Stones in glass houses and all that, but Lupe Fiasco's name is eye-catchingly silly. What possessed the 26-year-old rapper to choose it? It doesn't even fulfil a chief criterion of hip-hop stage names, ie that they should be easy to rhyme. I suppose he could brag about being hotter than Tabasco, but after that the mind goes blank.

Fiasco, real name Wasalu Jaco, evidently likes to make life hard for himself. "I want to write songs you don't understand the first time you hear them, songs that make you think," he told us, introducing his manifesto for intelligent hip-hop, "Dumb It Down". Not for him the stale party anthems or turgid gangsterism of other rappers. Ambition and a willingness to take risks lie beneath the playful name.