come on y’all, get live, get down

my mans Ahmed also put this up. 

Common (Sense)

a few weeks ago, I was listening to Finding Forever for the first time.

*DISCLAIMER* as with any and everything you read on here, if it’s not a fact, i.e. Ghostface loves wallabees, it’s an opinion. what you do with it is your business, what i think is what i think and every one is entitled to make up their own reality. if you’re still confused, please refer to House Shoes’ blog.

A moment that would be at home in any Spielberg-ian story: the first memory I have of an MC named Common was this low-budget, poorly shot video that barely held my attention, until the last line of the song…”cuz who I’m talking bout y’all is hip hop”

daaaaaaaaaamn, the memory of that still gives me chills. Soon enough, like countless others, Resurrection was practically stapled to my boom box and Common was the best MC my friends had never heard of.

‘I’m Nestle when it’s crunch time’

This was late in the 1-9-9-9, and soon enough The Light dropped, and soon enough, it became my song for the remainder of the school year. I went back and got all the albums I had missed, and bought every new one that came out since. With every listen, with every spin, this dude just got better and better. The hard shit, the introspection, the wordplay, it all hit me like a fuckin’ train. I loved the boom-bap of the NO I.D. era, but Common’s Soulquarian phase holds the highest regard in my mind. This seemed to be when all stars aligned. Radio and the mainstream finally looked Common’s way (The Light’s grammy), the sales came in (700K), the artistry and innovation was there as well as the progression.

Now I’m listening to Finding Forever and I’m feeling like a kid that just pulled the fake beard off his dad on Christmas morning. There where hints of this on Be, but I don’t think anyone could have really seen this coming; complacency. The biggest monkey wrench is that the music isn’t bad, Finding Forever easily trumps 90% of any major label hip hop efforts thus far in 2007. Common never stopped making good music, but something seemed to happen since he dipped into the mainstream. The intensity, the rawness that Com would display, even on his softer tracks, seems dulled. There’s a general theory that after the reluctance with which Electric Circus was met, Common shied away from experimentation, and as much as I don’t believe internet-talk, this seems like a plausible explanation.

?uestlove posted on a OkayPlayer message board, in regards to the newest Common album, that there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with coasting, and that just added a little more pressure to the nails in the coffin. I don’t think an artists should stay always stay in one lane and never progress; the reason I loved Common’s music so much is because it was never the same record after record. I even like the dreaded Electric Circus (that shit is a prime example of ‘ahead of it’s time’). But now it’s becoming hard to find reasons to keep Common on that pedestal, but maybe it’s my fault for putting him up there to begin with.

After all the shit talking, Common still has cemented his legacy as a legend. How many artists have purists’ respect for a 1994 record, an impressive catalog with one of the greatest innovators of their genre (Jay Dee you dummies), multiple classics, and are at the peak of their mainstream career?

*bonuses

Common – Car Horn (Madlib remix)

Bilal – Reminisce w/ Mos Def & Common

Common – Sum Shit I Wrote

Common – Soul By The Pound (remix)

Common – 1-9-9-9 remix w/ Sadat X

my Chi town connect informs me: ‘ yo the county is the prison in chicago…..if you are a neutron that means you dont belong to any gang…’