This album is bookended by poetry; the opening song “The Dreamer” ends with an inspirational piece from Maya Angelou urging us (well, more specifically Americans) to look back at our forebears and admire their sense of belief in their dreams that enabled them to travel from Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia to reach the promised land. “Pops Belief” closes the album with Common in a relaxed mood, praising God and the benefits He has shown Common in his life, choosing poetry rather than rapping to express this, and the belief he has in himself and his faith.
It is such a different way to embrace poetry – and how cool to open a rap album with Maya Angelou. It is so uplifting and so interesting. (Although ... sidenote .. who knows what's the truth)
Indeed, when Common raps it is at breakneck speed – it is so fast and furious that it requires all your concentration. When he's good, he's exceptional and it doesn’t feel lazy or trite; where possible Common claims to rap for the common person in the street about issues of socio-economic and racial importance. His rapping, particularly on “Gold” and “The Believer (featuring John Legend)" is so fast, it’s invigorating.
But it’s an album of two halves – there is the aspirational, inspirational, uplifting anthems to encourage, drive the listener on to make something better of their lives – to take courage from the past and aim for a better future.
“Blue Sky” is about aiming as high as you can to realise your dreams – using all aspects of your personality and tools at your disposal (intelligence, money, history, faith, family). “I'm the cum lauda, top of the class / Black Wall Street so my stock will never crash”. He wants the best for his family and his community. (Maybe it’s because I’m British, but some of this aiming goes beyond aspiring into the realm of hubris. Can he really compare his acting skills to Oscar winner Denzel Washington?)
In “Gold” he aims for the better things in life, but he takes the image of the arrival of the Magi in the here and now (well, at his own birth) as if to suggest that through belief and firm commitment, that the Lord has not forsaken us and that He can be amongst us, even the poorest of the poor.
“Cloth” is a beautiful song dedicated to a woman who doesn’t know her own beauty, but is beautiful from the inside out. “Like raindrops we fall in love” is a beautiful image of harmony and two rights coming together.
On the other side of the relationship line, “Lovin’ I Lost” is a painful, but realistic take on why people fall out of love. It’s heartfelt because it feels real, as if it’s not a pose but a memory that is being redressed in the song. “Rumors leaving tumors on my heart now / We fell in love huh just to fall apart now”.
My problem, as a listener, comes in the other half of the album, where Common is adopting this heavy-handed machismo pose so that he outdoes anyone who seeks to suggest he’s not the man, the rapper, the gangster that he is. Predictably, I suppose, this becomes pretty anti-women and rather violent. On “Raw (How You Like It)” he threatens to bottle (as in smash a bottle over someone’s head) another guy simply for suggesting he comes from Hollywood rather than Chicago. On “Ghetto Dreams” ‘his woman’ aspires only to owning shoes and frying pancakes in the nude, and that’s as far as she gets other than fucking and fighting with Common.
“Sweet” is perhaps the nadir of this pose (I’ve read online it’s a riposte to something Drake said about him):
“Yeah, man, y’all niggas man, you soft muthfuckers
Yeah my man, muthafcker
Then come around my crib
You know where I’m from
Some hoes ass niggas
Singing all around me man, lalala"
This is lazy and it’s derivative, and I get it’s what a certain element of his audience expect – but for me, no matter what else he says on the rest of the album, I just cannot find my way into his music if this is what his music is about.
So which Common do we believe? Which does he believe? One of these sides of him becomes inauthentic, therefore, because the other is so completely contradictory. It’s a hollow pose, and somehow I can’t believe what he’s saying – if he contradicts himself so strongly from one song to another. For instance, he talks with great pride about his daughter and her being the hope of the next generation – yet are his hopes for her (from “Ghetto Dreams”) to “use her ass like a weapon”?
It seems incredulous. And ever so slightly disappointing because there is so much amazingness elsewhere to enjoy.
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