It's a familiar showbiz story: Superstar rapper starts taking acting gigs, hanging out with Hollywood types, and moving beyond the music that made him famous, leaving fans to question his commitment to hip-hop. In the opening verse of "In Moe (Speculation)," his fantastic new collaboration with the legendary producer DJ Premier, rapper, actor, and activist Common faces these criticisms head on.
A lot of speculation about the things that I said Is he coming off the head? Is he that high level that his third eye is red? I know he used to love her Is it true he really cared? Did he become a great actor when hip-hop was dead?
Common doesn't answer any of those questions directly, and he doesn't need to. In its exuberance and display of craft, "In Moe (Speculation)" functions as a reminder of Common's dedication to hip-hop. The opening line nods to the intro medley from JAY-Z's 1997 album In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, and a few bars later, Common references his own 1994 classic "I Used to Love H.E.R.," in which he personifies hip-hop as a woman to work through his complex relationship with his beloved genre.
Sure, Common is now a respected actor and media personality who's only a Tony away from an EGOT, but he's never turned his back on the music that shaped his life. When he started taking film and TV roles in between 2000's Like Water for Chocolate and 2002's Electric Circus, the so-called "conscious" rhymer was simply at a crossroads. Hip-hop was changing, and nothing grabbed him quite like the music he absorbed as a youngster growing up in Chicago.
"Hip-hop as a whole, for me at that time, was not anything where I could just turn on these different artists and be motivated, or even just be sparked as a person," Common tells Genius via Zoom. "Not like when I would listen to KRS-One, Rakim, N.W.A, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Black Sheep, Brand Nubian, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, or Black Moon. It was something about that stuff that just made me want to be better, and it's something that I related to."
He was feeling "stagnated" in hip-hop, so he began looking for other avenues of expression. "Acting was the one that truly connected to my soul," Common says, and as it turned out, he was great at it. He's appeared in films like Brown Sugar, Smokin' Aces, Suicide Squad, and Ocean's 8. The most notable entry in his filmography may be 2014's Selma, for which he and John Legend wrote and recorded the stately and uplifting "Glory," which won an Oscar for Best Original Song.
Along the way, Common has continued making solo rap music. He's released nine albums since Electric Circus, and three of those have come in the last five years. In fact, when DJ Premier texted him earlier this year to ask if he would rap over "In Moe," one of the more buzzed-about instrumentals from his recent Beats That Collected Dust 3 compilation, Common tried to push him off, since he was hard at work on a forthcoming album with another iconic boom-bap producer, Pete Rock.
"I was like, 'Can you give me two weeks?'" Common remembers asking DJ Premier. "And he was like, 'No, I need it this week.'"
So Common dutifully hit the lab and sent Preemo his verses in a matter of days. Amazingly enough, given that both Common and Premier were doing some of their finest work in the '90s and early '00s, "In Moe (Speculation)" is only the second time the two icons have truly collaborated. The first was "The 6th Sense," a standout from Like Water for Chocolate.
"For any MC that loves hip-hop, it's always been a dream to work with Premier," Common says. "I've been around some of the greatest producers of all time, just as simple as that, from Dilla to No I.D. to Pete Rock to Pharrell Williams to Kanye. Premier-he's just one of the greatest."
Common remembers wanting to score a Preemo beat early in his career, but it wasn't until Like Water for Chocolate, recorded in New York City with executive producer ?uestlove, that he was able to work his way into the East Coast scene and secure a track from the in-demand beatmaker. "The 6th Sense" doesn't necessarily sound like the rest of Like Water for Chocolate, which also features production from J. Dilla and D'Angelo, among others, and that's part of what makes it so memorable.
"I felt like it brought a unique spirit and boom-bap to the album that was very progressive in its own way and going in the soulful direction," Common says. "That album was heavily influenced by Fela Kuti and Slum Village. Dilla was just taking the music to where he would go, so ['The 6th Sense'] brought a grit to the album. When I would rock that song at shows, people would go for it. They were loving it."
With "In Moe (Speculation)," Premier's signature mix of pillowy soul instrumentation and hard-snapping drums struck a chord with Common, inspiring him to open the song with a series of self-questioning lyrics. After those introductory bars about his acting career, Common name-checks one of his greatest heroes, slain Chicago civil rights leader Fred Hampton, in a line about his own relationship to his community.
A hungry hip-hop junkie, does he keep his people fed? With a seat at the table, would he be like Chairman Fred?
"Would I be doing the right things with that seat at the table?" Common asks, explaining the lyric. "Would I stay true to the people, and would I be feeding the people the way I need to if I had that seat at the table? I pose that because that's something that somebody might ask: 'Hey, you've gone to do all this stuff-are you on some Hollywood stuff? Do you think you're bigger or better than someone else? Because you've been out doing movies and these things, are you in tune with the people like that? Are you still for the people?'"
In some ways, Common's willingness to challenge himself on "In Moe (Speculation)" harks back to "The 6th Sense." In the final verse of that song, Common describes riding the L trains in Chicago and sitting next to a very young girl who's rapping a sexually explicit song. Common's first inclination might be to scoff at her listening choices, since they don't meet his own progressive standards for hip-hop, but then he thinks better of it.
Who am I to judge one's perspective? Though some of that shit y'all bop to it, I ain't relating If I don't like it, I don't like it, that don't mean that I'm hating
"That's how I feel," says Common, reflecting back on that verse from nearly 25 years ago. "When people talk to me about hip-hop... man, I still love the culture. It's just something about this culture that is timeless for me. It's an infinite love, an eternal love that I have. I may not dig into all the new music the way I listened to everything that came out in the late '80s and '90s. But that doesn't mean that it's not art and it's not valuable and it's not good. It's just that I choose to listen to what does speak to me, whether it's new or old."
At the very end of "In Moe (Speculation)," Common raps, "I played life and music in the same key." Despite his use of past tense, Common is still looking toward the future. This year's celebrations surrounding hip-hop's 50th anniversary-including the "Hip-Hop 50 Live" concert at Yankee Stadium, which he took part in-have renewed his passion for the music. And that's fed into his as-yet-untitled album with Pete Rock.
"It was almost like I needed to be reminded that it's OK to MC, it's OK to rhyme," Common says. "Because I love that so much-MCing and beats and just hip-hop. I realized, 'Oh, it's a space for that. It's a new day for that.' And what I'm doing now, it just carries the spirit of what we all appreciate about the culture, and that's the fun in it. That's the cleverness. That's the purity of the soul, where it's just like a spontaneous thought and feeling, and you allow that to come through.
"That's what Pete's beats are. We're not creating a project where it's like, 'Man, this is a throwback.' It's more like, 'This is the purity of hip-hop, the way you love it,' and all the things that we've experienced as musicians will be in it. But it's basement hip-hop that is on a new level."
