Sucka Free: Common

Ignorant ideas, indefensible politics, despicable icons, and rappers look stupid on TV. It is pretty easy to show why people who don’t like hip hop should not.




But how do you show why people who love hip hop feel the way they do? How do you explain the magnificence, the mesmerising sight of an MC in full flight and how that sets your entire brain tingling with awe and excitement? How sixteen bars can make you feel that you have just heard history? How do you explain that?
I can’t even explain just one verse of one song. I mean, hip hop is so intricate, so complex: it alludes to itself and to other types of music and literature, it quotes, it puns, it jokes, it met aphorises to extreme levels... and every new MC tries to be better than the last, so it just gets more and more complex.
To fully appreciate Common’s verse on The Way Home you need to know your Gil Scott Heron, Miles Davis, Billy Holiday and your R Kelly.
Then you need to step away from the usual casual, passive way of consuming pop music song writing and prepare yourself for an author who uses a sudden dizzying burst of alliteration to set up a canny insight.

Hypes fighting for hits to heighten their hell.
Don’t he know that he can
only get as high as he fell?

You don’t get why that is such a brilliant couplet, how can I explain it to you?

Then you have to be prepared for sharp slices of cruel and unstinting aural picture-painting. To see the image of bleak and miserable homesteads scorched inthe aftermath of a crack cataclysm. Men bruised and helpless, but still with eyes glazed over, still dreaming. “Smoking grass in grassless jungles.”

It is not just the comment the rapper is making, it is the cunning phrasing, the wordplay, the sheer literacy of the work. And we haven’t even begun to talk about the performance, the tone and the variations on emphasi s and pitch, that makes you think of an urgent and sincere older brother trying to urge his younger sibling to avoid the mistakes he made.

And then how can you fully appreciate this one verse unless you are familiar with Common, his body of work, and what he stands for? And even then, brilliant as Common is, he isn’t even the best… Joe Budden is. But all most people know about Joe Budden is that song he did with that kid from Immature…