This is a celebration. If you can believe it, Common has been making great music since the first light of the 1990s. His classic debut Can I Borrow a Dollar? stood completely separate from and yet in kinship with the Native Tongues movement of his East Coast peers. He was a giant in a burgeoning Chi-town landscape that held both the rapid-fire rap of Twista and the laid-back bombast of Crucial Conflict and Do or Die. His career, then, has spanned 24 years. It’s legendary. And what has continued to separate him from the pack is his ability to convey both purity and plurality, mining his high mind and his earthly pursuits in the same breathy bars. He also knows a great tune when he hears it, and he’s managed to jump on Solange‘s “Cranes In The Sky” without anointing it in any kind of hierarchical man-speak.
He’s Been #Woke
It’s a testament to his own high level of woke that the Chicago emcee doesn’t need to spin the track in a different way to achieve results. This makes sense. We’re talking about the guy that book-ended the Soulquarians. The man who’s been a part of every major conscious movement since his debut. And, the guy who, 22 years into his career, released an album that celebrated the best aspects of blackness by championing a new generation of Chicago spitters on Nobody’s Smiling.
If these don’t make you feel something
He’s still got it. Bars like, “She’s seen pain in my eye/ Men and women at work / Cranes in the sky / We gon’ keep building…” and “I’ve felt the debt of what it is to be alone…” are the kind of hard-hitting poetry you find when Common is at his best. Check out the track and let us know how you feel.
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