I confess to being intrigued when I first spotted the headline about the White House having invited a "controversial" rapper to its Wednesday night social event. The artist in question rhapsodized about cop killing and burning a United States president -- neither of which can ever be considered anything other than unspeakable. I half-expected to find a renegade member of the now-disbanded N.W.A. Much to my chagrin, however, I instead found Common -- a rapper that practically put the "conscious" in conscious hip-hop -- at the center of a raging storm that has yet to abate.
As someone who has virtually no tolerance for hardcore rap and even less for people who openly fantasize about killing police officers or public officials, I feel compelled to defend Common. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I own his entire catalogue, the entire affair seems overcooked, and incubated in the same fever swamps that brought us the preposterous and utterly fictitious birth certificate controversy. Although the talented Chicago-bred rapper is hardly immune to criticism, the controversy has become the latest episode in a long-running political silly season that seems to accomplish nothing other than distract from real and substantive issues.
The rapper himself is seemingly bemused by the whole affair. Like any self-respecting (and self-promotional) celebrity does during a public relations crisis, Common took to Twitter to poke fun at his critics -- with a little help from his followers, naturally. And not without good reason: despite the admittedly misguided and inappropriate lyrics on the incriminating video, Common is hardly Ice Cube in his heyday. He's not even Ice-T in his "Cop Killer" incarnation (here I date myself, as very few of us are old enough to recall his music career before his current stint as a sex crimes investigator in prime-time).
If Common's critics knew anything about his artistic oeuvre and his career arc, they'd know the rapper originally rose to prominence as a member of hip-hop's socially-conscious wing -- which spawned such "dirty backpacker" favorites as Talib Kweli, The Roots, Immortal Technique and KRS-One. While the independent hip-hop movement is often lauded for its positivity, it also articulates social issues and urban rage with the same crass, foul-mouthed aplomb used in mainstream rap. Common's music certainly falls within that nexus. Although his material ranges from the jazz-infused to the salacious, it is seldom without a message.
For example, many of Common's (conservative-leaning) critics might be pleasantly surprised by his duet with Lauryn Hill called "Retrospect for Life", a haunting ballad that waxes emotional about a man and his girlfriend who ultimately opt against aborting the young woman's unexpected pregnancy. Common's somber refrain in that song, "$315 ain't worth your soul..." was enough to prompt one music blogger to rank the gem as one of the top 10 pro-life songs of all time.
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