rap musician
Personal Information
Born Lonnie Rashid Lynn in Chicago, IL, on March 13, 1972; parents Mahalia Ann Hines and Lonnie Lynn; child: Omoye Assata Lynn.
Education: Attended Luther South High School and Southern A & M University, in Baton Rouge, LA.
Career
Rap artist. Formed his first rap group in high school. Signed a contract with Relativity records in 1991; produced his first album Can I Borrow A Dollar?, 1992; Resurrection, 1994; One Day It'll All Make Sense, 1997; Like Water for Chocolate, 2000.
Life's Work
Born in Chicago in 1972, Common was named Lonnie Rashid Lynn after his father, Lonnie Lynn. He grew up on the south side of Chicago in an economically diverse Black neighborhood called Avalon Park with his mother, Mahalia Ann Hines, a teacher for the Chicago Public Schools; his stepfather, Ralph Hines; and his grandmother.
Two major passions of his early years were basketball and rap. As a young teen, he worked one season as a ball boy for the Chicago Bulls. His love of hip-hop began in the early eighties with a trip to visit his cousin in Cincinnati. When he returned to Chicago, he began, break-dancing, emceeing, and writing rap songs. In 1986, while attending Luther South High School, a Lutheran school on Chicago's South Side, he formed his first rap group, called CDR for group members Corey, Dion, and Rashid. Dion, a friend of Common's from the fourth grade at Faulkner Elementary School, later became rapper and producer NO I.D., and continued to work with Common on stage and in the studio after both had started to perform independently.
While Common continued to perform through high school and after, he also continued his education. After high school, he studied at Florida A&M in the College of Business for two years. But then in 1991, Relativity Records, which had begun to move into hip-hop from a straight rock line-up, offered him a contract, and Common decided to stop attending college to become a full-time performer.
Kept It Real
Lonnie Rashid Lynn began recording under the name Common Sense. The title of his first album, Can I Borrow A Dollar?, produced on Relativity's label in 1992, was an allusion of his place as a Chicago rapper on the hip-hop scene. The title seemed to ask if there was room in hip-hop for rappers who were not from the east or west coast. Common has always had a strong sense of place, and he gives much credit to his early experiences in Chicago as having been an important influence on his musical style. In the area around 87th Street and Stony Island, the neighborhood in which he grew up, Blacks with middle class aspirations, working-class Blacks, and young gang members lived side by side. In a fall 2000 letter to the Chicago Sun-Times, he said, "That area kind of shaped me. It taught me ... to be real with myself and to be real with people. It taught me to speak the truth."
Common moved to Brooklyn early in his career to have greater access to the music industry, but he retained his Chicago-based version of reality. Music reviewers and fans generally find Common's raps more wide-ranging and thoughtful than most other rap artists. In an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Britt Robson said, "Common's most noteworthy contribution to hip-hop has been his definition of 'keeping it real.' The phrase, often used by gangsta rappers to justify their grisly themes, has devolved into a lazy cliché ... Common's reality is braver, broader, and more down to earth."
One way that Common has "kept it real" is by rapping about some uncommon themes. His 1997 album, One Day It'll All Make Sense, included the song "Retrospect for Life," about parenthood and abortion. It also featured rapper Lauryn Hill, and was recorded when both Hill and Common were expecting the birth of their first children. In fact, they shared the same due date for their children, August of 1997. The song's last line comments on the emotional price tag of abortion: "315 dollars ain't worth your soul." On the same album, in the song "G.O.D." which also featured artists Cee-Loo of the Goodie Mob, Common comments on world religions, rapping about the Koran and the Bible and concluding, "Who am I or they to say to who you pray ain't right?" Other albums include raps about how it feels to come home and find your place has been robbed, and a series of raps by his father, Lonnie Lynn, called "Pop's Raps."
Common has a solid reputation among fans of hip-hop for his thoughtful lyrics and creative rhymes. The Source, a hip-hop magazine, has described him as "Chicago's lyrical warrior." While his songs offer biting and clever commentaries on contemporary topics, they are definitely not sermons. He told Soren Baker, a Los Angeles Times writer, that rap, while it needs to be socially conscious, needs to stay true to its tradition of word play and creativity. "I believe in balance." he said. "If you're going to educate people, then you've got to entertain them too."
A conflict cam up in 1994 concerning his name. Though Common's lyrics represent his own version of common sense, another group--a California-based reggae group going by the same name--challenged his right to call himself "Common Sense." Faced with a lawsuit, Common shortened his performance name to Common.
Albums Reflect Common's Evolution
Common's own education, both formal and informal, is a consistent influence on his music. As his social consciousness expanded, his ideas are reflected in his songs' themes and lyrics. And as his knowledge of music expands, his records show the influence of a wider bandwidth of musical styles. His album, Like Water for Chocolate (the title of which is taken from a highly acclaimed novel by Laura Esquivel), released in March of 2000, is a good example of this interplay. One track on the album is a result of an educational journey that Common took. In 1997, he read a biography of Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther accused and convicted of being involved in the killing of a New Jersey policeman, an event that happened the year before Common was born. Shakur escaped from prison and fled to Cuba in 1979, where she has lived ever since. Common penned a rap to her, "A Song For Assata," and went to visit her in Cuba to add her voice to the song.
The album also reflected Common's musical growth. After the release of Resurrection, his 1994 album, Common decided to study more music theory. At the same time, he continued his informal musical education, listing to a wide range of artists including John Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield, Herbie Hancock, and Miles Davis. Many tracks on Like Water for Chocolate pay homage to the rich tapestry of African-American musical tradition. The first track, "Time Travelling," is a tribute to the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. It features his son, drummer Femi Kuti, and contemporary jazz trumpeter, Ray Hargrove. Other tracks reflect strong influences of R&B, of jazz, and of James Brown's driving guitar work. While the album is solidly in the genre of rap, it includes a wider range of music than mainstream hip-hop albums typically neglect. The album's cover also makes a statement: it's a black and white photo, taken by photographer Gordon Parks, of a well-dressed African-American woman in the 1950s drinking from a water fountain marked "Colored Only."
Each of Common's albums has done well. His third album, One Day It'll All Make Sense, sold a respectable 435,000 units. However, in 1998, MCA heard a rumor that Common was not happy with Relativity Records. MCA had already signed artists with a similar vision and style, Mos Def and Roots. MCA executives began talking to Common, and MCA bought out his contract that December. Common was given free artistic license on the album, The resulting album, released under Common's imprint, Madame Zenobia, was well-received, selling enough units to go gold. The Village Voice's reviewer described it as "an honorable and beautiful continuation of Common's longtime project of bridging the life of the street and the life of the mind."
A Common single, "The Light," had gotten him a Grammy nomination for best rap solo performance. He had also performed at Havana's fifth annual Hip-Hop Conference. Common often performs at concerts, on videos and on albums with other well-known artists, including Erykah Badu, De La Soul, and members of Roots.
He is most famous in the hip-hop community for the allegorical song from Resurrection, "I Used to Love H.E.R." The song describes his relationship with a girl that he met when he was 10, a funny, fresh, creative girl. She moved to L.A. after a few years and got involved with a negative scene, including some folks who, as the song says, "told her if she got an image and a gimmick that she could make money, and she did it like a dummy." Common says that even though he sees her being dragged through the sewer, he hasn't given up on her. He's going to try to help her turn herself around because, as the song's last line reveals, " ... who I'm talkin' 'bout y'all is hip-hop." West Coast rapper Ice Cube took Common's attack on West Coast rap as a personal affront and came back with a cut on his album with Mac10, West Side Slaughterhouse. Common responded with another rap single. Apparently fearful of a rap war of words that might lead to physical violence, Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam called the two together at a conference in 1997, and the two rappers declared a truce.
However, the target of Common's criticism wasn't Ice Cube or any one rapper, but his view of the dangerous state of hip-hop because of the tendency for rappers to bend to the will of commercialism and produce tracks that will sell, without regard for the ideas that they put forth. In a Thanksgiving message published in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2000, Common commented on the positive turn he saw hip-hop taking, stating, "I'm definitely grateful that I'm seeing a lot of hip-hop artists out there doing stuff for the community. I'm grateful that I see artists taking a stand in their music. They're saying important things that can affect some lives." As his words indicate, Common sees contemporary hip-hop as a vehicle for conveying messages of importance at the same time that it is generating good music and entertaining its audience. It is his vision that makes him stand out from other rappers. At the same time, his musicality, his blending of multiple musical traditions, and his creative poeticism make his fans want to hear what he has to say.
Awards
His fourth album, Like Water for Chocolate, went gold; Grammy Awards, nominated for best rap solo performance, "The Light," 2001.
Works
Selected discography
- Can I Borrow A Dollar?, 1992.
- Resurrection, (songs include "I Used to Love H.E.R.") 1994.
- One Day It'll All Make Sense, 1997.
- Like Water for Chocolate, (songs include "The Light" and "A Song for Assata") 2000.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- Billboard, Feburary 19, 2000, p. 25.
- Chicago Reader, October 10, 1997.
- Chicago Sun-Times, November 23, 2000, p. 9.
- Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2000, Calendar p. 5.
- The Source, March 2000.
- Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), November 10, 2000, Freetime section, p. 3.
- Village Voice, April 12-18, 2000.
- Biography Resource Center, Gale, http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC.
- Pop Matters Columns, http://www.popmatters.com.
- Pound Magazine, http://www.pound.com.
- Westword, http://westword.com.
- Additional material for this profile was obtained from an interview with Contemporary Black Biography, July 31, 2001.
— Rory Donnelly
