What exactly is Japanese Cartoon?
Lupe Fiasco: It’s a punk band that I started almost two and a half years ago. It’s kind of like a flight of fancy. I used to write songs for other people and I thought I could also pull these songs off myself. In the course of a year we pulled in like-minded people who wanted to push the same message out.
Le Messie: “Another way of thinking” is what Japanese Cartoon’s about. If you have everybody going this way, the band is about us looking the other way.

So the “other way” also includes working with the likes of The Cult’s frontman, Ian Astbury and The Prodigy?
LF: I don’t know how to play any instruments but I know what I want and produce everything in my head, so Ian did a song with us on our latest album Gasp—just some favors from friends. We remixed the one with The Prodigy called “Invaders Must Die x Shinobi.”

In the Jaws of the Lords of Death is a funky name for an album.
LF: It’s pretty serious actually. I was talking to a friend who runs a clothing label in London about the inspiration behind different clothes and he said that some warrior Buddhist monks don these yellow shirts with red lining and teeth around the collar. The idea is to live life to the fullest, as though you were “in the jaws of the lords of death.” For these monks it was super important to put deaths on their backs. This was the inspiration for the album I made four years ago, but the message remains with me till today.

And from Japanese Cartoon came your Fallacy of Rome clothing line?
LM: It’s an ongoing thing where there are no fixed structures; I guess that’s the beauty of the work we do with Lupe. It’s about how we feel; we prefer to work naturally.

How did you guys meet?
LF: Le Messie invited me to Singapore for a design conference six years ago and it started from there. I stayed in their house where there were bathrooms with no doors. Messie and his wife Amanda are inseparable and I’ve seen them progress.

How do you stay inspired after 10 years in the business?
LF: You’ve definitely got to stick to your guns. I think the attention span of people these days has gotten shorter; trends come and go and everything moves so fast. It’s not about doing that little bit of something to get their attention, I’d rather stick to what you are good at.