Lupe Fiasco in Complex Magazine January 2006 issue. Written by Ben Detrick. Photographed by Matthew Salacuse. (via rapstylearcheology)

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Lupe Fiasco in Complex Magazine January 2006 issue. Written by Ben Detrick. Photographed by Matthew Salacuse. (via rapstylearcheology)
I wondered if our fetishization of his authenticity might have been selfishness cloaked as worship.
Ben Detrick, on Allen Iverson
French Montana and Kanye. Photo by some guy with a shitty camera-phone.
Kanye Was "All Over" French Montana, by Ben Detrick
When the New York Post’s “Page Six” gossip trawl reported on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s "Watch the Throne” concert in New Jersey, there was an item that must have seemed bizarre to the majority of their racist, glassy-eyed, drooling readers. Backstage, Rupert Murdoch’s spies whispered, Kanye was “all over” French Montana, a rapper who few people outside the New York City mixtape circuit have ever heard of. The blurb of gossip was designed to make Kanye sound like a trolling homosexual, but it contained a crumb of truth: if the Louis Vuitton Don, arbiter of credenzas and leather kilts, thinks French Montana is worth propositioning, you might want to know who he is.
Yes, “French Montana” sounds like a variety of coffee roasted somewhere in Red Hook by a dude with a beard hanging in front of his neck like a ginger proboscis. It would have notes of vanilla and hints of smokiness from a distant forest fire. Or it could be a delicious granola mix, one of the popular kinds that is always too shallow in the plastic supermarket bins and includes more moth larvae than raisins. It wouldn’t be surprising if French Montana was also the name of an acrylic paint shade that falls somewhere in the ovum-hued space between eggnog and eggshell.
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