Lupe Fiasco's DROGAS WAVE explained: a thread

This is one of those albums that are very overlooked, it's my personal 2018 AOTY and its concept is amazing, Lupe is a genius

RTs appreciated

DROGAS WAVE is actually a double album broken down into 2 parts, WAVE and DROGAS respectively. The first part deals with the LongChains, African slaves that were thrown off ships by their white owners, leading their spirits to continue to live beneath the waves. The second part

touches on a lot of subjects but focuses mostly on drugs, human resilience and Lupe's own legacy as a rapper.
The first 2 tracks serve as preludes. "In The Event of Typhoon" details the practice of throwing sick slaves overboard(1) and "Drogas" refers to religion and drugs(2).

Disk 1: WAVE
The title of the first track "Manillas" is the currency used during the Atlantic Slave Trade mostly in West Africa, and that same currency is displayed on the cover art of the album. Today, this symbol is used as bracelets in order to remember the Africans' struggles

On "Gold vs the Right Things to Do", Lupe tells the story of slaves being kidnapped and sold into slavery. This is rapped by Lupe in the eyes of a Jamaican talking about his ancestors. At the end of the second verse, Lupe stops that and raps about how these slaves became the

LongChains when thrown overboard, and how they devoted their lives as "waves" that drag down slave ships and free slaves.
After the interlude, we arrive at "WAV Files", where Lupe raps as the LongChains themselves, spinning the narrative as if the souls of the slaves are still

alive. In each verse, he takes a different part of the world and talks about its complicity in the slave trade.
It's important to mention that WAV Files are an audio format in computers, so Lupe connects the LongChains narrative to his past "slavery" and current "freedom" from

Atlantic, Lupe's former label. This is actually the first album he dropped after his exit.
"Down" and "Haile Selassie" continue the LongChain narrative but in a way that's less angry, which suggests that they prefer this outcome over staying and slaving on the slave ships.

Onto the heart of the album and the last song off the first disk, "Alan Forever" is a song dedicated to Alan Kurdi, the 3-year old boy who drowned during the Syrian Refugee Crisis. In the song, Lupe raps as if Alan never drowned, but instead grew up to become an Olympic swimmer

with a lot of world records to his name. He also saves another little boy from drowning.
In the narrative of the album, Alan doesn't surrender to the waves, and instead becomes part of them.
Lupe concludes disk 1 with this strong, heartbreaking yet uplifting track.

Disk 2: DROGAS
Drogas is spanish for drugs, the main topic of the first 3 songs of the second part. Drugs is also an acronym for "Don't Ruin Us God Said", which is the thesis of the remaining tracks of the album.
An interlude leads us to "Stronger", which is a dark song that

juxtaposes the fantasy proposed by Alan Forever.
As mentioned before, the first 3 songs of this part focus solely on drugs, mentioning topics ranging from political and social impacts to addiction and the psychological, emotional and physical effects.
"Don't Mess up the Children"

is an interlude that introduces "Jonylah Forever", which has a similar theme to Alan Forever. Lupe raps about another victim, this time Jonylah Watkins, a 6-month old baby who was shot dead in Lupe's hometown, Chicago in 2013. In this alternative reality, this baby grows up and

becomes an intelligent and ambitious girl and fulfills her goal of helping others in the South Side, instead of them adopting the typical lifestyle.
The goal of this song is to talk down upon the increasing gun violence. It's basically what could've happen if her father had

devoted his life to her instead of the gang he repped.
Lupe then raps about a few different yet somewhat similar topics in the upcoming songs. "Kingdom" is feel-good song that talks about black excellence, while "Imagine" sees Lupe rap about his own rap career. The latter has

tons of references about his previous albums The Cool and Tetsuo & Youth, and his escape from Atlantic. While Lupe does mention the pain he had to go through, his goal in that song was to leave the past and look towards the future, something he described as his 'resurrection'.

Finally, Lupe raps about ongoing social and political issues, most notably by drawing an analogy between rival gangs (Crips and Bloods) qnd society at large. He also focuses on the discrepancies in power and how to combat them, while also mentioning how his nephews' adulthood may

turn them into completely different men growing up in a city like Chicago.
The album thematically ends on the 22nd track, basically leaving "Happy Timbuck2 Day" and "Mural Jr." as the credits of the album.

End of thread, thank you for reading!