Music Dude: Back yappin' 'bout Common
Yes-yes, yall. Man, I haven't had a Music Dude post on the blog in millenia...at least it seems that way. So, I'm back at it. Actually, what I'm posting was part of a 50-msg email string I had with my niggas yesterday. The topic was Common and his new album, Finding Forever. A little prefacing context:
Comm's new album drops July 31st. Leading up to its release, one of the crew members always had some smarmy comment to make about how the album was gonna be wack, others were excited, me, I was guardedly excited. Well you know us ThisIsRealMusic.com kats get the drop on ish the second it hits the net, so we manage to scoop the album this past Monday. When it comes to dudes like Common, their releases usually call for a lot of discussion and that's what took place recently. What you'll read is a response to my nig Gee who thinks this album is a near classic (which it is not) and my nigga Trav who was ishin on Comm's lyrics like he's Young Joc and also made some comment like, "This is Comm's album for white people" which sent me thru the roof.
Anyways, in true Music Dude fashion, I think I wrote about 64,382 words in my response. dig...
*********
-- to me a 4.5 is a near classic. it means that there's just "something" that is keeping it from being a classic. I dont know that I can call Finding Forever a near classic, which is funny, because I think it is better than Be, but i rate Be as the near classic and Finding Forever as about as strong as a 4 can get. Let me explain...
For Comm to make a classic or near classic at this point he either has to return to Bridge or take a 3 or 4 year hiatus, come back and be just as dope. its very hard for someone to drop a classic or near classic album that is void of context. and by context i mean some extenuating circumstance that is either informing or imposing upon an album that is otherwise just really good sounding soundwaves. Be was a near classic because it was a return for Comm. He came "back" to regular, good ol' hop and returned as an even growner emcee. his classics and Be all had some kind of context and represented some sort of plateau or touchstone in his career. Ressurection was the album he dropped in the midst of hop's new golden age and it was an album where we first saw COMMON and not a pseudo Das EFX biter from Chicago. One Day It'll All Make Sense saw Comm at the peak of his frisky, young-boy emcee skills (like a 88-90 MJ). He was athletic on that joint, PLUS started making more socially conscious songs that we didnt hear on Resurrection (his joints with Lauryn and Lo come to mind). Like Water For Chocolate was Comm at his peak as a hip hop "artist" and introduced us to Soulquarians. Electric Circus might be the best Bridge album ever (it's really starting to challenge New Danger). Those were the classics. Then he came with Be, a near classic. What we have to realize is that Comm had an eight-year, four album string of bonafide classics. Resurrection, One Day, LWOF and Circus arent even borderline classics. There is no arguing those. 8 friggin years and 4 classics. That effin incredible. if u add Be to that equation, thats a 10-year span with 5 albums of impeccable quality, all of which represented some shape-shift, artistic progression, refocus or persona development. What I'm getting at here is that it is im-friggin-possible for Comm to do anything at this point to really shake things up, unless he returns to Bridge and helps further crystalize that young genre of music or if he takes 3 or 4 years off to make movies and then, after we miss him greatly, he returns to satiate us (similar to Desire, which is why i think niggas are semi-falsely giving that classic status).
So what we get is Finding Forever, another impeccable album that can only be rated but so high because there's no context to push it up any levels. EVERY artist plateaus...not some, EVERY artist. I find it interesting that Marvin dropped Hear My Dear as his last album. its friggin mind-blowing because its so good...but had he not died, he'd have finished his career and probably not had any more classics. Steve plateaued. By the time the 80s rolled around, he wasnt droppin classics. Prince's last classic was Sign O Times (i believe), his New Power Generation stuff wasnt classic. Stillmatic was a classic not because the music was so overwhelmingly dope, but because Nas returned to making great music. The albums he's dropped since have all been excellent, but none classic. What makes Finding Forever and Common so special is that he's plateaued but maintained the excellence. Every great artist -- and Common is a great artist, top 20 of all time in hop, no question -- anyways, every great artist has their classic run and at some point a human being has no room to really grow THAT much. the chore is staying relevant and good once the exploration stops. and thats what Comm did, here.
-- Trav comically said that Comm dumbed down his lyrics and made mention of the pop culture lyrics. I think its important to note that there's nothing wrong with making pop culture REFERENCES. For instance, on Kingdom Come, Jay had basically gone pop in a lot of ways, yappin about Chris and Gwyneth and that wack ode to his homey locked up in the clink. that annoyed me. Comm's pop culture references are basically punch lines. and, at least to me, they never come across as forced or contrived.
with that said, its VERY important to note 2 things. 1.) Common is the greatest lovesong writer in the history of hip hop. 2.) Comm is every bit the story teller that Nas and Pharoah are. Let me explain...
Hop has never been a genre built for love songs because its always been so charged with machismo and/or lust. So an emcee's primary goals has always been to trumpet his greatness, challenge competitors, release aggression, rebel...that kinda stuff. By the time an emcee gets to the topic of a woman, it's usually to describe some tramp that broke his heart, gave him the clap or to let a woman know how much he wants to bone her or its a story about how he pursued a vixen. Even when Pharoah writes a song like "The Light", he's really only giving us a tale about how this women blew his mind and how he made her his. There has never really been such a thing -- in hip hop -- as songs that earnestly speak of love and relationships with any sensitivity, because, well thats gay. And there also hasnt ever really been a slew of dudes that speak about love and relationships with any depth (Mos is Comm's only peer). Comm has a SLEW of these songs from "The Light" to "Nag Champa" to "Love Is" and his songs like "Go" are so much more complex than others. My fav of his love sogs is "Star 69" of Electric Circus which is an ode to Badu (he plays with her name in the chorus, calling her E-rot-ica). Its not his best lovesong and it uses phone sex as its theme and his flow is simpler but between his lyrics and Bilal's chorus, i just always finish that song thinking "no one else does this in hip hop."
Well, songs like "I Want You" and "Break My Heart" off Finding Forever continue this trend. btw, the way will.i.am spirals the track off into that fantasy-sounding bridge at the end of "I Want You" is the absolute ish. I grimaced on the train today when that part of the song broke. and then we get to his story telling. Not too harp on Trav's cornball agenda to trivialize Comm, but he had the nerve to scoff at Comm's "uplift the black people" motif as if he's tired of it. What i find incredible about Comm's uplift the people missions is that he often does this, not through preaching, but through stories that are often based around characters that falter or crush under the weight of whatever is inherent to being black in America. And that whole structuring of his songs is unique. Whereas Nas often takes full songs to tell his stories and Pharoah deals in a lot of metaphors and Ghost is extra theatrical; Comm usually has songs that are made up of three vignettes. For instance, i love how on "Driving Me Wild", the first two verses separately tell a story of an individual whose pursuit of some elusive, superficial goal is costing him/her something greater. "Black Maybe" is done the same way, with each verse telling a short story. And although Comm's topics aren't extra wide-ranging, he always profound. so how can u get tired of that?
As a former emcee and current writer, I envy the guy. When I listen to Stevie Wonder, i wonder (pun) what it's like to be that eloquent and Comm is one of the few emcees that have that same effect on me.
I also wanna reiterate that Common is the only emcee (along with Mos) that you can put in the same category as Smokey Robinson or Stevie or Paul McCartney or whomever when it comes to lovesongs. yall niggas may scoff at that because hop aint really about love songs, but when u start getting into arguments about hop's place with the other genres as a full, developed, three dimensional musical art, that has to be a apart of it and Comm and Mos allow hop to stick its chest out.
-- production wise...i gotta admit, i effin miss Comm with the Soulquarians. as good as he and Ye are as a tandem, nothing beat him working with Dills, ?uest and Poyser. With that said, Finding Forever is really cementing Kanye West as one of the great music producers in the history of music. That top 7 list needs to be extended to 8, because when Ye sits down and works on a full album (Dropout, Be, Late Reg, Finding Forever) he does not miss. What I like about Ye is that he's one of the few producers that is making music to really stand on its own as a piece of art. u can tell he slaves over the songs and is always thinking of inventive ways to approach things. its like he's trying to blow ur mind each time out and i think that goes in line with his personality of being very insecure and lusting for accolades. But the production this album is just so tight, and the guest producers ( will.i.am, Devo Springsteen) kept the level very high.
-- i'm giving this album a 4, but only because, at this point, its pretty impossible for Comm to go any higher, given the fact that he's already 10-plus years into a classic career.
Comm's new album drops July 31st. Leading up to its release, one of the crew members always had some smarmy comment to make about how the album was gonna be wack, others were excited, me, I was guardedly excited. Well you know us ThisIsRealMusic.com kats get the drop on ish the second it hits the net, so we manage to scoop the album this past Monday. When it comes to dudes like Common, their releases usually call for a lot of discussion and that's what took place recently. What you'll read is a response to my nig Gee who thinks this album is a near classic (which it is not) and my nigga Trav who was ishin on Comm's lyrics like he's Young Joc and also made some comment like, "This is Comm's album for white people" which sent me thru the roof.
Anyways, in true Music Dude fashion, I think I wrote about 64,382 words in my response. dig...
*********
-- to me a 4.5 is a near classic. it means that there's just "something" that is keeping it from being a classic. I dont know that I can call Finding Forever a near classic, which is funny, because I think it is better than Be, but i rate Be as the near classic and Finding Forever as about as strong as a 4 can get. Let me explain...
For Comm to make a classic or near classic at this point he either has to return to Bridge or take a 3 or 4 year hiatus, come back and be just as dope. its very hard for someone to drop a classic or near classic album that is void of context. and by context i mean some extenuating circumstance that is either informing or imposing upon an album that is otherwise just really good sounding soundwaves. Be was a near classic because it was a return for Comm. He came "back" to regular, good ol' hop and returned as an even growner emcee. his classics and Be all had some kind of context and represented some sort of plateau or touchstone in his career. Ressurection was the album he dropped in the midst of hop's new golden age and it was an album where we first saw COMMON and not a pseudo Das EFX biter from Chicago. One Day It'll All Make Sense saw Comm at the peak of his frisky, young-boy emcee skills (like a 88-90 MJ). He was athletic on that joint, PLUS started making more socially conscious songs that we didnt hear on Resurrection (his joints with Lauryn and Lo come to mind). Like Water For Chocolate was Comm at his peak as a hip hop "artist" and introduced us to Soulquarians. Electric Circus might be the best Bridge album ever (it's really starting to challenge New Danger). Those were the classics. Then he came with Be, a near classic. What we have to realize is that Comm had an eight-year, four album string of bonafide classics. Resurrection, One Day, LWOF and Circus arent even borderline classics. There is no arguing those. 8 friggin years and 4 classics. That effin incredible. if u add Be to that equation, thats a 10-year span with 5 albums of impeccable quality, all of which represented some shape-shift, artistic progression, refocus or persona development. What I'm getting at here is that it is im-friggin-possible for Comm to do anything at this point to really shake things up, unless he returns to Bridge and helps further crystalize that young genre of music or if he takes 3 or 4 years off to make movies and then, after we miss him greatly, he returns to satiate us (similar to Desire, which is why i think niggas are semi-falsely giving that classic status).
So what we get is Finding Forever, another impeccable album that can only be rated but so high because there's no context to push it up any levels. EVERY artist plateaus...not some, EVERY artist. I find it interesting that Marvin dropped Hear My Dear as his last album. its friggin mind-blowing because its so good...but had he not died, he'd have finished his career and probably not had any more classics. Steve plateaued. By the time the 80s rolled around, he wasnt droppin classics. Prince's last classic was Sign O Times (i believe), his New Power Generation stuff wasnt classic. Stillmatic was a classic not because the music was so overwhelmingly dope, but because Nas returned to making great music. The albums he's dropped since have all been excellent, but none classic. What makes Finding Forever and Common so special is that he's plateaued but maintained the excellence. Every great artist -- and Common is a great artist, top 20 of all time in hop, no question -- anyways, every great artist has their classic run and at some point a human being has no room to really grow THAT much. the chore is staying relevant and good once the exploration stops. and thats what Comm did, here.
-- Trav comically said that Comm dumbed down his lyrics and made mention of the pop culture lyrics. I think its important to note that there's nothing wrong with making pop culture REFERENCES. For instance, on Kingdom Come, Jay had basically gone pop in a lot of ways, yappin about Chris and Gwyneth and that wack ode to his homey locked up in the clink. that annoyed me. Comm's pop culture references are basically punch lines. and, at least to me, they never come across as forced or contrived.
with that said, its VERY important to note 2 things. 1.) Common is the greatest lovesong writer in the history of hip hop. 2.) Comm is every bit the story teller that Nas and Pharoah are. Let me explain...
Hop has never been a genre built for love songs because its always been so charged with machismo and/or lust. So an emcee's primary goals has always been to trumpet his greatness, challenge competitors, release aggression, rebel...that kinda stuff. By the time an emcee gets to the topic of a woman, it's usually to describe some tramp that broke his heart, gave him the clap or to let a woman know how much he wants to bone her or its a story about how he pursued a vixen. Even when Pharoah writes a song like "The Light", he's really only giving us a tale about how this women blew his mind and how he made her his. There has never really been such a thing -- in hip hop -- as songs that earnestly speak of love and relationships with any sensitivity, because, well thats gay. And there also hasnt ever really been a slew of dudes that speak about love and relationships with any depth (Mos is Comm's only peer). Comm has a SLEW of these songs from "The Light" to "Nag Champa" to "Love Is" and his songs like "Go" are so much more complex than others. My fav of his love sogs is "Star 69" of Electric Circus which is an ode to Badu (he plays with her name in the chorus, calling her E-rot-ica). Its not his best lovesong and it uses phone sex as its theme and his flow is simpler but between his lyrics and Bilal's chorus, i just always finish that song thinking "no one else does this in hip hop."
Well, songs like "I Want You" and "Break My Heart" off Finding Forever continue this trend. btw, the way will.i.am spirals the track off into that fantasy-sounding bridge at the end of "I Want You" is the absolute ish. I grimaced on the train today when that part of the song broke. and then we get to his story telling. Not too harp on Trav's cornball agenda to trivialize Comm, but he had the nerve to scoff at Comm's "uplift the black people" motif as if he's tired of it. What i find incredible about Comm's uplift the people missions is that he often does this, not through preaching, but through stories that are often based around characters that falter or crush under the weight of whatever is inherent to being black in America. And that whole structuring of his songs is unique. Whereas Nas often takes full songs to tell his stories and Pharoah deals in a lot of metaphors and Ghost is extra theatrical; Comm usually has songs that are made up of three vignettes. For instance, i love how on "Driving Me Wild", the first two verses separately tell a story of an individual whose pursuit of some elusive, superficial goal is costing him/her something greater. "Black Maybe" is done the same way, with each verse telling a short story. And although Comm's topics aren't extra wide-ranging, he always profound. so how can u get tired of that?
As a former emcee and current writer, I envy the guy. When I listen to Stevie Wonder, i wonder (pun) what it's like to be that eloquent and Comm is one of the few emcees that have that same effect on me.
I also wanna reiterate that Common is the only emcee (along with Mos) that you can put in the same category as Smokey Robinson or Stevie or Paul McCartney or whomever when it comes to lovesongs. yall niggas may scoff at that because hop aint really about love songs, but when u start getting into arguments about hop's place with the other genres as a full, developed, three dimensional musical art, that has to be a apart of it and Comm and Mos allow hop to stick its chest out.
-- production wise...i gotta admit, i effin miss Comm with the Soulquarians. as good as he and Ye are as a tandem, nothing beat him working with Dills, ?uest and Poyser. With that said, Finding Forever is really cementing Kanye West as one of the great music producers in the history of music. That top 7 list needs to be extended to 8, because when Ye sits down and works on a full album (Dropout, Be, Late Reg, Finding Forever) he does not miss. What I like about Ye is that he's one of the few producers that is making music to really stand on its own as a piece of art. u can tell he slaves over the songs and is always thinking of inventive ways to approach things. its like he's trying to blow ur mind each time out and i think that goes in line with his personality of being very insecure and lusting for accolades. But the production this album is just so tight, and the guest producers ( will.i.am, Devo Springsteen) kept the level very high.
-- i'm giving this album a 4, but only because, at this point, its pretty impossible for Comm to go any higher, given the fact that he's already 10-plus years into a classic career.
posted by Twistinado @ 5:00 PM
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