Rapper Lupe Fiasco stands by Antony Gormley’s steel sculpture “Chord” at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
In the summer of 2022, the rapper Lupe Fiasco sat on the grass near a sculpture on MIT’s campus and, on the spot, wrote and recorded a song about it. The Big Sail, by the American sculptor Alexander Calder, is spider-like and imposing, a 25-foot-tall abstraction made of spiky black steel. As he sat facing the sculpture, swatting at bugs, Fiasco conjured a dizzying litany of metaphors to describe it. “Looking like math/ Looking like geometry/ Looking like jazz/ Looking like a craft/ Looking like it crashed,” he raps on the song that resulted, “Sailing Flavor.”
You can now stream the entirety of “Sailing Flavor,” along with other tracks inspired by public art at the university. It’s part of an ongoing project by Fiasco, an MIT visiting scholar, who is interested in the creative possibilities of site-responsive music. He calls the process of making these songs “ghotiing,” which is confusingly pronounced “fishing” – a phonetic joke in which the “f” sound is drawn from the “gh” in “rough,” and so on. Fiasco uses ghotiing as a teaching tool, sending his MIT students on outings to various public art pieces across campus to “fish” for musical inspiration. He ultimately hopes to make a song for every piece of art on MIT’s campus.