Remember the rumors that this album title was actually an acronym for "Before Erykah"? Like now that this dangerous witch had gotten her claws out of him, Com was gonna go back to humble b-boy shit where he belonged? It was Yoko theory all over again, but for some reason there's something even funnier to me about Assata-supporting backpacker dudes blaming a Black woman for Common wanting to mess around with psychedelia. Anyway the theory was always nonsense because James Poyser (one of Erykah's closest collaborators & a major contributor to Electric Circus) is very present on this album too, playing on 4 tracks.
But of course, the collaborator that got everybody's attention was not Poyser, but Kanye West. As an album, Be is credited solely to Common, but it feels like a duo project, since Kanye produces all but 2 tracks & contributes vocals to half of them. As I've written before, I try not to let my feelings about modern Kanye interfere with my assessment of old Kanye, & the fact is that his work here is simply stunning. Yet, the album is not as much of a singlehanded Kanye masterpiece as it might appear. For instance, the iconic intro with its swelling strings & beautiful keyboard work by Soulquarian James Poyser. Even "Faithful," which is the closest to classic Kanye chipmunk soul, has Poyser's fingerprints all over it. Kanye does fly solo on the stellar urban jazz of "Real People," with its restless key changes under a complex rhyme by Common making it a contender for best beat on the album. "Chi-City," with its layered funk guitars & horn fanfares, is a fine beat as well, although the rhyme is a bit unfocused, making it one of the weaker pieces lyrically. Outside of Kanye-land, we have "Love Is" with that inimitable Dilla bounce, complete with eerie, ghostlike sample drops of Marvin Gaye repeating the title phrase to "God Is Love."
The next thing I'm going to say will come as no surprise to readers of this series: I appreciate this album for being so short. Of the 6 top-selling hiphop albums of 2005 (by 50 Cent, The Game, Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne, Paul Wall, & Kanye himself), the average length is about 73 minutes. In an era dominated by excruciatingly long albums with bonus tracks out the ass, Be's breezy 42 minutes was a breath of fresh air. (Although I'm sure part of the album's brevity was to atone for Electric Circus's 73-minute excess.) Not to mention, in a year lorded over by all things G-Unit (in addition to 50 & Game's albums, the Get Rich or Die Tryin' movie soundtrack went plat & even fucking Tony Yayo charted for god's sake), Common's gentle good-naturedness was an antidote to the performative thuggishness that was, well, pretty much everywhere else you looked.
The amount of respect I have for Common as an emcee doesn't match the amount of time I spend listening to him. I admire his eccentricity: there's not another rapper who flows remotely like him, unfussy about precision, pauses in odd places like rap's Christopher Walken, vocal patterns derived from an older set of jazz cats than seemingly anybody else. I heard a rumor that his abrupt pauses came from an early-career struggle with breath control--whatever led to it, he made it into a trademark & it sounds really cool. I'll admit, though, that for whatever reason I have trouble sitting through an entire album of Common. Sometimes both his voice & subject matter can create a bit of a drone effect, or maybe he's just too grownup for me--I like a bit of ignorance or a bit of wild-out ego tripping to supplement my conscious rap. Records like the watershed Resurrection, the explosive Like Water For Chocolate, the righteous Black America Again & even the sprawling Electric Circus have their charms for me, but Be is the only one I'll come back to, front to back, time & again.
Hey, remember when Kanye was gonna shepherd a whole conscious rap renaissance in the mainstream? Whatever happened to that?
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