COMMON takes another sip from a glass of red wine. It's creeping towards 1am and he wants to get into the minibus parked outside the venue, drive back to his hotel and fall into bed. The day began in London and ends in Dublin with dozens of interviews and a show taking up all the time in between.
Earlier, there was a full room hooting and hollering along as Common gave it socks. What Dublin witnessed was a 90-minute set with more punch and vigour than most lame hip-hop shows will ever muster in their wildest dreams. Common swung from one banger to the next, kicking out back-catalogue vintage cuts from his six albums - Invocation (from 1997's One Day It'll All Make Sense), 6th Sense (from 2000's Like Water for Chocolate) - and watched the crowd lap it up. One guy in the audience kept waving a 12-inch record sleeve at him. Common figured that must be how they show mad love for you in Ireland. Strange people, man, these Irish hip-hop heads.
Mostly, though, Common stuck to the script and plugged the new album. Not that that was a chore. Be is the album, after all, which has pushed Lonnie Rashid Lynn from the south side of Chicago back into the limelight.
Produced by hip-hop's current ruling grand poobah, Kanye West (who also signed Common to his Good label), Be is a sparkling, funky, feel-good behemoth. Your 50 Cents and Eminems may be shifting more units and flogging more tickets, but this is the real deal. Anyone in the room tonight who heard Testify, Go, The Food, Faithful and The Corner will tell you that.
A few hours after the show, that audience has gone home, the chorus to It's Your World bouncing around their membranes. The bar staff are doing their cleaning thing, the production staff are doing their packing thing. And Common? Well, he's doing his talking thing.
It's been a long journey for the Chi-Town rapper. The then-Common Sense first lit a spark back in '94 with his second album, the underground classic Resurrection. In its wake came a major label deal, a truncated name and an upward momentum. After 2000's Like Water for Chocolate, all eyes were on him, but 2002's highly experimental Electric Circus saw many of the rap community running away in horror and switching their allegiance to less adventurous MCs.
But it was always on the cards that Common would bounce back. Ever since he dropped that timeless commentary on hip-hop life and culture, I Used to Love H.E.R., Common has had game like no other rapper.
Instead of glorifying black-on-black violence or gaining lyrical gratification from chronicling cartoon gangstas and street hustlers, Common has mapped out life as he sees it from his side of the street. Thanks to a smart political and social consciousness, his canny verbals and sophisticated flow have kept him in the frame all these years.
Yet for all the critical acclaim and applause from his peers, Common's albums are not monster sellers. Sure, they make the numbers, but not in the kind of quantity to trouble the big players to change their pitch.
Respect is all well and good, but respect doesn't pay the bills. As Jay-Z put it on Moment of Clarity: "I wanna rhyme like Common Sense/But I did five mill/And I ain't been rhyming like Common since."
Common is sanguine about his lot when it comes to the commercial side. "Let those who hear, hear," he says. "When it comes to popular culture, some people just want to cheer on the most popular person. They might be with this Cabbagepatch doll rapper at this point and then they move onto the next and then they move onto the Barney rapper. There are those who will really want to hear this and they'll go out of their way to hear it."
Of course, he wants more. "Yeah, I'd love to do arenas instead of small clubs, but I'm just glad that people are feeling the music. I'm not mad at it, I'm just going to be me. I do want to sell records but I don't want to give up what I believe in or take away from the integrity of my music to do that. I'm worth more than that."
The new album, he feels, is Common to the power of a thousand. "When I started kicking around ideas for Be, I had a goal to do some hip-hop which felt good, which felt raw. I wanted to get back to the roots of why I started out doing hip-hop in the first place, back to the things I loved. That's where I started and I suppose I realised with this album that it still exerts an influence over me today.
"But don't get me wrong, man - it's not about going backwards. I never want to go backwards in music or in life. You could do stuff that may sound like something you did before, but because you're at a new place in your life, it's going to be new. This album is about the spirit. I wanted to recreate that spirit which was there when I started out in '92 or '93. There was an innocence to the music back then."
Common looks wistful as he talks about those early days back in Chicago, spitting lyrics and learning his trade alongside such local heroes as producer No I.D.
"It was a very soulful place, very black, very blue collar. A lot of my stuff over the years comes from me connecting with different people there, and it's been a big part of who I am. I grew up middle class, I've been around the ghetto, I've been around preppy cats, so I'm not trying to be something I'm not. I didn't grow up around the industry, so I think that has allowed me to come through with authentic everyday music."
What Common never lost was a belief in what he was doing. "It's why I've stayed around this long. I know I'm doing the right thing. After this album in particular, I know that wherever my music goes that's supposed to be where it's going. Right now, I'm getting more and more attention, which is kind of strange on your sixth album. I take things just the way they come."
Even when the tide turned in favour of gangsta cuts, Common held his ground. Nowadays he's still holding firm.
"Criminal records are all about you getting shot or you shooting someone else and they're the records which are getting the big push from the labels. These criminal records have become huge marketing things. But the funny thing is all that criminal talk has nothing to do with the music. It's a lifestyle thing and people are trying to get into the lifestyle."
As the father of an eight-year-old girl, Common is acutely aware of how the images created by gangsta rap can distort reality.
"As parents, we are responsible for what we allow our children to be exposed to. My daughter should be able to hear everything and be exposed to different things. I just need to be able to communicate with her and let her know what's real and what's fake so she can make proper decisions. But as rappers, we hold a big part of that responsibility as well. A lot of kids who listen to our music don't have both parents around, so we have to play our part for the good of our community."
The reaction to Be is all the sweeter when the reaction to his previous album, Electric Circus. Common was the ringmaster juggling psychedelic guitars, flower-power singing, flutes and contributions from UK indie mainstays Stereolab. Many thought he'd lost the plot.
"I understood why the fans were feeling like they felt. It's like they were used to a certain kind of food at their local restaurant and they turned up and there was something completely different on their plate. It was like 'yo, hold on bro, this tastes strange'. I understood that, but I chose to do what I did with Electric Circus because that's what worked for me.
"I never look back and think 'why did I do that?' or 'what would I change?' No way. Electric Circus was me in 2002, and that's what the people got."
Afterwards, some began to wonder if Common was a spent force. "People were kind of doubting me, so that got me hungry when I started on the new album," he says with a smile. "Where I'm from and how I was raised, I never had to prove to anyone that I was hard. My music did that for me."
Between albums, Common has had other things on his plate. He's helped out with the "Knowing Is Beautiful" Aids campaign and established the Common Ground Foundation to help children in Chicago. For him, it's about putting something back. "I feel that it's my duty to speak out on matters that are affecting our community a lot because I know that I do have a voice. I have a platform that means people hear me speak, so why not speak out?"
He drains his glass of wine and rubs his eyes. Time to get some shut-eye before the Common show rolls out of town and onto the next city. He'll be back, be sure of that. With Common, it really is just starting off all over again
Be is out now on Island
HIP-HOP: THE REAL STARS ARE UNDERGROUND
INSTEAD of spending your cash on Fiddy or Slim Shadys, why not invest in some MCs who never get the headlines or the calls from Lord Henry Mount Charles to play in his paddock? Here are 10 names for starters
HAIKU D'ETAT
Long-in-the-tooth Los Angeles rhymers Aceyalone, Mikah 9 and Abstract Rude produce confident, bold, brash word-plays and enlightened perspectives. Essential listening: Coup de Theatre
ATMOSPHERE
From Minneapolis, Atmosphere's MC Slug is the name to look for if it's adventurous cuts and perspectives you're after. Essential listening: Seven's Travels
MF
This Doom Science-obsessed MC floats in and out of character to deliver often demented, usually creepy but always intriguing tracks. Essential listening: Operation Doomsday
PHAROAHE MONCH
Common himself suggested Monch for this list, and who are we to argue with him? One half of Organised Konfusion with Prince Po (see below), the Queens, NY MC went on to release a slew of collaborations during the 1990s. Essential listening: Internal Affairs
PRINCE PO
The other rhymer from Organised Konfusion has worked with a slew of A-list producers, such as Madlib, J Zone, Danger Grey Album Mouse and Richard X to produce one of 04's finest albums. Essential listening: The Slickness
BUCK 65
Rich Terfry is the prolific Canadian MC who comes across as a grumpy seventysomething Tom Waits, hawking conspiracy theories even conspiracy theorists find hard to believe. Essential listening: Talkin' Honky Blues
EDAN
Insane skills, crazy rhymes and thoroughly enjoyable tunes. Essential listening: Primitive Plus
DEL THA FUNKEE HOMOSAPIEN
An MC who has been in the game for almost as long as there has been a game going on. Best known these days for his work with Gorillaz, but still kicks like a mule on solo work. Essential listening: Deltron 3030
RHYMEFEST
Chicago MC who co-wrote Kanye West's monster hit, Jesus Walks, and won a Grammy for his troubles. Works with old Common mucker No I.D.. Essential listening: Blue Collar Poppin'
J-LIVE
Fine storytelling style from one of the many graduates from Prince Paul and Dan The Automator's Handsome Boy Modelling School project. Essential listening: All of the Above
