Lupe Fiasco Samples Radiohead, Jay-Z on "Enemy of the State"

Lupe Fiasco celebrated Thanksgiving by unleashing his new mixtape Enemy of the State: A Love Story as a free download. Enemy, the precursor to Fiasco's next album Lasers, finds Lupe taking on a pair of Jay-Z tracks, a Lil Wayne cut and, most notably, Radiohead's Kid A song "The National Anthem." With its menacing bassline and moments of hovering Ondes Martenot, Fiasco goes into full The Cool mode to keep pace with the unorthodox sample. Grab a listen to the song, and the entire mixtape, over on Nah Right.

This isn't the first time Lupe has metered his cadence to the music of Yorke: Fiasco, along with fellow CRS members Kanye West and Pharrell, used the Radiohead frontman's "The Eraser" as the sample for the rap supergroup's "Us Placers," a song Rolling Stone placed on our Top 100 Songs of 2007 list.

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Enemy of the State also features Lupe rapping over backbeats from Slaughterhouse, Timbaland and Clipse, who previously sampled Lupe's "Dumb It Down" on their own Road to Til the Casket Drops mix tape.

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Song Stories

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz | 2008

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."

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