Track 1 from Can I Borrow A Dollar? (1992)

Tracks 2 and 3 from Resurrection (1994)

I remember seeing the videos from One Day It'll All Make Sense in high school, and being impressed by Common's features with Black Star and the Roots. But I didn't really become a Common fan until I heard "The 6th Sense," at a time when DJ Premier was my favorite producer in the world, and picked up Like Water For Chocolate and then One Day and then Resurrection. And though Common became more famous and commercially successful later on, I still really dig those earlier records and think of that as his classic period. 

Fast forward to 2017, and I was doing teleprompter at a Howard University's Charter Day event, which was hosted by Common, whose daughter was a student at Howard. During our rehearsal, we got to the invocation part of the event, and Common joked around and started to rap the opening lines of his song "Invocation." I told him that was great because it was one of my favorite songs of his, and he seemed surprised and asked me if I was from Chicago -- I guess by now he's used to a lot of people only know his music from Like Water or Be onward. I don't think this was the case yet at the time, but now "Invocation" actually has the most streams of any song from any Common album now, the only Common tracks with more streams are collaborations with other G.O.O.D. artists ("Glory," "Get 'Em High," "One Man Can Change The World," "Make Her Say"). I'm not sure how that happened, if it was on some '90s hip hop playlists or something -- "Invocation" wasn't a single but it did have a video I'd see on "Rap City" back then, so it didn't feel right to include it here. 

Then last year, I got an e-mail from Stereogum asking if I was interested in interviewing No ID, and I jumped at the chance. It's definitely one of the most widely read things I've done lately, and I'm really proud of it, No ID has never done a lot of press and I was ready to go through his whole fascinating career and get some great stories out of him that hadn't been public before. We only talked for a few minutes about his work with Common, but I really love the 5 albums they made together (tracks 1-5 and 15-16 on here), I think they're one of the great MC/producer duos. I also like how Common gets into their history on "Rewind That," and kind of apologizes for the fact that they didn't work together for a decade. 

Common recorded his early 2000s albums in New York with the Soulquarians collective (?uestlove, D'Angelo, J Dilla, Bilal, James Poyser, among others). Like Water was a big breakthrough for him, and then Electric Circus was a really divisive commercial failure. Listening to those albums now, though, I think they're pretty similar and people overreacted to Electric Circus's artsy indulgences at a time when mainstream rap was very straight-laced and risk averse. Still, it has a song featuring Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier, and ends with a jammy 8-minute song and a jammy 10-minute song. The album's only single, the Neptunes-produced "Come Close" with Mary J. Blige, was a very pretty and radio-friendly song, and the other Neptunes production, "I Got A Right Ta," was the rare Pharrell track of the era that wasn't radio-friendly. Common's father, Lonnie "Pops" Lynn Jr., did spoken word outros on most of Common's albums until his death in 2014, I felt like it was only right to include at least one of those, "Forever Begins." 

If Common was at a career low after Electric Circus, he got a perfect movie script comeback in the form of Kanye West's success. Common opened a lot of doors for Chicago hip-hop, and now for the first time someone else from Chicago was way bigger than him, mentored by No ID, with Common featured on West's first two blockbuster albums, which followed Common's conscious rap template in a number of ways, large and small (Kanye even quoted the "yeah yeah now check the method" bit from "In My Own World" on "Jesus Walks"). To nobody's surprise, Kanye signed Common to his label, and Common's first two G.O.O.D. Music albums were the biggest records of his career. Be and Finding Forever are fine albums but I think they're a little overrated by the Kanye generation, and Common and Kanye's chemistry is not like Common and No ID's chemistry or Common and J Dilla's chemistry (Dilla produced tracks 6-8 and 12 here). The deep cuts are fun to revisit but I have no desire to hear any of Common's G.O.O.D. singles again.