Image via Complex Original
Common’s rap career stretches back over two decades, emerging during the early-’90s underground scene and rapping under the moniker Common Sense. Over 22 years after his under-the-radar debut (Can I Borrow A Dollar?) the Chicago native has 10 albums and two Grammys under his belt—not to mention starring roles in film and television, publishing a memoir, launching a record label imprint, and founding a charity. Through it all—from his membership in the Soulquarians collective, to his relationship with Kanye West and his G.O.O.D. Music crew in the mid-’00s, to his recent contract with longtime friend and collaborator No I.D.’s ARTium Recordings—Common has never been content with just being a musician. He has used his music for political activism at every opportunity, often focusing on Afrocentric, socially conscious themes, from lyrical history lessons in the civil rights and black-nationalist movements to addressing social issues experienced by the black community. At times, his politics have landed him in the hot seat.
To commemorate his role in Selma and his collaboration with John Legend on “Glory,”—in the movie he plays James Bevel, a leader of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches that led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act that same year, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting—we’ve compiled 10 of Common’s best political moments, in his music and beyond.
“I Used to Love H.E.R.”
The first single off Common’s sophomore album, 1994’s Resurrection, is often regarded as his best. (It has also been called one of the greatest rap songs of all time.) But “I Used to Love H.E.R.” is a cautionary parable as much as it is a single. The track uses an extended metaphor of a round-the-way-girl-turned-materialistic opportunist to comment on what Common saw as the degradation of Afrocentric hip-hop culture, mainly due to major label greed and West Coast rap tensions. “Once the man got to her, he altered her native/Told her if she got an image and a gimmick/That she could make money, and she did it like a dummy,” he rapped. The track loudly positioned Common as a conscious, moralistic foil to some of hip-hop’s violent caricatures and mainstream rap’s increasing commercialism.
“Retrospect for Life”
“Retrospect for Life” was the emotional centerpiece of Common’s third album, 1997’s One Day It’ll All Make Sense. For a single, the Lauryn Hill-featured track was heavy. On it, Common considered the options of his pregnant girlfriend. On its first verse, he addresses their unborn child directly, asking, “Knowing you the best part of life, do I have the right to take yours?” The second verse praises his girlfriend’s strength—“I probably never feel what you felt/But you dealt with it like the strong black woman you are”—and ultimately, they decide to raise the child. The song’s emotional charge was largely thanks to its biographical origin: Common’s first child, daughter Omoye Assata Lynn, with then girlfriend Kim Jones, who was born shortly after the album’s release. In her liner notes for the album, journalist Raquel Cepeda described watching Common listen to “Retrospect for Life” at a mastering session: “He tells me as we listen to L-Boogie wail the chorus, ‘When I listen to the song now, I think about how precious her [Omoye's] life is.’”
Like Water for Chocolate Album Art
Common’s fourth album, 2000’s Like Water for Chocolate, marked a breakthrough moment in his career. It was his most commercially successful album to date, selling 70,000 copies in its first week. This was also Common’s first album in collaboration with the newly formed Soulquarians (the neo-soul collective that included ?uestlove, D’Angelo, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, and more). The album wore its Afrocentrism on its sleeve—quite literally, in the case of its cover art, which borrowed a photograph titled 1956 Alabama by Gordon Parks, the first African-American to work at Life magazine and the first to write, direct, and score a Hollywood film (he also co-founded Essence magazine). The photo shows a young black woman drinking out of a water fountain designated boldly as for “Coloreds Only.” Though the album title is a reference to the book and film of the same name, the image also clearly portrays segregated fountains and the racism they represent.
“A Song for Assata”
Like Water for Chocolate was Common’s major label debut (he’d signed to MCA Records and relocated from Chicago to New York in 1999), but that didn’t mean he toned down his socially conscious themes. Many of its tracks honored Afrobeat music and its pioneer, Fela Kuti. The track “Heat” sampled Tony Allen, Kuti’s former bandmate and fellow Afrobeat trailblazer. “Time Travelin’ (A Tribute to Fela)” was an explicit homage. But the album’s most political moment was “A Song for Assata,” produced by James Poyser. Slipped in near the album’s end, the song told the story of Assata Shakur, a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army who was convicted of murdering a New Jersey State Trooper, among many other charges, in the early ’70s. Shakur was given a life sentence, but escaped prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba under political asylum since 1984 (discussions of Shakur are seeing a resurgence today after U.S.-Cuba ties are being slowly rekindled). After chronicling her story in its verses, Common closed the song with a spoken-word piece by Shakur herself—he traveled to Havana to speak with her during the album’s creation. “I know a whole more about what freedom isn't/Than about what it is, 'cause I've never been free,” she said. Shakur’s story was so important to Common that he named his daughter, Omoye Assata Lynn, after her.
“Between Me, You, and Liberation”
Common’s fifth album, 2002’s experimental Electric Circus, was his most polarizing to date. Its eclectic rock and electronic leanings were a jarring departure from its acclaimed predecessor, Like Water for Chocolate. But even as it diverged stylistically from much of his earlier work, it wasn’t without his usual socially conscious themes. Most notable was album cut “Between Me, You, and Liberation,” featuring vocals from Cee-Lo Green and production from J Dilla, ?uestlove, James Poyser, and Pino Palladino. The track dealt with three examples of socially relevant personal struggles, as experienced by people close to him. The first detailed a woman with whom Common is romantically involved, who remains scarred by familial abuse. In the second verse, Common watches his aunt slowly lose her battle with cancer. The third verse describes a conversation between Common and a close friend, who reveals that he’s gay. It forces Common to grapple with his own deeply ingrained homophobia on wax, and to ultimately decide that he was in no position to judge: “How could I judge him? Had to accept him if I truly loved him.” In a genre known for perpetuating heteronormative ideals, the song represented a rare critique of hip-hop’s stubborn hyper-masculinity.
Def Poetry Jam & “A Letter to the Law”
Produced by Russell Simmons, Def Poetry Jamm ran on HBO from 2002 and 2007 and featured spoken word performances from poets, musicians, and actors like Nikki Giovanni, Mos Def, Cedric the Entertainer. Over the show’s five-year run, Common performed on three occasions. His first appearance came in the third season, when he read a poem called “God Is Freedom.” But his standout performance is definitely "A Letter to the Law," from the fourth season. The politically charged poem takes the form of an open letter from a young black person to the police system that is failing them. From there, it expands to include the war on Iraq, including some thinly veiled shots at then-president George W. Bush: “Burn a bush, cause for peace he push no button/Killing over oil and grease, no weapons of destruction/How can we follow leader when this a corrupt one?”
The Last Poets on “The Corner”
Common’s sixth album, Be (2005), was his comeback after the commercial failure of Electric Circus; it was also his first album in collaboration with Kanye West, whom he’d known since 1996 and had worked with on West’s debut, The College Dropout. West produced the majority of Be, and released the album on his recently formed G.O.O.D. Music label. “The Corner” was the second single, and on it Common tells stories over West’s piano-heavy groove. In a bold move that paid homage to the history of rap and the power of spoken word poetry, the track also featured the Last Poets, a group of poets and musicians who came to prominence in the late ’60s as part of the black nationalist movement. The group had found commercial success with its self-titled debut album in 1970, and "The Corner" marked their big moment in the 21st century. Common explained his reasons for working with the group in a 2005 interview with PopMatters: “I knew those who had been listening to hip-hop would know who the Last Poets were and if they didn’t they would feel it in their souls sooner or later. And I also felt good about introducing some of the youth to [them].”
will.i.am’s “Yes We Can”
In February, 2008, will.i.am released “Yes We Can,” a video composed of quotations from presidential candidate Barack Obama’s speech from the New Hampshire Democratic primary earlier that year. The accompanying video featured black and white clips of Obama coupled with an array of celebrities who echoed Obama’s words. It was awarded the first-ever Emmy for Best New Approaches In Daytime Entertainment. Common made a cameo in the video—jump to the 0:23 mark— repeating the following: “It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists, as they blazed a trail towards freedom—yes, we can.”
2011 White House Visit and Controversy
In May, 2011, Common was invited to perform at the White House as part of Michelle Obama’s White House Music Series. Along with Jill Scott, Aimee Mann, former U.S. poets laureate Billy Collins, Rita Dove, and other performers, Common appeared before an audience of dozens of high-school students. He recited a poem that nodded to Martin Luther King, Jr. and mourned the youth who suffer because of American injustice: “I write for beacons of light for those of us in dark alleys and parched valleys/Street hits spark rallies of the conscious.”
But the invitation sparked controversy: Fox News called Common a “vile rapper,” and the Daily Caller cited his anti-Bush lyrics from his 2005 “A Letter to the Law” performance on Def Poetry Jam, misinterpreting a reference to a Public Enemy song as a death threat. Addressing the invitation, White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a media debriefing: “It’s ironic to pick out those particular lyrics about this particular artist when in fact he’s known as a socially conscious hip-hop artist and rapper and has done a lot of good things. You can oppose some of what he’s done and appreciate some of the other things.”
Nobody’s Smiling
After his 2011 album, The Dreamer/The Believer, Common took a hiatus from music, leaving Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music collective. When he returned to promote his 10th studio album, 2014’s Nobody’s Smiling, he revealed that it would be a concept album that dealt with the homicide epidemic that plagued his hometown of Chicago. In an interview with Revoltthat summer, he said, “It was really a thought that came about because of all of the violence in Chicago. It happens in Chicago, but it’s happening around the world in many ways. We was talking about the conditions of what’s happening, when I say ‘nobody’s smiling.’ But it’s really a call to action.”
The lyrics mourn the city’s lost youth—figuratively, in the case of children who lose their innocence early, and literally, in the case of the “young soldiers who never got to become older,” on “War.” On the album’s title track, poet Malik Yusef captures the fraught nature of drill, a grim style of Chicago street rap that had become popular since Common’s previous album, and the possible implications for those who work within the style: “They drilling on my land but ain’t no oil to be found/I might be part of the problem.” But Nobody’s Smiling had a mission even beyond its socio-political concerns—Common used the album as a spotlight for young, talented local rappers, including Lil Herb and King Louie, who he put on an alternate cover for the LP. In the same Revolt interview, he explained his decision: “Putting them on my album cover is a way to give back. Saying, ‘Look, we are all one in the same'…I see y’all, I see me.”