Music

In an A.V. Club interview, when asked about how autobiographical this song is, Lupe responded with a negation:

“Kick, Push” isn’t about me. It’s about this kid by the name of Ken. He’s not even a kid, really, he’s in his 20s. That song is his life exaggerated with maybe a few stories of a few other people, and then some stuff I fabricated. I just added some of the stuff that I knew from being a skateboarder into eit.

Upon being asked about its reception among skateboarders, Lupe talked about its positive reception and his discomfort with being dubbed a “spokesperson” after it took off because of its irrelevance to the album as a whole:

They love it. The OGs love it. The new kids, even the kids who weren’t skaters, who became skaters because of “Kick, Push.” [F]or the most part, it’s been good with people like Tony Hawk and Steve Williams. [But] I always shunned [being] at the top of skateboarding royalty, I’m with Tony Hawk and Steve Williams, and with these people and this company, but I was often like, “Yo, I don’t want to do this photo shoot with a skateboard.” What really killed me was that people were trying to pigeonhole me, and magazines would get mad because I didn’t want to do their photo shoot with a skateboard. Then when the album came out, people forgot about “Kick, Push.” The rest of the album had nothing to do with skateboarding. And they said, “Oh, now we see why you didn’t want to be the spokesperson for skateboarding.” The album had nothing to do with skateboarding. It was just little things like that.

https://genius.com/Lupe-fiasco-kick-push-lyrics