Maybe it’s just paranoia, but these guys seem like they’re faking. It’s early as hell (for musicians and writers, at least)—10 a.m. in New York and 7 a.m. in Los Angeles—but Common and Kanye West are already talking to each other via cell phone. This is no breezy, “Hey, how ya doin’?” affair either. It’s an involved, emotional, latenight–dorm-room-cipher discourse about music.
Common (né Lonnie Rashid Lynn) is in the backseat of a taxi on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn en route to a session at Sony Studios. On the other end of the line is West, who has just woken up more than 2,000 miles away in the L.A. mini-mansion his soul-beat empire built. They’ve been yammering for over half an hour. Subjects include the divinity of music, the power of their partnership, God’s hand in songwriting, and many other ethereal, abstract, and touchy-feely matters. This over-the-top earnestness, coupled with the uncanny timing of their call, has the Spidey-sense of the reporter seated next to Common tingling. // That Common disappeared somewhat mysteriously during breakfast (making a call outside the Park Slope restaurant) only to return moments before West rang him, was strange. The way they respectfully slob each other (“No, your album is my inspiration”) is plausible, if predictable. The generality of topics they cover, things that should’ve been beaten into the ground after countless hours in the studio together, throws up red flags. But it’s the fact that Common keeps repeating out loud what West has just said to him, that really has this scribe thinking the whole thing is being staged. The saccharine-sweet Norman Rockwell picture they’re painting is too perfect.
Or maybe this journalist is just listening to too much Rockwell (as in, “Somebody’s Watching Me”). Or maybe he went into this with the preconceived notion that the timing of the partnership these two have forged— West, 28, signing Common, 33, to his newly branded G.O.O.D. (Getting Out Our Dreams) Music label and producing the lion’s share of Common’s newest album, BE— smells like it’s more a marriage of convenience than a match made in hip hop heaven.
Common and Kanye West have known each other for more than a decade back in Chicago, meeting in producer No I.D.’s basement. “Kanye would beg to give Common beats,” says No I.D., who mentored West from age 14 and produced the majority of Common’s first three LPs. “But Kanye made Puffy-style popish beats, so Common would be like, ‘Nah, I ain’t messing with him. Don’t have him come around.’ Back then, Common didn’t want input. And, you know, Kanye is very ‘Let me help.’”
Common may have dismissed Kanye, but West wasn’t all that awestruck by Common’s talent either. “I used to love people like Wu-Tang Clan, Biggie, and Nas—people that sold records,” West recalls. “I liked Common okay, you know, since he was from Chicago, but I wanted to dress like Nas.” The two even battled in 1996, at the peak of Common’s popularity, on No I.D. and Twilite Tone’s WHPK radio show in Chicago, albeit in freestyle fun. “That was just Kanye trying to prove himself. And I was up there drunk, like, Just ’cause I got a deal don’t think I’m not cold,” says Common. “But it was all in fun.”
“He thought I was, like, a New York dickrider ’cause I used to rap just like Raekwon and Nas,” says West. “But he knew that I had a spark lyrically, otherwise he wouldn’t have let me battle him.”
Nine years later, West has platinum plaques hanging on his walls and Grammys sitting on his mantle, and Common has teetered on the brink of obscurity—thanks to his bizarre last album, Electric Circus. And we’re to believe these guys are now rap’s Tango & Cash, when it feels more like a tango for cash? Common certainly thinks so. “Not only do I love Kanye creatively and as a brother,” he says as his cab approaches the studio, “but we doing business with a vision.”
Maybe this cynical view isn’t fair. Perhaps Common and West really are the most earnest men in hip hop, musicians who love their music and just can’t stop talking about it. And really, would that be so hard to believe? The two Chicago natives, along with Ohio player John Legend, are making the most challenging hip hop and R&B on the charts. It’s consistently rich, nuanced, and thought provoking. And what’s most significant, thanks to West’s golden ear, they’re making it pop as well.
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