Music for a Monday: Peering Into Common's Future

Kanye's right-hand man?

No one should ever feel bad for Carmela Soprano because she pretty much loves her life and is ultimately a contented party in the Faustian corrupt bargain that passes for her existence. She may continuously lay her tenuous claims to the moral high ground and play the scorned innocent with regularity, but at the end of the day, she loves the money and that she's married to the boss. Somewhere deep down--the place that is always shaken when bad things happen--she knows that the Devil will be there at some point, but she doesn't care enough to change. The furs are too nice, the jewelry too expensive. That she espouses traditional American values and traffics in trite platitudes is even better; she plays her part so well. You oftentimes can't tell if she's trying to convince herself, as though she's girding for the burning eternity, or if she's so sinister and twisted that she actually believes she pulls off the act with aplomb.

If Carmela weren't this wonderfully rendered character, Tony's degrading sarcasm--"Ohhh, poor you!"--wouldn't be nearly as resonant. However, despite the myriad reasons why she deserves her plight, something that she said last night should not be lost amidst the deserved consternation: it really can be grating to hear someone complain all the time. The negativity is poisonous.

It likely says something bad about people like me that we are always complaining. It's not just that I have an opinion about most things. Rather, I have those opinions and am all too happy to let someone else know what's wrong with so much stuff. Witness Straight Bangin'. Open-toed shoes, baseball, Mike Breen--my criticism is bound only by time. The more I can see, hear, meet, feel, taste, the better, because it will help me identify that which is insufficient. For these same reasons, though, I enjoy so many activities and subjects because I enjoy learning, and there are all sorts of opportunities that come with perpetual animadversion.

Of the many rappers who receive attention on this interwebnettube (which should perhaps be an adjective that measures one's internets ability), The Game is among my favorite to disparage. And I mean that with a certain warmth. Whereas I simply have no patience for 50 Cent's wretched exploitations or Young Jeezy's inadequate rap music, I appreciate Game for what he and his music afford me while serving as targets for the usual opprobrium. My review of Doctor's Advocate remains a favorite entry of mine because far from aimless hostility, it was a targeted critique of a complicated rapper, and writing it helped me better understand why I'd even bothered. I hate many things in this world that are almost never discussed here--tomatoes, dogs, Jane Eyre--because they're just not worth the effort. They really aren't that interesting. But my feelings for someone like The Game are far different from other persistent aversions that I carry as badges of honor: I experience no virulent emotion when considering Jayceon Taylor (there's no way that my mother will know that he's the same person without the link). I don't care for some things about him that are hard to escape, but exploring those differences helps me also to identify that which I do I like. Above all else, I greatly appreciate that through his music and his actions, The Game is an ongoing psychodrama. He appears to be incredibly conflicted, a walking paradox. And for all that irks me about him, I ain't mad at that.

I enjoy a similar experience when listening to and thinking about Common, a rapper whom I treat with much more sympathy despite obvious shortcomings that even his fans, of which I am a devoted one, cannot fully look past. Common is among the most intriguing rappers because he seems lost in a culture that values direction and unsure in a culture that tethers certainty to manhood. That he is such a gifted lyricist, commanding attention and respect, makes him a study in psychology to rival The Game, because if he couldn't rap, no one would care. Common is a black-power mainstreamist; a culture critic who sells clothes for the Gap; an independent who all but admits to needing Kanye West; a dude whose legacy was forged by Resurrection, revived by Like Water for Chocolate, and almost destroyed by what followed, Electric Circus. He makes little sense, and even that is part of his appeal. Really a blogger's dream.

Many of the perplexing questions that surround Common again seem salient now that his upcoming album, Finding Forever, is on the horizon and damn near half of it seems to have leaked on the internets. Which Common will we be getting? Will he be exercising agency over his own career?

Since 2000, Com has seemed more like a gifted rap vessel and less like his own dude. He's just always contorting his excellent flow and hip-hop-bohemian aesthetic to match up with whatever creative Svengali he's following at a given time. LWFC was a dope record, but were it to be addressed in a hip-hop history book, I think that the discussion would primarily cast the record as a towering accomplishment for the Soulquarians. In fact, the characterization is lent credence when one considers that Common seized upon that moment by...getting punked for his relationship with Erykah Badu and letting the Soulquarians go crazy and fuck up his next album. Is that really the record that Mr. Used to Love H.E.R. meant to make? That's what the dude who destroyed "The Food" summoned? Electric. Wire. Hustle. Flower? P.O.D.? Really, Com?

Humbled by the experience, Common came back in 2005 with Be, a very good album...that was, again, largely seen as a testament to someone else's talent. This time, we celebrated Kanye West's genius. It, of course, didn't help that Common made appearance after appearance as a West supplicant while Kanye--doing what it is that does--would claim to have "brought back" Common, helped him find himself, and all that. I saw Be performed live a number of times, and what was most striking was that it seemed to take Com about a year to really perfect the stage show, as though he needed the time to fully embrace and familiarize himself with someone else's passion. He needed to really learn the role and figure out how he was supposed to be applying his talents. I am not assailing Common's microphone skills, but as you assess his career, you can't help but wonder why it's always someone else doing things to and for him. Rappers need great beats to make great music, but between the Soulquarians and Kanye, it always seemed like Common was a foster child looking for parents who were all too happy to put his talents to their uses. And I don't want for that to sound critical, but it is what it is.

As we get back into it with Common now, it seems too early to tell if he will be working for himself or someone else. "South Side," "The People," and "Black Maybe" are subdued, soulful music that fits Common well and sounds like an amalgamation of the producing talents that have driven his better music before. There is Kanye in all of them (he did produce the shit, after all), but it's not pure Kanye. Though he must have been drunk when agreeing to do so, Kanye's beats sound like works of compromise. Other stuff, "Misunderstood" and "The Game," doesn't caress Common's flow in similar fashion, but the beats for both work. And one is inclined to think that perhaps Common, despite Kanye's overarching vision and input, had some of his own ideas. Maybe he felt as though he could take off the training wheels. I certainly hope so.

Lyrically, an older, wiser, more self-conscious Common continues to be a mixture of the witty and cheesy, independent and beholden. On "The People," alone, he runs from pole to pole: we get the funny and knowing "While white folks focus on dogs and yoga..." but also the wishy-washy contrivance, "My daughter found Nemo"; the declarative "Can't leave rap alone/The streets need me/Hunger in they eyes/Is what seemed to feed me/Inside peace mixed with beef seemed to breed me/Nobody believed/'Til I believed me" but also the sadly submissive "I found the new Primo." He is never fully his own man. Common has also changed his narrative perspective, which is only natural. The personal perspective from "Book of Life" may no longer be a realistic mode for a man who's experienced so much else and spent an entire career rapping about himself. But to now regularly hear Common address the condition of his people, rather than just himself, is simultaneously admirable and somewhat hard to believe. Is someone with an identity significantly created by others really in a position to address someone else's problems, no matter how right-on we find the messages?

We can't yet answer the question, and in some ways, that's a fitting end-point.

- Common, "The People"
- Common, "Book of Life"