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Album
Review
Common - BE This Better BE IT  by: Malik Sinsear, for Entertainment So here we are. This is it. The hip-hop IT release of the year is finally here. You only get one, maybe two IT releases every 12 months and sadly the hype preceding the record usually kills any chance of IT living up to lofty expectations. The story usually goes like this; the first single leaks, you get your hopes up, you hear the rest of the album, you’re disappointed and then you’re left chasing the next white dragon of an album begging to get your hip-hop fix like a mindless heroin addict. Few of these things ever pan out. That can suck, but when IT pays off, boy does it feel good. Kind of like a drug… Common’s
BE is the IT hip-hop release of 2005. Yeah, we had 50
Cent drop, but we pretty much knew what we were getting there.
That wasn’t the case with the MC who has been anything but
common over his career. We didn’t know whether we were getting
the Comm-Sense of the celebrated Resurrection, the one
from the underappreciated One Day It’ll All Make Sense
or the psychedelic Common from the mostly weird Electric Circus.
Sometimes I don’t know who’s harder to read him or
Andre 3000. Let’s back it up, BE officially became an IT release at the end of a Chappelle Show episode, last year when two Chicago rappers set a makeshift kitchen ablaze. Pressed ass tech-junkies had the The Food converted from Tivo to mp3 the very next day. IT was on. We’ve had to wait on IT for a while now, just getting bits and pieces of how IT was being constructed. Kanye & Jay Dilla were to produce the whole album and there were only a few guest appearances including John Mayer. Speaking of which, let me say something about Go, easily one of the smoothest tracks on BE. As the story that’s been circulating for a good two months now goes, Common, Kanye and John Mayer went out to see the movie Ray and felt so overcome with musical inspiration they hit the studio and created this song. Well, like I said the song is good, it’s got a Umi Says vibe to it, musically. The message just isn’t what I expected after hearing that Grammy Award speech of an explanation for it. I was expecting another A Song for Asata or at least Come Close… This nigga talking about bangin’ a broad in the club. Umm, I know Ray was freakin’ in that movie, but I kinda thought the overall theme of film would be more explored on this song than all that fuckin’ Ray was doing. Common’s first official single off BE is The Corner featuring Kanye West and The Last Poets. Now everyone who knows me knows I hate me some spoken fucking word. I despise the way they move all dumb using all them dumb cadences with their exaggerated words. That shit is wack. I got enough work trying to sift through these wack rappers to deal with all that foolishness. I cringe through Def Poetry Jam just so I won’t miss Mos Def do something incredible, but it’s hard. That being said, Comm’s albums always do that spoken word right. From Pops to Malik Yusef and now The Last Poets, they actually make the records better. I like Common albums because they sound like albums and not just a collection of songs. BE is no different. Listening to the whole record enables you to give an annoying sample like the one on Testify a pass. The CD is kinda short, but it’s a good short. A quality short. Tracks like The Food, The Corner and Chi City hit hard, while Love Is, It’s Your World and Faithful featuring Bilal and John Legend are as smooth as the diary at TCBY. (*Note: If I were Legend I’d make that the last time I appear on the same track as Bilal. That dwarf, dwarfed him.) I don’t know who’s handling Bilal’s next record, but they need a swift kick in the ass to wake them up. He’s got that IT, in him too. BE
isn’t a perfect record, hell it’s not even Comm’s
best record, (Like Water… and One Day…
take those honors. NOPE! They’re better than Resurrection,
I said it!), but by no means did IT disappoint. For the guy whose
different approach on albums can only be rivaled by Outkast, Comm
really brought it back to where most people probably think he
is needed most in hip-hop, The Corner. He was absolutely
in a zone when he recorded these 11 songs. When he said “Rick
James Bitch,” and it didn’t sound forced that
sealed it. Go out and get this.
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