Lupe Fiasco gave his Zero Mass Water keynote speech at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. He presented SOURCE, designed by Zero Mass, a hydro panel technology that uses only sunlight and air to produce five liters of drinking water daily per home. In a recent interview with Vibe, the rapper revealed the musical inspiration behind his humanitarian endeavor. Mos Def's work was instrumental.-
"I was in high school and I remember just getting Black On Both Sides, and that record was super pivotal for me because I was still practicing Islam, or at least trying to, to a certain degree. Mos is top 10 incredible emcee and he is able to put a really good album together. So that record, I lived with forever," he began. "That and Nas’ It Was Written were two albums that were like, this is what a rap album should sound like. It should have all these different kinds of things on it. He had the club record, the love record, the rap record, and then he had kind of the informational records, and that was the 'New World Water' and 'Mathematics.'"
"'New World Water' stood out because it was focused on this one subject, which I did not know too much about at that time. I was 17, 18, and it was so different from anything you hear on another rap album. It's water, but he went through all of it: politically, environmentally, socially, chemically," Lupe Explained. "I think it's one of those things that only a rapper could do, or only a poet could do: take this subject and hit it in all these different areas and components. It just kind of got bookmarked in my mind: water is an issue, water's a problem, water's a right."