Common has arrived -- on his terms

By Julian Benbow, Globe Staff  |  August 26, 2007

HARTFORD -- His Thursday started about two hours after his Wednesday ended, and now Common is slumping in his seat in a corner booth at Trumbull Kitchen, a trendy downtown restaurant. Eyes heavy, voice muffled as he asks for the menu, the Chicago rapper is the perfect picture of burnout.

To say the past 12 hours have been a blur would be fine, except it would understate how nuts the past year has been for the 35-year-old artist. He has transformed from simply a rapper's rapper to a Gap pitchman to a bona fide celebrity recently named to MTV's list of the 10 hottest MCs. He had spent much of the previous night in the Manhattan lounge Marquee celebrating the release of his highly anticipated seventh album, "Finding Forever," which producer and friend Kanye West called the best album of 2007 before the year had even started.

West was at the party. So was former Tribe Called Quest frontman Q-Tip, who served as DJ for the event. The night was so hectic that Common didn't make it home until around 3:30 a.m., he says. He had to be up at 6 to make an appearance on the "Miss Jones in the Morning" radio show for New York's Hot 97. From there, he drove to ESPN in Bristol, Conn., and spit couplets for athletes LeBron James and Tiger Woods in a last-minute freestyle session for the sports behemoth's "Who's Now" series.

By the time his black Chevy Suburban bends the corner onto Trumbull Street for a late lunch interview, Common is groggy. Hanging out in the back seat behind tinted windows, he's with just a couple of handlers and steals a few more winks before he makes it into the restaurant.

"I don't know how campaigning for the president is," he says, reaching for a metaphor to describe his promotional blitz, "but it feels like you're on a campaign. You gotta make sure that you're talking to the DJs and meeting with the people that deal with your music and showing them your appreciation."

As much as he is a conscious MC who waxes intelligent about politics and society, Common is also sort of a hip-hop idiot savant. He's very much a regular guy who happens to have embraced rap. He made a resolution around 1994, when he recorded his classic sophomore album, "Resurrection," that he'd always try to say something with his music, be it exploring abortion from the perspective of a forlorn mother and the nonplussed father-to-be or the idea of faith in God if God were a woman. But bare bones, he's just a rapper.

All the A-list love might make you forget that Common wasn't always Common. He wasn't always in movies (he'll be starring alongside Denzel Washington in "American Gangster" this fall, and next year he'll play opposite Angelina Jolie in "Wanted"). He wasn't always in commercials. He wasn't always famous.

In fact, up until 2005, when Common dropped the crown jewel of his career, "Be," he was essentially a hip-hop insider and a pop-world outsider. But "Finding Forever" has changed that, marking his first album as a pop star. The new album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts a few weeks ago, selling 155,000 copies its first week and capping a kind of mainstream success Common had never seen before.

Back when Common still went by the name Common Sense, "Resurrection" was an underground hit but couldn't crack the top 150 on Billboard. His Grammy-nominated "Like Water For Chocolate" was certified gold in 2000 but didn't sell 750,000 copies until 2005. And 2003's "Electric Circus" was, depending on your perspective, either an amazing exercise in experimentation or Common holding his head on the knob of a baseball bat called hip-hop, spinning around 20 times and stumbling dizzily away and later finding himself in a music video (for "Come Close") wearing crocheted pants.

Those years were a learning experience, he says. Happens to everyone.

"I really started just finding myself," he says. "And when you're going through that process, you ain't found yourself all the way. We all go through it. But when you're doing it as a musician or as an artist, you're doing it in front of people. So you're trying on your clothes in front of everybody."

Back in Hartford, the black Suburban pulls up to the club Room960 at about 6:30 p.m., and Common is waiting outside for a listening session hosted by Power 104.1 FM. Inside, a crowd of about 50 youngish men and women in club outfits and stepping-out shoes banter about. Spank B.U.D.A., host of Power's morning wake-up program, "Da Show," introduces Common, who then performs his first single, "The People," and later opens up the session for questions from the crowd.

Suddenly, the promotional event becomes a one-man panel on hip-hop and society, and Common has plenty to say.

On 50 Cent: "I've got respect for 50 Cent. But just as much as we need to hear 50 Cent, we need to hear Common Sense."

On Oprah: "It was an honor for me to go on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show.' I felt that she was saying [there are] other sides to hip-hop by putting me up there."

On Imus: "I think the Imus thing was good because it helped us start talking about it among each other."

You can tell when Common is engaged in a conversation: Gazing outward in thought and motioning out every idea with his hands, he's as comfortable one on one as he is giving a speech to 50 people. When he points, it looks like he's throwing a peace sign.

"First and foremost, I realized that life is change," he says. "You're going to constantly be changing and growing, so I don't just try to be the person I was 10 years ago or three years ago. Hopefully each album you see in me, it's some growth going on. And that growth comes from growing as a person."

And therein lies the dilemma.

On one end, that evolution has turned him into a commercially viable rap ambassador who is as acceptable in the streets as he is in the family room. He's become a fashion plate of sorts with his own line of hats and seen in countless magazine spreads. And don't forgot those Gap commercials, which were aired between shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy."

"That's a crowd that don't know who Common is, bruh," he says. "Just point blank. I've been on the street, and it's been people like, 'That's the dude from the Gap commercial.' "

Or, perhaps, that's the dude who was on "Oprah." He was her guest during the Don Imus explosion because, as Glen Gamboa, a music critic at Newsday, recently wrote, "Whenever there's a controversy about hip-hop being too violent or too wealth-obsessed or too tough on women, folks turn to Common like the whole town's on fire and he's the only guy with a hose."

Common has to be conscious and thoughtful and clever and respectful in order to be the antithesis of hip-hop stereotypes. But on the other end, there are times when he's none of those things.

"I'm not like, 'I. Am. Here. To. Save. Hip-hop,' " he says, almost chuckling at the notion. "I'm not that guy. I'm just a piece. I'm a part of it."

As much as he embodies what's great about rap, he is not immune to its ailments. He has battle-rapped with Ice Cube and been accused of misogyny early in his career. Even now, women will walk up to him and assume that because he's a "conscious rapper," he automatically wants to talk about the crisis in Darfur or AIDS in Africa.

But, he says, "Sometimes you just wanna holla at a girl. I'm human like everybody else. I ain't one of them dudes that's going to get caught up there and try to act like I'm perfect. I'm gonna make my mistakes. You're gonna laugh at me sometimes. I'm gonna wear crocheted pants if I want to. Fall in love, you know, whatever."

He has thought about rapping 10 years from now (he'd be 45, mind you), and he seriously considers it because he believes each album is a checkpoint in his evolution -- not necessarily as a rapper but as a musician. He sees hip-hop the way people look at jazz and R&B: as genres that allow the artist room to mature with the music.

"Rap music is like any other music; it's just younger," he says. "So if it's rock 'n' roll artists around in their 50s and 60s performing, still putting out albums -- you got U2 -- then why shouldn't it be a hip-hop artist doing the same thing?"