Why Did Lupe Fiasco Quit Rap? ‘Next To It’ Rapper Cancels Upcoming Albums

Lupe Fiasco has once again announced his retirement and this time, he’s also canceling his upcoming albums.

In a series of tweets posted Tuesday, Fiasco announced he was quitting rap due to “getting beat up for telling the truth.” The backlash the rapper is referring to began on Sunday when he released a new song called “N.E.R.D.” which was rapped over the beat to J. Cole’s “Everybody Dies.”

On the song, Lupe rapped, “Artists getting robbed for their publishing by dirty Jewish execs who think it’s alms from the covenant.” This led to some fans calling him out and an Op-Ed from hip-hop site DJBooth.net which called his lyrics anti-Semitic.

Following the Op-Ed’s release, Fiasco took to Twitter to defend himself and got into a back-and-forth with the website’s official Twitter account. “Oh please,” Fiasco wrote in response to the article and said while there are “some upright moral Jewish execs in this biz,” others are “low down dirty” and “would sell they mother into slavery.”

Unfortunately for Lupe, the backlash didn’t stop there. The rapper’s song was then removed from SoundCloud due to hate speech which seemed to push Lupe over the edge. “So @SoundCloud took the NERD freestyle down because of ‘hate speech,’” he tweeted, adding, “I’m done.”

The rapper was scheduled to release two albums in 2017 — “DROGAS” and “Skulls” — but it appears the projects will not see the light of day. “Yo Lupe fans it’s been fun and I hope you’ve had fun. I’m officially not releasing anymore music. Albums cancelled,” he tweeted.

Lupe Fiasco’s Twitter account has since been set to private, so fans looking to follow him will now have to be approved first.