Lupe Fiasco and Kaelin Ellis Announce New EP HOUSE for July 2020 Release and Share New SOng “SHOES” Featuring Virgil Abloh

Lupe Fiasco and Kaelin Ellis have released an EP titled HOUSE with their new song “Shoes” featuring Virgil Abloh. Virgil Abloh has been the artistic director of the Louis Vuitton Men’s wear collection since 2018. He is also a DJ and an executive-officer of the label Off-White, which he helped to start in 2013.

The new song “Shoes” speaks on the being black in America. In the song Virgil Abloh’s feature is him verbally designing the shoes that Ahmaud Arbery was wearing when he was killed earlier this year, while running in his neighborhood.

The song reflects the on going struggle of the Black Lives Matter movement. Abloh describes the shoe in the song saying, “What does that sole look like/It’s soft to run on/But tough enough to withstand the reality of the ground/Or the reality of the context we’re living in/That’s the soul/Let’s just call it black.” He goes on to describe that running and an elevated heart rate is a form of freedom. Towards the end of the song Abloh reveals that hypothetically you could call the shoes “Air Ahmaud” or “Air Arbery.”

Lupe Fiasco, also known as Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, is a Grammy award winning artist. Fiasco was born in Chicago and is also a record producer, community advocate and entrepreneur. Fiasco paired up with Kaelin Ellis who is a multi-platinum music producer for the EP that was produced entirely from their own homes.

The two started working together through twitter. Ellis had started tweeting beats that he was making while he was self isolating, and Fiasco started freestyling to those beats and after sending each other their work back and forth, they created their EP HOUSE. The title was inspired by each of their isolations in their house due to the current pandemic. The EP will be released July 24.

Fiasco was recently just scheduled to perform at the Warfield in San Francisco this past June. However, because of the relentless Coronavirus, the show has been rescheduled to February of next year. His small tour that he had scheduled for this year was also cut short because of the outbreak of the novel virus in America.