Tetsuo & Youth Season Breakdown lyrics

by

Lupe Fiasco


---I want to do this explanation of the seasonal theme from Tetsuo & Youth to clear up any confusion about it. There are 4 seasons in this album, and they don't really make sense until you listen to them from the ending (Spring to Summer), and it will all make sense eventually. Most people think that the vibe of a song corresponds with the season's portion it's in (Summer: happy light feeling songs/Winter: sad, harsh songs, etc.), but it is much more than that.
---Before we get into this breakdown, I should point out that the seasons and the whole album should be interpreted like a manga is. Let me explain why. A manga is sort of like a comic book in Japanese terms. Lupe is a huge fan of mangas and animes as he has brought up many different shows in multiple songs of his including one from T&Y, Mural. Anyways, when you read a manga, you read the lines left to right, but you visualize the pictures and story from right to left. In T&Y, you first listen to the album from Summer to Spring (front to back/left to right) because that is the conventional way to listen to an album, just like Summer to Spring is the way the order of the seasons go. This way you interpret each line for what it is, or in other word, you understand the meaning of each song individually and you form the pieces to the puzzle, but you are not putting it together just yet. When you finally understand the individual meanings that each song has to offer, then you can finally complete the puzzle and see the bigger picture. This is when you can listen to the album from Spring to Summer (see the pictures right to left/back cover to front). And from this you can understand the entire story, which is an auto-biography of Lupe's life thus far and what's to come. Click here to see what I mean. Lupe metaphors this story with four different references that can be heard from the whole album: a kid from the ghetto, a buddhist monk defeating Samsara, a player in a video game, and a picture being painted (which is the seasons meaning: I'll break it down later). To conclude, when you listen to this album front to back and read the lines left to right, you get the individual songs displayed in the order of how the seasons go, and when you listen to the album in reverse and see the pictures from right to left, you get the complete story.
---Starting with Spring, you can hear the kids, cheers, and fireworks throughout it and that could only signify one thing, the celebrations of a baby on it's way in a baby shower. This is clarified by the next track being T.R.O.N. (They.Resurrect.Over.New.) which is a video game that came out during Lupe's birth year. This is the start of Lupe's life. This is where Lupe is starting to be fed his influences for the final picture he will one day paint about his life.
---Moving on to the dark and scary part of the album, the next interlude, Winter, illustrates the struggles of life and shows the dangers of the ghetto that Lupe grew up in. This can be proven since they're are no kids playing in the streets during this time. The songs in this portion of the album symbolize the unfairness and the despair that are shown in tracks like Deliver or Chopper. Since the kids in this interlude can be assumed to be inside, one could assume that they are playing video games since that is who The Game is in their eyes. This is how they're introduced to the personified villain that will lead them into the hood activities later in their lives. Lupe here is being surrounded by a lot of negative factors and as a kid, he is left to wonder why. In other words, he is creating a visual picture in his mind and wants to paint it.
---The next portion of this album is the Fall interlude. This one comes after Lupe makes it through the Little Deaths in his hood and his friends getting locked up in the song Prisoner 1 & 2. Here he finally makes it out of his hood and sees brighter days up the road ahead. In this interlude, you can tell Lupe is starting to paint his picture of his life as you can hear the sweeping on a dirty floor. This not only symbolizes the raking of leaves that takes place in Fall, but it also symbolizes the brush strokes of a painting. This was used to portray Lupe dusting off his shoulders of the pain from his past and moving on with his life.
~ Note that you can also hear a small amount of children chanting again in this interlude while there was none present in Winter.
---Summer is the final interlude off this album and is basically the outro. After Lupe's struggles with his label on Dots & Lines, he finally sees the sunshine he was long so dreaming to see. Now if Lupe was born in the first track, T.R.O.N., would this mean that he meets his death in the last track, Mural? The truth is, yes. Lupe meets the death of his contract deal, and now he has the privilege and freedom to do anything he wants with his independency. When discussing the track, Mural, this was the song Lupe was writing in Fall and about his upbringing in Winter. Here Lupe kills that beat with a lyrical bombardment of bars for 9 minutes to clarify what he means, and speaking of death, Mural is a song that symbolizes the flashing of life before ones eyes before they die. With all the childhood references and more that was rapped about in the song, Lupe summed up everything he thought that life had to offer him before he reaches the afterlife in Summer. After this last track, All the kids can be heard playing again to portray a happy ending. The bhuddist monk defeats Samsara and reaches Nirvana, and so he goes off to heaven. The video game that started in T.R.O.N. has finally been defeated, the little kid from the ghetto in Winter has grown up into a respectful man, and the final picture has been painted with Mural.
---I think it goes without saying about how important these interludes are to the album. Without them the album would just not mesh together, conceptually nor sonically, but it is these transitions that help everything flow smoothly throughout. Not one word had to be said in them either, the feeling you get from each one was more than enough.
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