Common, a.k.a. South Side native Lonnie Rashid Lynn, is making a comeback. And he’s getting help from an old friend and fellow Chicagoan, Kanye West.
Their collaboration is on one of the year’s most anticipated albums, Common’s “Be,” due out May 24.
The two are putting a Chicago stamp on the world of mainstream hip-hop. Call it blue-collar rap or lunch-pail hip-hop, they specialize in beats ‘n’ rhymes about everyday life. At the same time, Common is trying to return to better record sales after his fifth album, 2002’s “Electric Circus,” sold only 294,000 copies.
“This is Common’s most important album, especially … after ‘Electric Circus,’ ” said the rapper’s manager, Derek Dudley, who has known Common since grade school. “This is his comeback.”
For “Be,” Common has gone 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 said.
“I was disappointed that people reacted so negatively to ‘Electric Circus,’ ” Common said. “I wanted to stretch the definition of what hip-hop was. … 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.
West, 27, and Common, 33, share similar backgrounds. They grew up on the South Side 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.
The unifying thread on “Be” is the everyman perspective of the song’s narrators, another trait the two share. This is the hip-hop of everyday life that is often overlooked in mainstream hip-hop.
“I’m not a gangster, I’m not a preppie, and I’m not a nerd either,” Common said. “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 he was living well, but not lavishly. 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 is serious about Common Ground, about his daughter, about his music. But not necessarily himself.
“I’m bald,” he said. “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 said. “This is an entertainer’s life. … 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.”
———-
Edited by Curt Wagner (cwwagner@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com)
