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Volume CXXXII, Number 13 |
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Common: 0 stars; Homiez: 3 stars
JAY KANG
COLUMNIST
OK, so Common wants to be a sixties-styled, psychedelic sex god like Rudy Ray Moore or Marvin Gaye. To achieve this status, he shaves a ring around his head so it looks like he's balding, grows a thick beard and starts squinting a lot, so that when you see him, you immediately think of a young, confident Phillip Banks (Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air), back in the days when he was a swashbuckling black lawyer, courting the first Vivien.
Then he makes his album cover look like a Lovin' Spoonful reprint with lots of weird blue colors, fat white people and stupid little pinwheels.
There's still the issue of the music, so he picks up his Chicago roots and moves to Manhattan, where he records the entire album in a downtown recording studio built by Jimi Hendrix. Latest transformation complete.
The thugged-out Southsider Common Sense changed his name to Common in the mid-nineties and did a song with Lauryn Hill about abortion. That sensitive formula worked for two albums and now he's back as sexy, soulful Common Gaye, cryogenically restored.
Which is not a problem in itself. If anything, the past couple of years have taught us that revisiting dead music eras can produce highly original, wonderful music.
Outkast and the Strokes have given us landmark "revisitation" albums that are based on smart choices. Outkast took the outrageous polka dots, plaids and basslines from Parliament, but kept their manic-paced, driving style of rapping. The Strokes picked up the wear-a-week outfits and the shaggy hair of bands like the Ramones, but kept their prep school brattiness and good looks.
The problem with Common is that he revisits an era of music with almost endless charisma, and somehow emerges from the vintage closet with all the wrong lyrics, the wrong sounds and definitely, the wrong clothes. It would be as if someone did a retrospective of nineties television and they only showed clips of Step by Step and Saved by the Bell: The College Years.
Perhaps the strangest part of The Electric Circus is that none of the songs mark any real departure from anything on Common's last album, Like Water for Chocolate.
The beats are all still from the Okay Player camp-the snooze merchants that have produced the last couple of Roots albums-and carry the trademark, highly rendered, dragging drums and stolen, Earth, Wind and Fire bass lines.
The lyrics are embarrassingly sensitive and are mostly about being in love. Which brings us to the final problem with Common Gaye: who wants to hear a rapper go on about being in love?
For two quarters, you can get your own thumb-sized plastic Latino Gangster. They sell them outside of Shaw's on Bath Road in those red-topped machines that spit out those little plastic bubbles. Only this time, instead of getting a charm bracelet or a Dallas Cowboys miniature football helmet, you get tiny little guys in Fubu and wifebeaters. Pretty cool.
I have five of them, but I have two Hectors, so I will trade my Hector to anyone who has a Jesus, who is my favorite, but that might only be because I have a problem with wanting what I don't have. Probably when I get a Jesus, I'll say to him, "Sorry buddy, the thrill was in the chase and now I want Al."
This summer, I put one of my two Hectors in a bowl of salsa. My unsuspecting friend Will dipped a chip into the bowl and out popped Hector. Will said that putting a Homey in a bowl of salsa was almost racist and that he was disappointed in me. So then, I took Hector and lit his feet on fire with my car lighter, hoping that I could smash his melty feet onto the dashboard, where they would harden and stay forever. But that didn't work either.
Look for more next week when columnist Jay Kang reviews another CD in addition to something else.
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