How Anonymous forced Atlantic Records to release Lupe Fiasco's album amid rapper's controversial Obama statements
When we read about the hacker group, Anonymous, we often associate it with more "serious" things like the Arab Uprising and now, police brutality. But there is one curious case from Anonymous's history that stands out.
Born out of a spirit of disruption with a touch of anarchism, "Anonymous" or "Anon" sprung up across major digital platforms in the early 2000s. This loosely interconnected network of hacktivists went on to take on everything from Scientology, to the Clintons, to ISIS. Back in 2014, when Anonymous was widely present in the international news cycle, rapper Lupe Fiasco was having trouble getting a release date for his fifth album. Fiasco, born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, complained that his label, Atlantic Records, would not release his album until they got a "pop" single.
On 15 October that year, Anonymous's Twitter account tweeted, "@AtlanticRecords: You have 24 hours to present a statement announcing the immediate release of [Tetsuo & Youth]." They wrote, "If you do not comply, we will launch a direct attack against your website, your associates, and your executives ... Blatantly censoring @LupeFiasco is inexcusable."
At the time, Lupe Fiasco was known for his widely controversial statements, including one in which he called the then-President Barack Obama a terrorist. Since the late 2000s, Fiasco has been openly vocal about the "New World Order" and the Illuminati.
In 2011 during a CBS interview with Shira Lazar, Fiasco called Obama "the biggest terrorist." He went on to say, "The root cause of terrorism is the stuff that the US government allows to happen ... and it's easy for us because it's just some oil."
When Lazar asked Fiasco on how politics informs his music, he said, “No, I don’t vote." He continued, “I don’t get involved in politics. It’s meaningless. If I’m going to say I stand behind this person and write on a piece of paper that says, ‘Yeah, I stand for this person,’ then I have to take responsibility for everything he does cause that’s just who I am as a human being. So politicians aren’t going to do that because I don’t want you to bomb some village in the middle of nowhere.”
About 19 hours after Anonymous's tweet asking for the release date of Fiasco's album, Atlantic Records tweeted out the release date of 20th January 2015, and Anonymous’s Operation Free Lupe is “mission accomplished”, they declared. Fiasco, meanwhile, simply tweeted, "V," seemingly in reference to the 2005 film and to one of Anonymous’s canonical texts, Alan Moore’s graphic novel, 'V for Vendetta'.
Later, Anonymous joked, “Damn, we wanted to test that website crasher." However, they also released a victory statement, writing, "At this time it can be concluded that we have proved our point. We wish music that is educating the masses to keep being released. We will fight for that. Lupe Fiasco, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Common, and others are the moving force behind conscious rap. This is [the] music we will fight for."
Anonymous recently threatened to expose the Minneapolis police department's "many crimes to the world" following the tragic death of George Floyd. It stands to note that Lupe Fiasco once stated in 2016 that he is on "both sides" when it came to police and black people, noting that his siblings were both officers.