common - like water for chocolate - C/D

yeah word

roots are just way better than common overall IMO.

i dont really think of it as a neo soul/rap album but if you want some similarly nice warm rhodesd out hip hop then slum villages fantastic vol 2 album does that generally better than lwfc.

"resurrection is fairly generic & of its time"

those are both very respectable qualities.

Of course you can make a case for that but one record hardly makes lwfc 'generic' or something, which was your point al. I like the roots on the whole better than com but lwfc was his artistic peak imo. Not sure why folks are shitting on him lyrically on this record either - he kills cold blooded and doin it and heat. And titchy sounds insane putting dilla's group home on the same ground as common in 00 never mind ahead of him.

Yall are letting titchy's arbitrary challops and yr distaste for gap hoody ads - or in al's case, challopsistic defenses of gap hoody era com - distort year view of this multi faceted, beautifully produced record

yeah i dunno i just recall that album being the beginning of Com's tendency toward awkward pauses and line breaks. but obviously we have different views of his catalog, when all is said and done i do like the record and would still rate it as one of my favs from that year.

xpost

isn't his gap hoodie era more like Be/Finding Forever? i wasn't even saying anything about those records.

i mean i guess i said he was more competent in that era, but i don't know if i actually like those records more.

real talk though deej what do you think of Electric Circus? because based on the negative buzz and my mixed feelings about LWFC I never really even sat down and heard the whole thing, but i'm curious what yr take is.

i'm not deej but it's terrible. there are a couple of beats i wouldn't mind hearing again though.

hey dudes we should all adopt LOL common lyrics as our display names! who's with me?...............anyone?

nah

lol

I'm with some dude, _Resurrection_ is Common's best record hands down. I like LWFC quite a bit, but I similarly concur with some dude that as an MC it's one of Common's worst records (the only ones worse being _Finding Forever_ and _Electric Circus_, abominations both).

deej, you might be right about No I.D.'s beats, but they suit Common perfectly on that album. They're not too ostenatious, but their jazziness is very Chicago in feeling, and they work really well when Common is rapping fast and nimble. The opener is the best example of this, as that piano and the scratches complement his rapping PERFECTLY.

Also, I like "Common Sense" MUCH better than "Common." Having to change that name was bogues.

yeah fuckin ska band

btw damn it's difficult to pick just one lyric from "come close"

Two other reasons _Resurrection_ is a winner, no contest: Ynot Nevertheless and Mista Sinister.

dammit this one is too long for a display name but a good un:

I’m your worst nightmare squared/That’s double for niggas who ain’t mathematically aware

yeah but that's Bus dumbness on a Com track

I love the handwave argument for that line, basically that if you aren't mathematically aware, you think x^2 and 2x are the same thing.

I love the phrase "mathematically aware" full stop

canibus is just a hoot, i love that nutcase.

I think I'm gonna focus on LWFC lyrics now just to see if it irks deej

hahaha^^that's a classic one

doing lines from that lily allen song seems too easy

hahaha real talk the beat on that song was great but yeah so many lol lines

I think if com hadn't fallen off so hard after lwfc folks would look at it a lot more fondly; just because he dumbed his style down further after didn't mean it shouldn't have been straightened out as the times changed. His first record sounds awful & I dare anyone to say its better than lwfc. he's beyond corny on that joint. Even on resurrection his flow is real 90s sounding, and 'I stagger in the gathering' verse is classic but I don't see how it's any less embarrassing than most of his verses on lwfc. I'm from Chicago but to me Chicago sound is like adrenaline rush. The Philly sound was more singular w com's rhymes in a way that wouldn't have worked for most rappers. Who would u rather see rapping on the lwfc beats?

honestly? maybe pharoahe monche or mos def at the time? but i agree that he never had better beats than on lwfc.

rap threads without ethan feel like substitute teacher days in grade school.

he IMed me a bunch of st0rmfront links tonight, you can just assume he'd find some way to work those into this thread if he was here

^^ sorry feel free to googleproof that

Lol Ethan as the krs 1 of ilx

Real talk tho he would just link to copywrite - that's a wrap.mp3 for the 43rd time

"dilla's group home"

that would be frank n dank. sv is like dilla's gangstarr.

i still dont get why 'of its time' and 'real 90s sounding' work against resurrection. you could say the same for illmatic.

sc marley marle

it only works as a criticism if you just dont like that mid 90s sound and imho, when resurrection it came out, it def wasnt thought of as 'generic'. its obv mining the same kinda jazzy samples as a lot of other ppl in that era but what no id/ynot etc came up was pretty individual, or at least perfectly in sync with what common was rapping about. def inspired, either way.

youre misreading me u tard

i think resurrection is a great record -- i have no problem with that mid 90s sound

i just think that lwfc is a much more singular record, because it is. no that doesnt make it INHERENTLY better but i never said that it did -- just that i prefer it /pull it out more often for that reason

his verses have always had pretty wince-worthy lines whether it was 'bitch as missy' on lwfc or 'grammatics that are masculine' on resurrection. his flow was more 90s acrobatic on resurrection so if u prefer that aesthetic yeah yr gonna prefer resurrection but on balance i dont think theres really anything about that record that is somehow superior to lwfc & at least lwfc doesnt really sound like any other rap record, incl the other soulquarian records from the time

rap threads without ethan feel like substitute teacher days in grade school.

― i'm grand like auto theft 3 (Jordan), Thursday, March 19, 2009 3:39 AM (14 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no doubt.

Don't think I ever really liked common after this album

his verses have always had pretty wince-worthy lines whether it was 'bitch as missy' on lwfc or 'grammatics that are masculine' on resurrection. his flow was more 90s acrobatic on resurrection so if u prefer that aesthetic yeah yr gonna prefer resurrection but on balance i dont think theres really anything about that record that is somehow superior to lwfc & at least lwfc doesnt really sound like any other rap record, incl the other soulquarian records from the time

yeah, but it sounds like a bunch of other R&B records from the same time, and I'd much rather put on Voodoo or Mama's Gun than Common's third-best album, which hasn't really aged that well (Great beginning, some hot jams in the middle, ending is fucking sloooooow).

I'm from Chicago as well, and honestly the only thing that comes to mind when I think of growing up there is R. Kelly and 2Pac, which was just about all I heard on the radio growing up (and even, to an extent, when I go home to visit, whether it's the fact that they still rock the R constantly or that they play the shit out of 2Pac's Greatest Hits on GCI's Old School Sundays or whenever). Chicago is a musically fecund city and so you will inevitably hear lots of music with lots of different perspectives.

Anyways, the way that Resurrection evokes Chicago is mostly in its selection of beats, which rely heavily on old jazz and soul records that were pretty ubiquitous--maybe not on the radio--but in drugstores and diners and bodegas. I wasn't hearing Twista or Do or Die--those were very much regional (and regional within Chicago) rap records--so the way Common is able to evoke a Chicago aura is also very similar to the way he invokes a rich sense of tradition and history, rather than the endless polemics and junior college "philosophy" that he raps about now. Whether or not you feel that '90s b-boy academic style, it's, linguistically, infinitely more interesting and captivating than practically anything he's done since.

u forgot about bone thugs -- that shit was everywhere

Also, your line "Chicago sound is like..."; Adrenaline Rush should probably be replaced by Mobstability.

NO CRUCIAL CONFLICT NO CREDIBILITY!

^always loved them for weirdly having a mid-80s hardcore band name for some reason.

I'd love to rep for CC or DoD, but the Twista albums slay both of them, on the whole.

I regret slagging junior college students above--I was mostly referring to a certain strain of junior college student that's all over Chicago; didactic, weed-blazing (dudes mostly) who have ridiculous and misinformed superiority complexes.

rolling autogoon thread 2009

yo random chicago dude check out our rolling rap music thread

Also, your line "Chicago sound is like..."; Adrenaline Rush should probably be replaced by Mobstability.

― talrose, Thursday, March 19, 2009 2:19 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i meant the single. traxter in general

xpost - fucknuts, it doesnt really sound like any other rap record of the time but who cares? it sounds like plenty neo soul records of the time. which isnt really what i want from a common record. you know something is wrong when dangelos album has an overall tougher sonic aesthetic than commons album.

common was already going a little bit soft on one day which is fine as his flow was still limber but he got more stilted on lwfc and overall i think that the move from chicago where he was not 'accepted' by all his heroes hurt him a little - as soon as he got the ok from de la, tribe and co on the one day album he lost something. also, i think hes just better working with more standard boom bappy producers whether it be ynot, no id, doug infinite or even kanye, rather than dilla, even though i do like the unusualness of tracks like cold blooded and heat.

i love the shit out of this album, especially the warm and languid second-half. 'song for assata' might be the most poyser-ific song of the entire soulquarians period. i think this one has my favorite pops rap too.

welp, halfway through nobody's smiling and it's more of the same. beats are just a bit "harder." he does sound a bit more fired up, he's just saying the same thing over and over: we seen it, we lived it, and we ain't havin it. okay, cool?

okay, foot into mouth- "rewind that" is fucking dope and easily my favorite thing since be.

his albums always end really strong, so here we go...

okay so yeah, definitely better on the second half. and i was listening to the deluxe edition, so "rewind that" is actually the end. he sounds engaged on the last few tracks and "young hearts run free" is another easy highlight. still same kind of vibe overall: ambition is apparent, but execution is unenthusiastic. certainly not awful, just all feels a little second tier. at least it has some legit memorable highlights. lonnie lynn sr passed away in 2014 and his contribution is sorely missed. 3 mics.

on to black america again and the first two songs feature bilal. ahh boy.

okay i'm taking off my cynical jerk hat now and i will say: about halfway through baa and it's easily his best since electric circus. he doesn't sound forced at all here. too much posturing on the previous two albums, but this feels like the old common who actually gives a fuck. beats are stellar (+some are fairly weird) and it's a damn fine representation of actual adult contempo hiphop. stevie wonder hollering about rewriting black anerican history is kind of a mindblowing moment in his catalogue. like it feels full circle that he had lauryn singing a stevie song on one of his old albums and he talked about changing the dynamic of black families... and then almost 2 decades later, he fets the official cosign from stevie himself.

still getting through it, but this is an easy 4 mics. too many highlights to start listing. fucking solid.

"little chicago boy"

not even gonna front: i have tears rn

don't care of i sound like a cornball, this is a beautiful album, holy smokes. again: easily his best in over a decade at that point. very firm and mighty 4 mics. even bilal and john legend couldn't fuck it up.

(lol, put my cynical jerk hat back on for a sec)

gonna take a detour into the august greene album...

the august greene album is good! it's glasper+riggins, so the beats are that chunked up synth jazz boombap and com continues to sound reinvigorated. it is a bit dour at times, but very soulful. the track with brandy was unexpected and it's a legit excellent radio jam that hits at the perfect time in the album's sequence. a very good record that plays like a sort of unofficial epilogue to black america again. a very solid 3.5 mics and a pleasant surprise.