Lupe Fiasco, 11/13 | Free Show in Chicago

Rob Soltan, a friend of the site, caught the free Lupe Fiasco show downtown Chicago as part of the Zune Release Parties across the country yesterday. He wrote in to tell me how it went…

My girlfriend Jill and I had taken the day off to recover from a wedding the night before. Looking through metromix.com we tried to find some sort of fun event that we could take advantage of during the day. To our surprise (and delight) we learned of the free Lupe Fiasco show taking place in front of the NBC building on Michigan Avenue. After picking up a peppermint cocoa at that coffee place with the green mermaid logo, we walked down to a crowd of high school students, suits, tourists, and music fans in the know that were all braving the cold for a free Lupe performance. There were probably about 200-300 people total, many holding Food & Liquor promotional posters and digital cameras. A stage was setup in the middle of the plaza connected to a makeshift dj booth. There were four towers, one at each corner of the stage that had a high beamed intelligent light. At 4:45 the lights changed from gold to purple, the DJ started the opening chords of a dramatic string section and Lupe, joined by Bishop G, made it to the stage bundled in black hooded sweatshirts, gloves, and lupe’s signature sunglasses.

Lupe started the show off with “Touch the Sky,” which he sings the third verse on Kanye West’s album Late Registration. This really got the crowd moving. Lupe followed with a crowd participatory “I Gotcha” which flowed nicely into “Kick Push.” His fourth song was “Daydreamin’,” a great track off his current album that features Jill Scott on vocals. At this point, while the show was really fun, and the sound was awesome (the sidewalk was shaking from all of the bass!) we decided to head home as he was starting up “He Say She Say.” I’m pretty sure he also played “Sunshine” somewhere in there. It was a really good show. Very entertaining for the price, and well worth the cold weather for all of the warmth and love they showed to their hometown crowd.