Kanye West has won Grammys, sold millions of albums and become the most sought-after producer-songwriter in hip-hop, but at the moment he’s feeling a bit like a voyeur.
He’s presiding over a video shoot that is also a summit between Chicago musical giants: West behind the camera and the rapper known as Common, a.k.a. South Side native Lonnie Rashid Lynn, in front of it. The $350,000 video will usher in their musical collaboration on one of the year’s most anticipated albums, Common’s “Be,” due out May 24 on West’s GOOD (Getting Out Our Dreams) label and Geffen Records.
Together, these artists are putting a Chicago stamp on the lucrative world of mainstream hip-hop. Call it blue-collar rap or lunch-pail hip-hop, they specialize in beats ‘n’ rhymes about everyday life instead of the bling-bling world of limo-riding pimps and blunt-toking gangbangers.
As the video unfolds, blue collars are loosened, while West watches. As a so-called “conscious” rapper, full of high-minded thoughts about what ails society, Common isn’t supposed to be flirting with willowy models on camera. But that’s exactly where he finds himself, an arm wrapped around the model’s waist, his lips nibbling on her ear, then gently tracing a path of kisses down her neck.
“Let me get a really tight shot on his lips and her ear,” West instructs his producer as he leans back in a director’s chair and feigns exasperation. “I think I’ve gotta get in there to show ’em exactly what I mean.”
In a soundstage warehouse remade as a fur-carpeted living room, the handsome couple slow dance to the rhythm of Common’s next video-single, “Go.” In the next set on the two-day $350,000 video, a silk-sheeted bed beckons the amorous pair. Common’s manager, Derek Dudley, lets out an envious sigh as the tryst unfolds. “That’s hot! Let me get in there.”
The problem with being labeled a socially conscious rapper is that it’s often music-industry code for self-serious artists who are more interested in being scolds or preachers than having fun. Common knows the stereotype well; he’s earned a truckload of hip-hop credibility for his worldly wise street poetry on a decade-long string of acclaimed albums. But on this early spring afternoon, the stereotype is melting in the glare of the hot video lights
“Yeah, we’re changing Common’s image,” West cracks. “We got rid of the checkered pants.”
Instead of his trademark trousers and knit skull cap, Common wears khakis and a newsboy cap for the video. But “Be” is no fashion makeover. Instead, it’s a bold artistic statement designed to expand the perception of who Common really is.
“People might not expect a song like this from me,” Common says, “but I feel very comfortable and confident doing it because it is me. Being sexual is part of being human. The idea on this album was to present a balance [artistically] that I have always had as a person.”
It is also aimed at reaching the broader audience that seemed to be his after he released “Like Water for Chocolate” in 2000. That album sold 750,000 copies, according to Soundscan. But Common’s fifth album, the ambitious “Electric Circus” (2002), plummeted to 294,000 sales.
“This is Common’s most important album, especially in light of where he was after `Electric Circus,'” says Dudley, who has known the rapper since they were in grade school together on the South Side. “That was the first dip in his career, and it created uncertainty. Now he really has something to prove. This is his comeback.”
Common went back to the sounds that first inspired him. “The only thing he knew going in to this album was that he was going to go back to beats and rhymes,” Dudley says.
“I was disappointed that people reacted so negatively to `Electric Circus,'” Common says. “I wanted to stretch the definition of what hip-hop was and show a few new moves, like Michael Jordan developing a turnaround jumper after people got used to seeing him do dunks and finger rolls. Sometimes you travel and see what the world is about, and it gives you a new appreciation of how beautiful home is.”
Home is the kaleidoscope of human experience heard on “Be,” from meditations on faith to fantasies about infidelity, as filtered through the eyes and ears of Chicago’s two most prominent hip-hop artists. It brings out the best in both, an instant classic that builds on the promise of their work apart.
Common has never sounded looser or more hard-hitting, and West has never worked with an artist whose lyricism connects on such a high level.
“We pushed each other on this album,” says Common during a break in the video shoot. “We challenged each other. He wouldn’t allow me to just do anything on a track. He’d say, `I need you to cut this verse down,’ or `What if you rap about this along with what you already have?’ And I wouldn’t just take anything from him. He’d say, `Yo, this is your single right here.’ And I’d be saying, `No, it has to be something that I feel in my heart.'”
West has already been involved in three of the last year’s most successful albums: His Grammy-winning solo debut, “The College Dropout,” which has sold 2.6 million copies; John Legend’s million-selling “Get Lifted”; and Chicago rapper Twista’s “Kamikaze,” which sold 1.8 million on the heels of the West produced and written “Slow Jamz” single. He put off working on his second album, “Late Registration,” to produce 9 of the 11 tracks on “Be.”
“I don’t have time to do music just to be doing it,” says the gray-hooded West as he picks through a lunch of carryout roast chicken and rice. “I did this album because it’s important to hip-hop music. It’s that real [expletive]. When Jay-Z hits a beat, or Common hits a beat, or I hit a beat, it’s something different.”
Though he could easily have hoarded all his best beats for his own album, West acknowledges that Common wouldn’t settle for any leftovers. “He has all my better stuff right now,” the producer says with a wry smile. “Now he’s got to listen to my stuff till it’s as good as the music he has on this album.”
West, 27, and Common, 33, share similar backgrounds. They grew up in middle-class South Side neighborhoods with mothers who are educators: Mahalia Ann Hines is the principal at John Hope Prep College High School, Donda West a professor of English at Chicago State. Common’s first producer, Dion “No I.D.” Wilson, became a mentor to West.
`Loved his confidence’
“I was working on my third album, and Kanye would come around to No I.D.’s basement and would always talk [expletive] to anyone who would listen about how good he was,” Common says with a laugh. “Eventually he’d come to my house and want to battle me. I loved his confidence. When we’re in the studio now, he’d be reciting lyrics from my first album, which came out when he was in high school. It made me realize that I meant something to him as an artist, and that being from Chicago and meeting with me and No I.D. was something special for him.”
Both artists eventually moved from Chicago to New York to expand their careers, and toured together for the first time in 2003, when West was just beginning to establish himself as an “A”-list producer.
West was working on another artist’s album in Los Angeles later that year when he invited Common to the studio. “I was riding around town and Kanye calls, `Yo, I’ve got something you need to hear,'” Common says. When the rapper arrived, he heard a piano-goosed groove that he couldn’t deny.
“It felt like that beat was made for me,” Common says. “I couldn’t let this other artist come in and hear it, because he might want it.”
The track evolved into “The Fool,” a street drama about young working men struggling to make choices about how to provide for their families as poverty closes in around them: “I know I could make it right, if I could just swallow my pride,” West raps on the chorus.
The relationship between the two artists blossomed after that. Common was impressed by the tracks he heard from “The College Dropout”: “I always thought Kanye was clever, but he needed to grow in his delivery. When he put some substance into what he was saying on that album, he became a great artist, not just a good rapper.”
The two developed a relationship where finished tracks would be constructed from scratch in a matter of hours. “Go” came about after West, Common and singer-songwriter John Mayer took in an afternoon screening of the Ray Charles bio-pic “Ray” at a Manhattan matinee.
“Kanye had this beat, and John was vibing out to it, coming up with this `go, go, go’ line that Kanye sampled and used as a loop,” says assistant engineer Taylor Dow. “John wanted the song to go to an even crazier place, a no-holds barred thing about every sexual fantasy you could imagine. Common could relate to the idea, but he gave it his own twist. He definitely didn’t want to go as far as John. It had to feel right to him. What was fascinating is watching these three guys create the entire song in a matter of hours: Kanye picked out the sounds, John responded with a melody, and Common brought his ideas about what the song should say lyrically.”
Different sounds
Each track on “Be” creates its own distinctive sonic world: the gritty urban grind of “The Corner,” with hip-hop pioneers the Last Poets adding their ghetto gravitas to the mix; the gospel hosannas of “Faithful,” in which Common imagines how life might be different if straying men treated God as a woman; the rapid-fire upright bass tones and string orchestrations of the “Intro,” which is more of a manifesto than the toss-off its title might imply; the soul horns of “It’s Your World,” which is told from the perspective of a street walker sustained by her dreams.
The unifying thread is the Everyman (or Everywoman) perspective of the song’s narrators, a trait that Common shares with West. This is the hip-hop of everyday life in a blue-collar community, the world between the ghetto projects and the downtown high-rises, a constituency often overlooked in mainstream hip-hop. In this respect, “Be” is Common’s answer to the cinematic urban drama played out in Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”
“I’m not a gangster, I’m not a preppie and I’m not a nerd either,” Common says. “I’m an everyday guy, and I wanted to be that voice, the one who could speak to all those people, because I have known all those people in my life growing up.”
Along the way, Common matured enough to not just tell their story, but to live it. He became a father of a now 7-year-old daughter, and his records sold well but not spectacularly. He was living well, but not lavishly. He became a student of artists such as John Coltrane and Bob Marley, and of books such as the Koran and the Bible, as well as black literature. In 2002, he created the Common Ground Foundation in Chicago to help disadvantaged youth with after-school educational programs that use hip-hop as a teaching tool.
“Common knows that hip-hop artists have a huge influence on this generation of young people, even more so than politicians sometimes,” says Angela Murray, the foundation’s executive director. “He wanted to have a positive effect on their future.”
Common is serious about Common Ground, about his daughter, about his music. But not necessarily himself.
“I’m bald,” he says. “I get jealous. I was just a crazy kid once, smoking and drinking and womanizing. And I’m figuring it out as I go along.”
That attitude is as blue-collar as it gets, and “Be” is a testament to the city that shaped it. “There aren’t a lot of limousines back home to pick me up like there are here,” Common says. “This is an entertainer’s life, an artist’s life in New York, and there is a film star’s life in Los Angeles. But in Chicago is where I get my base of people who work for the CTA, who work for health clinics, teachers. It’s an authentic place. If you try to be something other than yourself, to hide your flaws, Chicago people will let you know real quick that it’s not working.”
The perfect model
Back at the video shoot, Common is being particular about the type of model he will be paired with in the next day’s shoot, part two of the sensual fantasy played out in “Go.” One of the production crew is exasperated as she tries to track down the perfect partner for the rap artist. Out of earshot of Common, she tells one of the producers, “I’ve been working on it and I’ve been praying on it, and I can tell he’s just not happy.”
Common is outwardly calm, but his words convey the struggle he’s having with this video, this concept, the idea that he can’t be paired with just any model. “We’re trying to do it right,” he says to no one in particular as the eleventh hour nears for a decision. “We’re going to do it right.”
Then a digital photo of a model’s face pops up on the small screen of a crew member’s cell phone. Everyone is enamored, but the face has a price tag: $10,000.
“You gotta get her,” Common says. “I’ll put up $5,000 of my own if I have to.”
The rapper is at last a little more relaxed. Smiles replace furrowed brows on the video set. Common’s got the perfect partner for his video fantasy, a portrayal of the righteous rapper as sensualist, as a connoisseur not just of ideas but of boot-knocking companionship. Yet there is still a line he won’t cross. Later he reveals what it is.
“Before I came here this morning,” he says, “I thought to myself, `Please let this be sexy and beautiful, but let it be something my daughter could watch.’ I don’t want it to be what I’m not, something I can’t show my daughter and talk to her about. I can’t just put anything out there to sell records.”
The hope that Common has is that class will win out over crass, that a great record will sell without having to sell himself out in the process.
“I’m a dreamer,” he says as twilight looms outside the video shoot. “I believe if you just make good music it’s going to get to the world somehow.”
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gregkot@aol.com
