Common

Rock & roll has grabbed Common by the neck and given him a good shake. With its heavy, multilayered sound, Electric Circus is steeped in the Chicago-born and Brooklyn-based rapper’s newfound love for Pink Floyd, Traffic, and, above all, Jimi Hendrix. But, like many new converts to anything, Common goes a little off the deep end. His ambitious quest to expand the boundaries of hip-hop is crammed to the gills with a thousand motifs and is a little too busy to be a complete success. Perhaps not surprisingly, Common’s rhymes (sample lyric: "my mind screams like Al Green to stay together!") take a distant second place to the complex musical landscape he’s fashioned. In addition, a sidereal array of vocalists (including Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, Mary J. Blige, Jill Scott, Cee-Lo, Bilal, and Common’s main squeeze, Erykah Badu) and musicians (Prince, Bobbi Humphrey, Nicholas Payton) add to th ...
2002-01-01 - Mca
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