“How can you say something by saying nothing?”

The Nothing Riddle is the centerpiece of Mural Jr., the halfway point of the song and Lupe tells you what he’s about to do as early as the fourth bar: “Pause for applause, evolves to what was never here.” Using the first Mural as a guide “If we doing what’s already done”, the original goal was to create art until he reached Nirvana. This achieved “nothing” or absence in the Buddhist sense (Mu) of becoming spiritually cleansed and free, because he’s poured out everything from within the self into the mural. Mural Jr.’s first half shares a similar goal, even if it chooses a more destructive path to reach the same destination of nothing.

0:22-2:27 46 bars of social decline, the rise and fall of Bellerophon, visions of Heaven reduced to nothing

2:28-2:55 10 bars of clues hinting at the Nothing Riddle, the halfway point, a limbo state "No Heaven up above you, no Hell underneath ye"

2:56-5:00 46 bars of redemption, rebuilding nothing into something again: a diptych as a companion piece to the first Mural, but also structurally, a diptych within the song itself

The 46th "This is Jr.'s Mural" reversal of the title is half a bar, filled in by the echoes, saying something with nothing again "Fit the life of a whole booth in only half a line"

Crafting song structure around those “Who don’t deserve the whole truth and only half your time” is not too surprising, considering his time/number-related bars in the past. Sunshine’s “Relationship is just 30 minutes long” happens right before the 30-minute mark of Food & Liquor. His Touch The Sky verse includes a 3-2-1 countdown, before the 15th bar implies a nod to the second half of 1st and 15th. Adoration of the Magi (the 14th track) was released on January 6 The Epiphany, so that “two weeks pregnant” happens in real time when you play Tetsuo & Youth in reverse and count from the album release date, January 20. Now, the first Mural is not as evenly split, but also branches into two separate halves of death and rebirth. If the first half of Mural Jr. doesn’t contain the whole truth, that can only mean it’s a half truth, arguably worse than outright lies. On the other hand, if a half truth can be defined as vague omission of information, then that aptly describes the Nothing Riddle.

There’s potential in that, meaning there’s still time to tell the whole truth like Lupe’s father requested in his last words. While fundamentally the same, the second half leans closer to the whole truth (coming clean) by regretting the problem with the first half and doing its best to right past wrongs. “I won’t make a Dent, hardly, but I’m still Harvey, I hope this making cents/sense.” Harvey Dent/Two-Face feels like the most crucial reference to the song structure as a person literally split down the middle, who leaves all decisions up to heads or tails coin-flips. Harvey also refers to the Jr. High and High Schools where Lupe devoted his life to rapping in Harvey, Illinois, narrowly avoiding gang culture. Existing between extremes of fantasy and reality, does the money make the man or the man make the money? Lupe can let someone else’s two cents determine his destiny or have the common sense to choose the right thing for himself.

MF DOOM was known to use this rhyme misdirection, where the listener would anticipate the obvious rhyme and he would subvert their expectations by choosing another word in its place. A couple examples can be found on Great Day and No Names. I think Lupe could be evolving this clever technique into something more high concept, knowing that he’s been praising his work since at least 2007: “Some people may not look at their own work as art, but I do. I look at MF DOOM almost as if he’s Picasso. I look at the grotesqueness of what he does. It’s so out of the ordinary, that it becomes grotesque the way that some of Picasso’s paintings can be considered grotesque.” “Thanx DOOM…I learned so much from you about the art of rapping. Studied and a***yzed you for years as recently as a few days ago. I wish I could’ve met you to tell you that.” Lupe already paid homage to MF DOOM on the first Mural with “I sit back and watch the world through eye holes in my oil paintings”, so I wouldn’t put it past him to try again.

When Celly tackled the Nothing Riddle in 2018, I gathered that the main “three birds” could refer to nine, line or rhyme. I’ve offered five reasons for each one to see what sticks, based on supporting Mural Jr. lyrics, aiming to somewhere emphasize both birds and silence:

1. Nine
a. Magnum is the third in a series of "out the back of" imagery
b. .357 Desert (Zone) Eagle is a type of Magnum pistol with a 9-round magazine, .357 Magnum is also mentioned on Imagine
c. Glock 9mm pistol, it's gon hit you a lot, Ready To Die (born to death, born to die) the song begins with grabbing the glock
d. Bobby Johnson shoots a Beretta 92FS (another 9mm pistol) with a potato silencer in South Central
e. Mega Man could be supplementary as his arm cannon fires Solar Bullets, literally packing heat, they pack warm supplies

2. Line
a. Bird/kilo of cocaine, winged forms swarms the skies
b. Pillars of salt (cocaine hydrochloride)
c. Breaking bricks into lines
d. Bellerophon kills the Chimera consisting of 3 different animals (lion, goat, snake) with the same spear, simplified into a line in art form
e. Underscore symbol is a line meant to both emphasize words and convey empty space in filenames

3. Rhyme
a. Perfect rhyme with time, megaphone (reverse microphone) magnifies the trap of enchantment
b. Talent trafficking ramblings fuses rhyming words with moving birds
c. One deal to sell souls, rhyming commercially involves a (drug) deal with the Devil
d. Hand of a pro serving the art of poetry to the fiends
e. Future life where he doesn’t have to rhyme/sell d****, Don’t Ruin Us, God Said

The silence of “nothing” opens the possibility to any of those words, on top of rhyming both “time” and “bluffing” at once. That’s the immediacy of it and in the grand scheme of things, bridging spiritual loss and success. Far too many instances of pairing the ebbs and flows of life to list them all, but the echoing repetition (with sweaters on, rephrasing of born to death, born to die) seems to be rooted in Moore’s Law of exponential growth doubling every two years. The full line itself “Killed three birds with the same _” sounds like a fusion of two different idioms: “Killing two birds with one stone” and “Death comes in threes.” The second set of “three birds” in “dream clean” can refer to curse-free lyrics, riding clean without d*** possession or the opposite of a wet dream, implied towards the end: “Don’t beat me for coming clean”, “Don’t bust in while I’m sleep.” Additionally, the triplet of homonyms (scene/obscene/seen) mentioned separately prior to all of this set up both “at the same time” lines.

“Answers each and every man with the same question: What is it? Bet you still wanna know, but I already done did it, I ball heavy, the physics, it’s all, but it’s already specific.”
“What is it?” can be answered with the questions presented in the pair of allusions to specific poems representing Mural Jr.’s opposite halves, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by John Donne and “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish. Said questions are “Who does the bell toll for?” and “What is poetry?” Sort of rhetorical questions that the audience already knows the answers to by the first line, because each poem follows a logical conclusion from those opening definitions. If “No man is an island”, then we’re all interconnected parts of a whole. Of course, the bell tolls for you, because every loss of life on Earth is a missing piece of ourselves. If “A poem should be palpable and mute”, then the imagery is strong enough to speak for itself and refuse over-explaining. Meaning is secondary to the emotion expressed, allowed to simply exist as art for art’s sake. Similarly, the opening stanza of Mural Jr. foreshadows Zeus denying the arrogant Bellerophon entrance into Heaven, leading to his crippled fate back on Earth. “Bet you still want to know, but I already done did it.”

“For Whom The Bell Tolls” can be summed up as universal experience vs. unique interpretation in “Ars Poetica”. Relating this divide back to Mural Jr. shows how it’s so common to glorify D.R.U.G.S., but rare to plead for Don’t Ruin Us, God Said. And like Mural Jr. is a response to Mural, MacLeish’s poem is responding to the original version by Horace. While Horace prioritizes how poetry will be best received by an audience, instead of how it best serves the poet, the original provided the template for MacLeish and any future ars poetica. “What is it?” “It’s all, but it’s already specific.” There’s specificity to these particular poems titled “Ars Poetica”, but ars poetica also refers to general meta-poetry about poetry under various names. Both all-encompassing and specific, it’s this organized chaos akin to a Jackson Pollock painting that decorates the Mural songs. The sheer density of the first maintains a picture really is worth a thousand words and then some (1,377), yet still scattered with precise intention beyond overwhelming the listener. Mural Jr. is partially Armageddon to the former’s Genesis, moving past the clean slate of nothing to rebuild anew at a deceptively smaller scale. Distinguished by meta-murals within murals across the vastness of all space, ironically leading to more concise, exact storytelling.

Bellerophon’s claim to fame was slaying the three-part Chimera, which sparked the arrogance that he deserved to fly up and join the Pantheon of immortals at Mount Olympus. However, Zeus knocks him back down to Earth, making sure he never reaches those heights again. This ultimately mirrors the story skeleton of The Cool narrative: trifecta meets the fast life, denied entrance into Heaven, ending with a fate worse than death. Bellerophon spent the rest of his life wandering the Aleian Plain in misery, much like The Cool eternally haunts the streets of Chicago. So, if the first half of Mural Jr. can be read as the rise and fall of Ballerophon, then the second half can be Lupe slaying the unholy trinity of Michael Young History, The Streets and The Game. Again, the Nothing Riddle is the vague centerpiece housing all of the above, but the surrounding sections hold very specific stories. Since the Wave part of the album is canonically The Cool’s origin story, it’s within reason to wonder if the Drogas part brings it closure. To kill off the everlasting chase for the Cool is to say something with silence and that is the birth of Lupe Fiasco.

As an addendum to an already overstuffed post, the origin of Bellerophon is noteworthy. Depending on the text, he could be a son of Poseidon or a grandson of Sisyphus (both referenced earlier in the track list), but Poseidon’s presence remains integral to either version. His other son, Pegasus, is who gives Bellerophon the chance to conquer the Chimera and fly up to Mount Olympus. “Rise with us, from out the Sevens to the Heavens and the skies in us.” There’s a lineage traced from the Seven Seas to the Seven Heavens embodied in Bellerophon’s failed ascension and Pegasus joining the constellations. “Poseidon, your trident can’t stop me.” Poseidon wields an authoritative trident or three-pronged spear vs. the act of rebellion in Bellerophon spearing the fire-breathing chimera, an impossible task he wasn’t supposed to accomplish. Playing with fire instead of water, Bellerophon betrays his lineage, because his story is a cautionary tale in the vein of Michael Young History. The impossible task of Drogas Wave is to craft a more enduring lineage, as old as the oasis of Damascus and the children of the first generation, Countering The Conspiracy To Destroy Black Boys.

“This is Jr.’s Mural” is a broad placeholder for any “Jr.” whom the shoe fits. Beyond the Johnny Thomas Jr. production credit and Jr. Pac-Man namesake is gratitude to the long history of all that came before them. Thomas Carlyle, William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell influenced Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches. Damien Marley, featured on Kingdom, carries on the tradition of Bob “Tuff Gong” Marley by adopting the nickname Jr. Gong. Marty McFly is an old song which playfully prevented Lupe from becoming a martyr, living long enough to reference Back To The Future II and Marty McFly Jr. The same optimism extends to the Forever songs, which lend to the personal juniors within Lupe’s own family. King Nas is dedicated to Lupe’s nephews King and Nas, but the song’s lyrics and drum pattern are inspired by Illmatic, the pioneer of the rapper’s baby picture on the album cover. The last movie reference South Central is an ode to manhood, determined to give his son the father that both OG Bobby Johnson and Ray Ray never had. As much as the Nothing Riddle seems to promise the elimination of life, it also heals and unites us like Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds”.