A-Typical Rap

It’s been almost a generation since names like N.W.A. and Public Enemy echoed in high school hallways, and a decade has passed since hip-hop’s most infamous rivals were shot. Even so, hip-hop is still a genre anchored in Coastal identity.

Both East and West, to be sure, have produced their share of what Wu-Tang called “R&B: Rap and Bullshit”— thug ego-rap, ala 50 Cent and Xzibit. But redeemingly, both coasts have also produced an incredible range of music defined by conscience and political purpose. Not that I can’t appreciate a little G-Unit once in a while; it just has to be a late Saturday night, and I have to be hammered in a bar stumbling my way around a dance floor.

For the rest of my week, artists like Jurassic 5, Talib Kweli, and Mos Def typify the kind of valuable hip-hop that tackles issues of racial identity, inequality, addiction and poverty—and although they draw on the same anger tangible in mainstream rap, they do so with poise, style and brilliant lyricism. But their inner-city iniquities do not belong only to L.A. and New York City. As Common reminds us on his latest album, “Be,” Chicago deserves its place among the coastal hip-hop meccas and its social concerns.

An appropriate metaphor for its mid-western roots, Common’s work in “Be” falls between the extremes of many of its coastal peers in both content and style. His beats lack the urgency and speed of more fiercely political artists like Kweli, and his rhetoric reflects that relaxation. While Common does take time to explore things like injustice in the judicial system, soap-boxing is not his priority—as he implies in the final track, the album is more a portrait about “my world.” When he does address injustice, he does so hypothetically and mostly a-racially on tracks like “Testify” and “Real People.” And while some of his contemporaries are drawing on black identity as a lens through which to understand daily life (think Chicago contemporary Kanye West), Common chooses to eschew race and discuss issues of humanity at their rawest: love, dreams, success, youth and temptation, as on tracks like “Love is…” and “Faithful.”

The album also strikes a careful balance between ego and self-reproach. In “Faithful,” he scolds himself for his lust and his predilection for weed, while on “Chi-City” Common finds tremendous pride in his rhymes and his Chicago roots. That pride fuels plenty of clever invective about his cynicism over the direction of popular hip-hop. In “Chi-City,” for example, his sarcasm has a terrific sense of condescension: “so many raps about rims, I’m surprised niggas ain’t become tires.”

It’s not surprising that Common works with issues in American society—and hip-hop—from the bottom up. As the title suggests, the album has a very specific direction and concern, one that presages most of the stuff that occupies other artists’ music. “Being”—as in, being what you want, being grateful for life, being creative and being conscientious—is the basic state that concerns Common’s latest work. And with its captivating rhythm and talented lyricism, “Be” is a truly great album that puts the rest of hip-hop’s politics in perspective.

For his occasional cynicism, Common isn’t too worried about the future of music—and with an albums like his (and Kanye West’s “Late Registration”) coming out, that’s understandable. “Lotta people ask me where hip-hop goin’,” he says, halfway through the album. “It’s Chicago’in.”