Resurrection

What do you see when you hear the word “Chicago”? In the popular imagination, it’s probably the skyline, skyscrapers with antennas forking into the clouds. Zoom in and you might focus on heavy and wet food like salad-loaded hot dogs, oily Italian beef sandwiches, and deep dish pizza. Think back and you’ll conjure Michael Jordan with his tongue out, Harry Caray’s blocky bifocals, or maybe George Wendt saying “Da Bears.” But if you’re from Chicago, you know these chestnuts are how tourists and transplants claim their Windy City bona fides. Most Chicagoans don’t picture the Sears Tower and Wiener’s Circle when they think of home. They see the lake.

Open the jewel case of Common’s second album, Resurrection, and right there, printed in purple and blue onto the CD itself, is the sun rising over Lake Michigan. The image is an exceptional rendering of Resurrection’s tone, which breathes Chicago with a mixture of defiance, exuberance, and reflection. Across its 55 minutes, you can hear 22-year-old Lonnie Rashid Lynn’s whole world: puttering down Lake Shore Drive in a beat-up Toyota Celica, hanging out at the 31st Street beach, riding through parks on Schwinn bikes, making runs to the liquor store. It’s a portrait of a specific slice of Chicago—a young black man’s experiences on the South Side in the early 1990s—but it also conveys the perspective of any teenager who grew up in the city.

Resurrection brandishes its Chicagoness obliquely, through snapshots of everyday life, a cocky attitude, and richly expressive beats. But subtlety didn’t come naturally to Common, who at the time was going by Common Sense. The cover of his 1992 debut, Can I Borrow a Dollar? , is a photograph of him crouched down, wearing a White Sox skullcap and clutching a touristy Chicago coffee mug, with a map of the city overlaid on his crew assembled behind him — the visual equivalent of someone from suburban Tinley Park claiming to be from the South Loop.

Common needed to lean on “No but you see I’m from Chicago” because he didn’t really have anything else. Put on Can I Borrow a Dollar? and its concrete-stomping energy and gruff, soul-sampling beats are interchangeable with hardcore hip-hop albums from 1992, like Redman’s Whut? Thee Album, Showbiz and AG’s Runaway Slave, and Das EFX’s Dead Serious. But “Common Sense” didn’t have any of those artists’ distinct personalities or approaches to rapping. It was a little Das EFX diggity here, a little Redman-style jokey simile there, smushing into a mishmash of non sequiturs and nonsense. “Breaker 1/9,” whose Isley Brothers sample was the basis of a hit song for Notorious B.I.G. three years later, opens with the lines, “A weeby weeby wobble gobble gobble do the turkey/Lord have mercy, mercy mercy me.”

Can I Borrow a Dollar? is the sound of someone performing what’s expected of them rather than who they really are. Common’s hometown friends Immenslope and Twilite Tone provided the beats, which are as strong as many other major-label releases from the same year, but the end product doesn’t feel honest. Common admitted later that the recording sessions were rushed — his label, Relativity, was trying to quickly capitalize on the momentum from a feature in The Source’s hallowed Unsigned Hype column — and said the album consisted largely of touch-ups to his demo tape.

Though it had three singles with music videos on steady rotation on MTV, Can I Borrow a Dollar? sold poorly, and Common wasn’t asked to guest on other rap albums or singles. Aside from Tung Twista, a West Side rapper known for the rapid-fire speed of his flow, there weren’t very many rappers in Chicago, and thus not much of an infrastructure for regional support. In early ’90s hip-hop, Common Sense seemed like more of a bit player than an up-and-comer. When A Tribe Called Quest dropped Midnight Marauders the following year, he was burned that his headshot wasn’t included among the rows of emcees featured on the front and back covers. He thought, “‘Man! I didn’t get invited to the big game,’” as he told Complex in 2011. “I wanted to be included as part of the next movement of artists. I felt like I was overlooked.”

And during the short time between Can I Borrow a Dollar? and Resurrection, hip-hop evolved. Dr. Dre’s The Chronic saturated the airwaves and the charts with the warped, P-Funk-pilfering sounds of West Coast gangsta rap. Looking to the East Coast, Common heard Nas freestyling on The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show and was shook. “I was like, ‘This dude is too good,’” he said later. “It just made me have to grow quick … It really gave me insight on using my writing skills and poetic skills more.”

Equally profound changes were happening in Common’s musical world, particularly the growing influence of jazz. During the recording of Resurrection, he put a poster of John Coltrane’s 1958 album Blue Train on the wall of his apartment. Inspired by the Last Poets, he started to think of lyrics that could be “pure, timeless music.” And Immenslope, who’d by now changed his stage persona to No I.D. (his name, “Dion,” spelled backwards), also experienced a creative breakthrough. Largely under the tutelage of the Beatnuts, he learned how and where to dig for records and identify licks or riffs that could be great samples. Instead of building the drumbeat first and piling samples on top of it, he made the sample the foundation and constructed the beat around it.

Initially, Resurrection was going to be produced by Twilite Tone exclusively, but largely on the strength of No I.D.’s new beats, the latter contributed 13 of the album’s 15 tracks. They were the perfect complement to a new writing process that would become Common’s permanent practice. On Can I Borrow a Dollar?, he wrote all his lyrics down on paper, but for Resurrection he decided to try composing in his head. He would drive up and down Lake Shore Drive freestyling, and any bars he liked he’d repeat until they were committed to memory, an improvisational approach instinctively linked to jazz.

From the first notes of the opening title track, you can hear Common’s musical growth. There’s his voice, which has dropped down into a fatherly baritone. But what’s unusual is that you also hear his personal growth, literally, in the words. “Resurrection” is one of the all-time great songs about artistic maturation and emerging into adulthood, sparked by an effervescent snippet of the Ahmad Jamal Trio’s 1970 recording of Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance.” Common begins by showing off his linguistic dexterity (“I stagger in the gatherin’, possessed by a pattern that be scatterin’/Over the global, my vocals be travelin’, unravelin’ my abdomen”), then proudly boasts of his intellectual curiosity (“Proceed to read and not believing everything I’m reading”), and recounts his newly salubrious lifestyle (“My diet I un-swine,” “Had to halt with the malt liquor/‘Cause off the malt liquor I fought niggas”).

“Resurrection” announces and combines the two kinds of songs that make up the album: meditations on single subjects and rapping prowess exhibited through shit-talking, observational asides, and jokes. Songs like “Watermelon,” “Communism” (where most of the words have “Com” somewhere in them), “Orange Pineapple Juice,” “Maintaining,” and “Sum Shit I Wrote” don’t really have an underlying message or a theme. What keeps them from feeling like throwaways is the tension between the lightheartedness of Common’s rapping and the emotional weight of the beats beneath him.

Common Sense’s name is on the cover, but No I.D. deserves a lot of the credit for Resurrection’s emotional power. His ear stands out because he chooses samples as much for their texture as for their notes—whether it’s Ahmad Jamal’s twinkling upper keys, Freddie Hubbard’s shimmering soul-jazz arrangements, or Gary Burton’s plunking vibraphone hits. Yet all the tracks are tonally unified—a compilation of all of Resurrection’s sample sources is an incredible mix of jazz and soul music. And instead of choruses, bridges, or outros, most of the songs on Resurrection feature the scratching of turntablist Mista Sinista of the X-Ecutioners, whose rhythm and split-second quickness demonstrate undeniable mastery. (Peter Kang, the A&R who’s Resurrection’s executive producer, argued to Complex, “I really challenge anyone to tell me where you can find better DJ work.”)

In his autobiography, One Day It’ll All Make Sense, there’s a passage where Common explains that to understand Chicago hip-hop, you have to study Chicago music. He lists blues musicians from Muddy Waters to Junior Wells, soul singers from Jackie Wilson to Minnie Ripperton, and waxes rhapsodic about house music and the legendary DJ Ron Hardy. Resurrection feels so Chicago because it was created with this continuum in mind. But I’d also argue that what makes Common so unique is that he approaches hip-hop as a soul musician—he’s more like Curtis Mayfield than Talib Kweli.

This becomes apparent when you focus on Resurrection’s highlights, in which Common deals most directly with an issue or theme. “Book of Life” eloquently takes personal routines and extrapolates them into implicit self-improvement. Common chastises himself for eating fast food, bemoans having to work mindless jobs, and struggles with his place in the world. The poignant “Thisisme” makes self-affirmation sound triumphant. The track is like secular gospel, with its protagonist positioning self-awareness and knowledge as salvation over a snippet of Alton McClain & Destiny’s lustrous “The Power of Love.”

Yet it’s a song about aimlessness and ennui, “Nuthin’ to Do,” that’s Resurrection’s most powerful moment. With a loping drum break behind him, Common Sense does his own rendition of The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy,” except instead of a rags-to-riches narrative, he homes in on the moments in between, the anecdotes and scenery of middle-class youth. Like Biggie, Common uses evocative details to establish setting: popping wheelies on his blue and gray stingray bike, penny loafers with nickels in the tongues, taking trips to the Loop in Nike Precision sneakers. He also invokes specific Chicago touchpoints: Polish sausages, girls at Whitney Young and Kenwood high schools, taping Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s radio show on WBMX. If you look at the words, it all seems romantic. But No I.D.’s beat, foregrounding a sax line on Living Jazz’s rendition of “Walk On By,” provides a funereal tone. Common even alludes to this melancholy in the line, “As shorties we run ’round, play strike outs till sun down/But the shit ain't as fun now, and the city's all run down.”

Between 1990 and 1994, there were three years when Chicago recorded the second-to-fourth highest annual number of homicides in history; all five years were the worst for homicide rates ever. The violence in the city reached a flash point in September of 1994, one month before the release of Resurrection, with the murder of Robert Sandifer. Sandifer had hoped to join a local gang called the Black Disciples and fatally shot 14-year-old Shavon Dean while aiming for rival gang members. When police were searching for him, two teenage brothers from the Black Disciples feigned protecting Sandifer and executed him under a railroad underpass. Sandifer was 11 years old.

Because of the horrific details of the crime, the national media turned Sandifer’s story into a referendum on gang violence in Chicago. The September 19, 1994, issue of Time posted Sandifer’s mugshot against a black background with the headline “So Young to Kill, So Young to Die.” (The words “poverty,” “segregation,” or “disinvestment” don’t appear anywhere in Time’s coverage.) It was one of the earliest installments in the long, false, and, sadly, ongoing narrative painting the South Side of the city as a dystopian crimescape.

“Nuthin’ to Do” is striking because of how it tacitly challenges this framing. Though Common grew up in the predominantly middle-class Calumet Heights neighborhood, he acknowledges in his autobiography that he was close to impoverished blocks with high incidents of crime; he also recalls time spent in Hyde Park, the affluent home base of the University of Chicago. The point is that the South Side isn’t one thing; it’s a vast portion of the city with various communities of distinct ethnicities and class status. The sound of “Nuthin’ to Do” conveys proximate and enshrouding areas of danger and disinvestment, but its lyrics celebrate adolescent behavior, implying that racist policies and gang life shouldn’t preclude Black teenagers from moving freely and doing what any other teenager would do, nor should they be punished for it.

“Nuthin’ to Do” proves Common’s talent for depicting his environment, so it’s funny that his breakthrough single was a parable. By now, the concept of “I Used to Love H.E.R.” is well known: Common details the deterioration of a romantic relationship, only to reveal in the very last bar that he’s actually been talking about hip-hop the whole time. The story is a recollection of a woman he falls in love with, who gets into Afrocentricity, moves to the West Coast, and, due to business pressure, adopts a “gangsta” persona to make money as an artist. Superficially, the narrative scans as criticizing West Coast gangsta rap for reversing the progress made by Native Tongues hip-hop. But it’s a reading that Common disputes, claiming he was referring to East Coast rappers mimicking West Coast artists whose experiences they didn’t share.

“I Used to Love H.E.R.” was revelatory in 1994, but over time, its conceptual ingenuity has weakened. No I.D.’s beat, a flip of George Benson’s “The Changing World,” gorgeously draws out the billowing texture of the jazz guitarist’s playing. Yet where the other tracks on Resurrection thrive on nuance and subtext, “I Used to Love H.E.R.” is more of a sly gimmick. It’s also the catalyst of a tiresome period in which music fans were arguing over what constituted “real” hip-hop, a false dichotomy pitting underground “backpacker” rap against major-label artists. “I Used to Love H.E.R.” is the kind of song people post with mind-blown emojis next to it and you wonder, “Really?”

One person who definitely didn’t have his mind blown was Ice Cube. The buzz around “I Used to Love H.E.R.” brought newfound attention to Common Sense and No I.D., who says that purely off the strength of that single, he started getting calls from big-name artists requesting beats. The track made its way to Cube, who took it as a shot fired at West Coast rap. On Westside Connection’s “Westside Slaughterhouse,” Cube harshly and plainly calls Common out: “Used to Love H.E.R./mad ’cause we fucked a/Pussy-whipped bitch with no Common Sense/Hip-hop started in the west!”

Though it might seem crazy now—considering their personalities, and five years after Cube virtually ended N.W.A. on “No Vaseline”—Common annihilated Cube with his response. The Pete Rock-produced “The Bitch In Yoo,” issued as the A-side of a split single with No I.D. in 1996, is one of rap’s most brutal diss tracks. The first verse alone is a thorough dismantling of Cube’s career, with Common claiming his West Coast cred is ridiculous (hiring the Long Island-based Bomb Squad for his debut), calling out his blatant careerism (“Went from gangsta to Islam to the dick of Das EFX”), and insinuating he’s a bad actor (with sly references to Higher Learning and Friday).

It took the deaths of 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G., and the intervention of Louis Farrakhan, to squash the beef. At the Hip-Hop Summit in Chicago in April of 1997, Farrakhan addressed the assembled rappers, including Cube, Common, Snoop Dogg, and the Dogg Pound: “All this turf you fighting for—East Coast, West Coast—who owns it? Not you.” Farrakhan is acknowledged for ending the feud, but the deeper truth is that both men had changed. For Cube, he’d successfully made a transition to acting and was gradually assuming a role as a family man. Common had also recently become a father, and he was transformed by the Million Man March, which he attended. As he writes in One Day It’ll All Make Sense, the event inspired him to be comfortable with expressing love and solidarity.

To date, Resurrection has sold fewer than 250,000 copies, but it earned Common Sense respect. It also attracted more national attention, including from a California-based reggae band with the same name that sued the rapper over the rights. Common dropped the “Sense” before the 1997 follow-up LP, One Day It’ll All Make Sense, which simultaneously refined and expanded on the approach he and No I.D. took on Resurrection.

Shortly afterwards, he will leave Chicago and move to New York City. He will go and join the Soulquarians collective, garnering him larger audiences and further accolades; then he will drop an ambitious, experimental, psych-informed album that will bomb. He will date singers and athletes and movie stars; then he will think he can act. He will become an actor, questionably; then he will fight Keanu Reeves, believably. He will constantly cycle through success and embarrassment. He will come remarkably close to an EGOT. And all along, the sun will still rise every day over Lake Michigan.