Lupe Talks Streets on Fire

This is what Lupe had to say about his motivation and conception of the song Streets on Fire. What I find very interesting with his explanation is that it clearly relates to the theme of The Cool concept the we have been looking into lately. That of "Sin as Disease". And also manages to capture the controversies and debates over the existence of a God and also who is really responsible for setting the moral code. This debate was at the center of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, though Nietzsche thought the solution to this whole problem was the "Over-man" or the increased reliance on the self in order to realize man's true power. And again this discussion is channeled in questions of "what is real?", "what is the truth?" and "who decides on the truths?"

“Streets of Fire” is pulled directly from the pages of [George Orwell's] 1984 -- more the mood of it. The First verse is talking about a disease, but there are all these questions about whether the disease is real. It’s the same rules as doublethink. Is there really a war or was it something that they created to keep the public in check? I injected those really basic structural ideas that were set up in 1984. I always love to have triple and quadruple meanings. I learned in the process [of making The Cool] how to do it on a macro level. I’ve always been able to do it with my rhymes, where a metaphor means many things, but that song represents AIDS, it represents the hysteria around coolness.
But “Streets of Fire” is really the story of The Streets, the breakdown of that particular character, that temptress. The Streets is a walking, talking temptress with dollar signs for eyes and tattoos of her dead boyfriends across her chest. She’s the age-old temptress who tempted everybody from King Tut to Al Capone. But that’s just the literal level. Figuratively, she’s the [real] streets. I represented her as a [female] because it goes back to a biblical story where Jesus asks God to show her the world, and God shows him the world in the form of a woman. She was a princess, she was beautiful. She had these long robes and jewelry. But as he got closer, he saw that she was ancient. Her eyes were sunk in, and she had a skeletal form. Her robe was tattered. Her jewelry was dull and looked fake. Don’t take everything for how it seems, you know.
One thing is that there is no such thing as absolute, not even absolute weather. It’s a false construct. But how much falseness do we chase? One thing that Nietzsche said was that we live in a world full of falseness. It’s weird to believe in the things we believe. To me, the dopest thing that [Nietzsche] ever said was we allow ourselves to be lied to every night, every time we go to sleep.

From Rhapsohy