Twenty-four year old Chicagoan Lupe Fiasco’s emergence this year was by many measures an anomaly in hip-hop, or pop music generally. A rapper who skateboards rather than drives a Benz, who is more likely to reference Akira than Scarface, who doesn’t drink, who wears glasses, and who has said in interviews that he prefers jazz to hip-hop, Fiasco is defiantly eccentric—a nerd, really. He is out of place in today’s pop landscape as he might have been in a high school boys’ locker room, surrounded on the CD racks by ostentatious gangstas and brooding, tough white guys.

“All the fresh styles always start off as a good little hood thing … look at blues, rock, jazz, rap. I’m not even talkin’ about music—everything else too. By the time it reach Hollywood, it’s over. But it’s cool—we just keep it goin’ and make new shit.”

No one could blame our generation if we said we were sick and tired of Bob Dylan. In 1997, while we American kids first became preoccupied with those postmodern feminist ironists from the U.K., the Spice Girls (no joke) — the old man put out Time Out of Mind, his first honest-to-goodness album since he ended his convoluted and abortive religious journey, converting to Christianity then into Judaism then out of all of it (the religion was not good for his music, say most).

Game theory is the new fashion among economists and political scientists; a logical/mathematical practice that reduces everything people do to, as the name implies, a game. Extremists of this theory describe us all as players, operating on a set of rules and goals, but we really become more like game pieces, manipulated by a metaphysical structure that there is no escape from. One is reminded of the hero of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, who destroys himself in his obsession to reduce all of existence to numbers. It is a bleak outlook that is all the more disturbing for its correspondence with contemporary politics, with cynical leaders manipulating people like pawns in the sick game that is the global economy.