Common, The Source 2003

Eight days before Jimi Hendrix's sixtieth birthday, Common sits comfortably in the guitar god's apartment sipping Poland Spring.

Jimi's pad, according to Common, 31, is the original location of Studio A at Electric Lady Studios in lower Manhattan, where he recorded most of his latest LP, Electric Circus. If the walls could talk, the plaster might tell tales of his fiancé, Erykah Badu, lying on a couch at four in the morning coaching Common through his singing debut on the nine-minute opus 'Jimi Was a Rock Star'. The floors might speak of Prince's visit to give the completed album a listen, paying rapt attention to his own keyboard contributions on 'Star *69 (P.S. With Love)'. Common, however, dressed in Glen plaid slacks, a gray hoodie and an orange knit cap covering his shaven dome, prefers to comment on Soulquarian recording sessions that included ?uestlove, Bilal and Jay Dee.

"[Hiphop] ain't got no limits," he says of the contrast between his earlier boom-bap albums as Common Sense (e.g. Resurrection) and his most recent, more musical records as Brooklyn-transplant MC Common. "We're the creators of it. It could be anything we want. We invented it! There are no restrictions and no boundaries for the music."

The Universal Zulu Nation has celebrated hiphop every November for the past 29 years. A Zulu-sponsored panel discussion held at Harlem's National Black Theater weeks before Hendrix's birthday focused on the ills of the culture. Cashus D, a representative of the Chicago Zulu Nation chapter, pinpointed the recycling of beats and rhymes and the retro nature of some modern hiphop as evidence that the culture's drying up. The discussion cuts to the question at the heart of Common's current career: What will help hiphop more, restoring its foundation or stretching its boundaries? For fans who miss the punchline-driven battle rhymes Common wrote when still based in his native Chi-Town, returning to the roots might be in order. Yet listeners open-minded enough for guitar, bass and live drums in their hiphop mix (the latter being the larger faction, it seems, as 2000's Like Water for Chocolate is Common's biggest selling CD) may say change and growth are required to keep the culture alive.

Common's cellphone rings, echoing through the sound-sensitive studio. Shutting it off, the self-proclaimed "future of the B-boy" weighs in. "I think it's about understanding where it comes from and being able to envision expanding it," he says. "If we really understood that, I think that would help. We're not just about one thing. I ain't just about Langston Hughes and James Baldwin and Malcolm X. I like Friday, the movie. There are many sides to me."

"I'm concerned with over-ambition," admits Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, executive producer of Electric Circus and de facto overseer of Common's direction as a progressive MC. "I feel as though my job was to sit in the passenger seat and navigate wherever he steered at the end of the day. If he drives the car onto a path that hasn't been charted before, then naturally there will be indifference with the people he had previously held the attention of."

Like his music of late, Common's nature is multifaceted: political (see his Black August performances in Cuba), battle-ready (research his long-deaded beef with Ice Cube), sensitive (check his close-to-sappy video for 'Come Close'). At the Laemmle Fairfax Cinemas in West Hollywood, it's the socially conscious Common who sits beside manager Derek Dudley, drummer Karriem Riggins and the doe-eyed songstress Mya to check out Bowling for Columbine, a documentary examining gun culture in America. He shifts in his seat, eyeing various patrons of the crowded theater, antsy. He's been awake since 6:30AM, laying a track at Record Plant Studios for an upcoming Coke commercial with Mya. An hour into the film, he falls asleep.

Stepping out of the multiplex in leather Pro-Keds, black Adidas sweatpants and an orange T-shirt over a longer-sleeved cream-colored thermal undershirt, he groggily bumps into some high school classmates from Illinois and converses amiably, ever the nice guy. To the strains of Prince's fresh-out-the-plastic Sign o' the Times the conversation in the Jeep afterwards veers toward the impending war in Iraq ("I just think Bush has a thirst for blood, for war, for money, for oil, for power," he says), the hypocrisy of the United States and black expatriates of the past. Discussing artists from the sixties who abandoned the country for Europe, the question is posed: Why not do the same?

"I feel like my location is not what's gonna determine my spirituality or my karma," he begins. "Meaning, no matter where I am, if I'm doing the Creator's work, then the right thing's gonna come back to me. There are certain things I don't like about this country – the things they do." By this, Common is referring to Columbine and its revelations about American hypocrisy. "This country is gon' catch it. And I may be in the midst of it."

The diverse tracks of Prince's double album seeping through the speakers seem to underline the bravery of Common's latest. Electric Circus collaborators include singer Laetitia Sadier of the English ambient rock band Stereolab ('New Wave') and British soul singer Omar ('Heaven Somewhere') – far cries from former Common album guests Lauryn Hill and De La Soul. Looking outside hiphop might raise the hackles of rap purists who miss his former producer No I.D. Such a move could even support brother Cashus D's notion that hiphop is on its deathbed.

"Hiphop is alive to me," Common counters as he rolls through Beverly Hills. "We grew up knowing hiphop to be a certain way, but it's changed. It's grown in many ways and it's gotten less pure. But I also see the good side of it, too – the fact that it is allowing us to voice who we are. Whether people think it's bad or good, it's allowing us to travel and see the world. It's allowing us to communicate, really, as Africans, Latinos. So I see it as still being beautiful."

Press him, however, and he acknowledges the culture's dark side. "I don't hear songs that hit me in the gut and make me wanna emcee, but I do enjoy some of current hiphop. I appreciate it for what it is right now even though I don't listen to it as much. When I [compared hiphop to a] girl, it's like, if you know the girl to be this way and you love her for that and her personality changes, you're like, 'What are you doing?' Then after a while, when you really know what love is, you just accept her for what she is and are like, 'That's what you are. Okay. I still love you, but we ain't gonna talk that much no more 'cause I've grown in another direction."

It's a direction that fiancé Erykah Badu praises. "He always wants to do something innovative and different," she says. "But he doesn't do it on purpose. It comes out that way." Of their relationship, Common remarks: "We connected in a way that's greater than boyfriend and girlfriend; it's just something higher than that. That's my sister, that's the queen."

Like the love he rhymed about on 'Love of My Life', Common has evolved. Despite his bohemian trimmings of late, he still remains the same Lonnie Rashid Lynn from the Southside of Chicago. Common Sense vs. Common, then, is more a battle between revolution and evolution. Hiphop nation, the choice is yours.

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