Dear Hip-hop:
I used to love u.
Matter of fact, I guess I always have. Probably always will. When I think of how beautiful you are, how much you mean to people, I can’t help but believe you’re a gift from above. For those of us who love you, you’ve always loved us back. You’ve taught us and brought us closer together, closer to God.
I met you when I was ten years old. People talk about love at first sight. Well, this was love at first sound. It was your beat. It was your kick and your snare. It was your flows on top of flows. It was your new school soul, even though we look back now and call you old school.
You went by many names. You were the Number One Chief Rocka. You were the Grandmaster Cuts Faster. You were the Microphone Fiend.
Where would I be—who would I be?—if I hadn’t fallen in love with you? You gave me a sense of self and a voice for speaking it. You gave me a chance to express all that I am: the flaws, the fears, the fuckups, the creativity, the greatness, the discovery.
I can still remember my first tour with you, traveling around the country in a broke-down van, eating fast food, and barely sleeping at all. Just when I felt like giving up on you, you’d do something wonderful to bring me back.
When I wrote that song about loving you in the past tense, I guess you could call it tough love. You see, it was just so hard watching you change, especially when some of those changes didn’t seem for the better. Some dudes took offense because they thought I was pointing fingers at this coast or that, this clique or the other. But what I was trying to say is: Find yourself. Know who you really are. By saying that to you, I was really saying it to me, too.
We’ve been through some dark times. Times of death. Times of doubt. When you lost two of your greatest, Tupac and Biggie, I thought you might self-destruct. I even thought about leaving you because I didn’t want to fall victim to your collateral damage. But I stayed with you, and many others did too, and together we made our way through it all back into the light.
Listen, I know you have to grow, and everything you do is not going to please me. It shouldn’t, because you’re not only mine to keep. I’m not gonna front: I’ve never been good at sharing. I never wanted to drive the same car as somebody else. I never wanted to date the same girl. But I know you’re something that must be shared. So I guess what I want from you is not exclusivity but creativity—a way for us to relate in sound and sense.
So, yeah, I love you. I love you so much that if I see you doing something I don’t like, I’ll tell you. I just want you to be true to you, to the core. I want you to be true to your purpose. I don’t know all of what you were sent here to do; only you know that. But I do know that you are here to inspire and to enlighten. You are here to provide a voice for the voiceless, hope for the hopeless, life for the lifeless. Love for us all.
As I write to you today, you’re just about the same age as me. It’s nice to reminisce. But the things I love about you aren’t just what you used to be, they’re what you’re now becoming. You’re opening yourself up to the world, allowing different people from different backgrounds and different parts of the globe to get to know you. I see you expressing yourself in different ways, speaking with new accents and flowing to new beats.
I can tell some of these younger MCs out there are really serious about you, too. There’s that kid I know from the Chi with a heart as big as his ego. There’s a young lady from the islands who’s taking you in all sorts of wild directions. There’s even a dude from up there in Canada who’s fitting you with new metaphors and similes. They care. That’s all I want for you.
Hip-hop, you’re so much more than a music. You’re a culture. You’re a way of life. We can see you in a Jean-Michel Basquiat canvas, in a Michael Jordan fadeaway, in a presidential speech. You come in black and white and brown and red and yellow. You speak every language, and every language speaks you.
I see greatness ahead as you embark on the new pages and stages of your life. Do you know how much you mean to us? I don’t know if you understand just how influential, how monumental you are. Let me tell you, then, from me to you: You made me who I am. You introduced Rashid to Common and Common to the world. You’ve blessed so many of my friends, too, so many millions of people around the globe. You’ve changed the world, and I just want you to recognize your value and continue to grow in loving yourself. Remember your purpose—and oh, yeah, have fun, because you were always the life of the party.
Maybe you think I’ve neglected you since I’ve started making movies. “I’ve been through relationships like this before,” you tell me. “Acting and rapping . . . It doesn’t usually work out. Once you all get a taste of the silver screen, you tend to drop me like a bad habit.”
But I can’t let you go. That’s why I’m in the studio at three in the morning, laying down a fresh verse. That’s why I’m driving up the Pacific Coast Highway in the middle of the day with my iPhone off, bumping new beats in search of rhymes. That’s why you’ll still catch me in the cipher, spitting poems off the dome like it’s 1991 and I’m at a house party back at FAMU.
I love you more than I can describe. And I will always hold a high place for you in my heart. You are part of me forever.
Love,
Rashid
WHOEVER SAID THAT LIFE ON THE ROAD IS GLAMOROUS WAS never on tour with the Beatnuts and the Black Eyed Peas in the early nineties. Don’t get me wrong, this was my first tour—a big deal for me. This was my first time seeing the country, from New York to Cali to all points in between. But we were on a budget, so instead of a jumbo tour bus with a driver, a big-screen TV, and a PlayStation in the back, we had a simple panel van with some room for equipment in the back. It comfortably sat eight; there were nine of us.
We took turns at the wheel, though Derek claims that he drove most of the way. You might have just stepped off stage to rousing applause, then have to hop in the driver’s seat and knock out three hundred miles of highway driving. You’d better be sure you weren’t too drunk or too tired, or you might catch white line fever.
One night it was Psycho Les’s turn to drive. We set off from somewhere in the Southwest—maybe Amarillo—bound for somewhere else in the Southwest. Maybe Albuquerque, maybe Flagstaff. The motion and the monotony of the drive lulled me to sleep quickly. I don’t know how long I was out; all I can remember is the van coming to a stop, with the tires clattering against the warning strip on the side of the road.
“Why we stop?” I called from the back through the darkness.
“Man, hold on a second,” Derek said from the front passenger seat.
Everyone else was still asleep.
“Yo, B, I forgot to look at the gas tank, B,” Les said.
“You what?” Derek said. “Hell, no!”
“I guess I forgot to look at the gas.”
“What are we supposed to do now?”
I looked out the windows, and all I could see was an expanse of inky black on all sides.
“Ain’t nobody gonna come along this road at this hour,” Derek said, the voice of reason once again. “And if they do, they’re not stopping for a vanload of niggas.”
“Yo, what about that burnout?” Les asked.
This was in the days before everyone had cell phones. All I had was a pager. But one of the other dudes had one of those pay-as-you-go cell phones. We called them burnouts. He pulled it out and tried to dial the operator. No signal.
Derek looked back at me and said, “Come on, man. Let’s go see if we can find a gas station or something.”
I didn’t really want to go, but what else were we supposed to do? I got out of the van, and we started walking along the side of the road into the night. We made it about twenty feet before the howling started. Coyotes? Wolves? I don’t know, but I wasn’t about to stand around and find out. I’m not sure which one of us got back inside the van the fastest.
So now we’re back in the van and back to the burnout plan. After another ten minutes of trying, we finally get through and get connected to AAA. (Derek had a membership.) An hour or two later, the tow truck arrives and gives us just enough gas to make it to the next exit.
“It ain’t much of a town,” the tow truck driver said. “But they got a gas station, a diner, and a motel, too, I think.”
When we reached the place that the tow truck driver had generously referred to as a “town,” it was three in the morning. The gas station was closed. So was the diner. So we stopped at the motel. Derek got us a room, and all nine of us piled into it. We were sleeping on beds, in bathtubs, wherever there was space. Three hours later we were at the gas station and on the road again.
I did a lot of touring back then, playing small towns and smaller venues, trying to make my name. There were no concert riders banning red M&M’s from the dressing room. It was hip-hop delivered direct to the consumer. Sometimes, though, my delivery wasn’t the smoothest. For a 1993 show in Indianapolis, Derek, Dart, one of Dart’s partners, and I drove down from Chicago. We found our way to this little club on the outskirts of town to do a show in the middle of the day. Whoever heard of a hip-hop concert in the middle of the day? But, hey, we made the drive. We gotta get paid.
I’m performing for maybe forty people, and most of them are talking or drinking or doing something other than watching the show. But I’m rocking regardless, doing my thing. In the middle of “Take It EZ,” this dude comes up and throws something at me, spins on his heels, and starts walking away! I flinch to absorb the hit, but instead of a handful of pennies pelting me in the chest, a shower of confetti rains down nice and easy right on top of my head. For some reason, that makes me madder. It is the equivalent of him coming up and saying, “Get the fuck off the stage! Please.”
As he’s walking away all proud of himself, I throw the mic right into the back of his head. The next thing I know, security’s yanking me off the stage by the collar of my jacket. The next thing after that, I’m toe to toe, fighting the security guard. I mean, we’re trading blows. That’s when Dart jumps in, throwing haymakers. Before we know it, the whole club has turned against us. We’re black. Most of them are not. We’re from Chicago. They’re from Indy. It’s four against forty. We’re fighting all comers. After what feels like an hour, but must have been only a few minutes, we fight our way out of the club. You should have seen us running to the car. Talking shit the whole way, too. That’s when they start chanting, “We fucked Chicago up! We fucked Chicago up!”
I look back now at my younger self, and I see a kid with great potential but a lot of rough edges. I was in the studio with No I.D. the other day, and for fun, one of the engineers pulled up an old YouTube clip of the two of us. It was from a 1993 appearance on BET’s Video LP with Madelyne Woods. I was dressed in these baggy jeans, a hoodie, a jacket, and a black stocking cap. I was probably a little bubbly too.
Madelyne: “Nothing should confuse you about my guest today. This brother is all about using a little common sense. He’s a swingin’ rapper from the South Side of Chicago, one of the most hardcore ‘hoods in the country. But he’s not a gangsta nor a pimp, he’s Common Sense, rapping about life as he sees it. And welcome to Video LP.”
Over the course of the next ten minutes, I proceeded to explain the meaning of a two-piece dark with mild sauce from Harold’s Chicken. And to describe the meaning of a hardcore artist: “I am a hardcore artist. Because to me hardcore means coming from the heart, putting your heart on that paper and being true to the streets.” Let’s just say that I had some room to grow.
Treach from Naughty by Nature was one of the first artists in the industry to really embrace me. When I was visiting New York, he picked me up from my hotel and drove me to New Jersey in his white big-body Benz. I remember that really impressing me. He and Vinnie took me to the Naughty store, to the skating rink, all over Jersey. It was inspirational to see how they were doing their thing as entrepreneurs. They had all their people working.
I had my first celebrity crush on Ladybug Mecca from Digable Planets. I was definitely digging her. She was sexy, had that sexy voice. She had star power, too. Digable was really big right about then. She was a little more advanced in her style of talk than most of the girls I was dealing with at the time. She kept that intrigue going. She even made me a mix tape. I knew it was love! I was goofied out. I didn’t know what tantric sex was at the time, but I had this inclination that I could get some real special sex like that from her.
Digable was doing a show at Northwestern University, so I headed down there to check her out, knowing for sure I was gonna get some of that next-level love from her. I went up to her, and we were talking, but somehow we got separated. I found her again a little bit later, and we got separated again. I found her a third time, walked over to her, and she said, “Quit being a pest!” That wasn’t exactly what I was hoping to hear from her. Come to find out she was dating Butterfly, her bandmate, and the dude was watching the whole time. She was probably trying to make sure that I wasn’t messing up her game. At least that’s how I massaged my bruised ego on the long drive home.
In those years, being “Common Sense” wasn’t all I thought it would be. It didn’t make me a celebrity overnight. I didn’t see my face all over MTV, on the cover of the Source or Rap Pages. That’s just not how it worked. Can I Borrow a Dollar? was a turning point. It was a moment to show and prove. I didn’t get the recognition I wanted, so I had two choices: go hard or go home.
I did both. I went hard by honing my skills. But I also went home, to Chicago, to family, to where it all began. I wasn’t sick, dead, or dying—my mother’s three criteria for her adult son to move back into his room—so I was renting an apartment with one of my guys, Rasaan. We were kind of living the college life but without having to go to class—different girls coming around, just having fun. That was my first time out on my own, paying my own rent and utility bills. That’s the first time I felt real responsibility.
For a while, I even thought about giving up on rap and going back to school in Chicago to finish my degree. But dreams of stardom still hovered in front of me, just beyond my grasp. Sometimes they would be clear; other times they would seem to fade away. That’s when I decided that I’d forget about the fame and focus on the things I could control. That’s when I decided to dedicate myself completely to the art.
Those months after Can I Borrow a Dollar? were a turning point not just in my music but also in my life. I started getting better with the raps and learning more about songwriting. I had to go deeper. I had to get better. I was developing, getting more concepts. We’d be freestyling in my room every day with these brothers from Indiana. It was like training. Like Fight Club or something. I’d go jogging on the lake, saying my raps so that my breath control would be good.
Rasaan would always clown me, “Nigga, what you running from?”
“I’m not running from nothing. I’m running to something.”
The quality of my voice was starting to change, too—figuratively and literally. I started stripping down some of what I’d been before. I stopped eating dairy. I stopped eating pork. I moved from drinking Old Gold, Cisco, and Bud Drys to drinking Heineken. It was a time when I said, “I really can be a rap artist, and I have to embrace that and believe in it, regardless of whatever else is going on around me.” I was unlearning some things, discovering others. Around that time, I started reading the Koran. I had what I call a resurrection, awakening a place within myself that I had never really explored, that I didn’t even know existed.
One day I was over at Dion’s laying down some vocals for a new song for my second album. I had my Bible and my Koran with me because I’d always read from them before a recording session. Dion, who had spent years as a member of the Nation of Islam, picked up the Koran and flipped it open to a random page. He opened right up to the book of Resurrection. We took that as a sign. It let us know we were on the right path with this new album. Resurrection was the perfect title.
Resurrection (re-zə-’rek-shən) n.
1. The act of rising from the dead or returning to life.
2. The state of one who has returned to life.
3. The act of bringing back to practice, notice, or use; revival.
Resurrection meant all of these to me: a return, an advance, and a change in the way that I composed my raps. With Can I Borrow a Dollar? I wrote down almost every lyric on the page. I’ve composed in my head ever since, not out of principle or of art at first, but rather as a matter of necessity.
When I was living with Rasaan, he always used to ask me to drive him places. There was this girl he was kicking it to who lived on the North Side. So a lot of times, that would be the destination. He’d be doing what he’d do with her, while I sat in my car, drinking a beer and thinking up rhymes. I didn’t have anything to write on, so I’d repeat them to myself over and over until they stuck. The practice became a habit. All that fall and into the winter, I’d write my raps for Resurrection from the driver’s seat of my red Toyota Celica.
Fall moves fast in Chicago. As soon as it’s here, it seems like it’s gone. Winters are long. Chicago winters are clouds draped low from the sky, promising storms. They are snowstorms blanketing cars and buildings and anything else in their path, covering everything in a coat of white that fades to gray that fades to black. Many winter days, I’d find myself driving along Lake Shore, tracing the borders of Lake Michigan, rubbing my sleeve against the windshield to clear the glass. Driving along, I’d think up rhymes. Something about the motion made it easier for me to create. It was cold enough that I could see my breath, but still I’d drive and write, drive and write.
Cruising through the city, making my way toward Lake Shore, I’d just freestyle about what I saw. Even when the rhyme I was thinking up had nothing to do with what I was seeing, the city was still present in the cadence. Even now, as I drive along the Pacific Coast Highway with a new beat vibing the truck, I think back on those earlier times, those earlier rhymes. I was breathing in the city, exhaling it back out in my verses.
I’ve never really advertised the fact that I don’t write down my raps. Sometimes I’ll spend weeks just trying to find the right word, the right sound. I compose orally in the same deliberate way as when I’m writing down the words, but minus the crumpled-up pages and scribbled-out lines. The beats are kind of like the lines on the page; they’re a form of necessary limitation and order. They give me something to play off of. They put me in the right mood. They set the vibe.
I compose the way a painter paints. Jean-Michel Basquiat once said about his approach: “I start a picture, and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work; I try to think about life.” Learning about Basquiat’s process was like unearthing a kindred artistic spirit. Just like I do with my rhymes, he’d begin his creative process using free association. Improvisation. His colors and forms hit the canvas like a Charlie Parker riff, a Charles Mingus bass line. He rejected precision, not for lack of ability to be precise but out of his belief that nothing human ever is.
One of my best-known lines is actually a line I never finished. I was in the studio putting down the lyrics for “The Light,” and I was having trouble figuring out how to finish this line, so I just did it like this. It just kind of stuck, so I kept it.
I know the sex ain’t gon’ keep you, but as my equal
Is how I must treat you, as my reflection
In light I’ma lead you. And whatever’s right
I’ma feed you digga-da, digga-da, digga-da, digga-digga-da-da
Yo, I’ll tell you the rest when I see you.
—“THE LIGHT”
What I do when I rhyme is like throwing a riot of color and line, shape and shadow on canvas. I let my mind roam unfettered, to play with sound and meaning as it will. Only afterward do I step back and look at what I have. At that point, maybe I can see that the work needs a dash of color here, a brushstroke there. Or maybe I’ll just set the whole thing aside and start again. I never throw it away, though.
Basquiat’s canvases captured his soul and the soul of the streets. He made art that provokes raw emotions. His paintings display everything from savage cruelty to playful tenderness. It’s impossible not to be moved by his work.
Over the years, I’ve gained a reputation as a relentless worker in the studio. I’ll do dozens of takes of a single song until I’m satisfied. Some MCs boast about going into the booth and knocking out their verse in one take. That may work for them, but it’s never worked for me. I always want to have options. I love to hear how I could make the same line sound different with a slight dip in my inflection, or a subtle shift of emphasis or tone.
Freestyling, which I’ve always been known for, is something else entirely. Back in Chicago, one of my guys—maybe Monard or Murray—would throw out words for me to shape my flows around. I still do it from time to time. A little while ago in Atlanta, a woman in the crowd gave me the word Destiny. I was almost tripped up. But I rhymed with that word for close to six minutes.
Performing freestyle is liberating because I don’t feel compelled to perfectionism like I do when I’m recording for an album. For one thing you’re not making art for posterity—you spit it, and it’s gone. And for another, there’s something wonderful in the rawness of someone extemporizing lines right before your eyes. Listeners judge it on a different scale, too—not a lower scale, just different. To me, a true MC has the capacity to freestyle and to formally write a song.
When I listen now to Resurrection, I hear a voice in transition—from raw energy to controlled power, from straight freestyling to songwriting. One of the first songs that I really felt was successful is still one of my best known, “I Used to Love H.E.R.” The idea came to me one night while I was hanging with my guys, Murray and ’Te, in this apartment we had in Hyde Park. They were smoking weed. I don’t recall if I was smoking with them or just high from the contact smoke. We sat there for a while, then they left me alone listening to a beat that Dion had made. He had found a jazz guitar riff from George Benson’s “The Changing World” and built this soulful track around it. A concept kept floating through my mind. What if rap were a woman? How could I tell that story?
I met this girl when I was ten years old . . . I thought about those trips to Cincinnati. I thought about listening to Run-D.M.C. and Afrika Bambaataa with my cousin Ajile. I thought of that first rhyme I ever wrote.
And what I loved most, she had so much soul . . . Rap was soul music for us. It was the same thing we loved about house music. I always wanted my music to have harmony and melody, even if my raps didn’t. That sweet soul music.
She was old school when I was just a shorty . . . I remembered the feeling of being twelve years old, spitting my first rap. Hip-hop is what it feels like for other people to know your words. Hip-hop is representing more than just yourself.
Never knew throughout my life she would be there for me . . . Through my highs and my lows, hip-hop has been my constant. I play it when I’m up or when I’m down. It’s my universal language, my universal beat.
Composing “I Used to Love H.E.R.” was a lightbulb moment for me. I wrote it more quickly than I’ve written almost anything I’ve ever done. The words flowed. The feeling was divine—one of the most heavenly experiences you can have in life. Divine inspiration is better than good food and even better than sex most of the time. I’m in an altered state, without chemical intervention. Call it a divine high.
My whole crew was in the studio when I recorded “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” and in the recording booth, I could see them while I rapped. I liked that because I’d draw from their energy. So I’m laying down my lyrics, and the deeper I get into the song, the more I see them—especially Ron—looking disappointed. All the while I’m thinking, “What’s wrong? I thought this was one of my coldest raps ever.” I’m nearing the end of the final verse, and now Ron looks like he wants to punch me. Then something strange happens, just as I’m delivering the final lines: “ ‘But I’ma take her back hopin’ that the shit stop / ’Cause who I’m talking ’bout, y’all, is hip-hop.” All of a sudden, Ron was nodding his head with a broad smile on his face.
I stepped out of the booth, and he was the first to greet me.
“Yo, Rash, you had me worried there for a minute.”
“What you mean?”
“I thought you were on some old punk smooth shit. Some old Teddy P. turn-off-the-lights lover-man shit. Now I know you was talking about hip-hop.”
I laughed at the time, but it had me thinking. What if I had been just rapping about loving a woman? Would there have been something wrong with that? Apparently so. Unfortunately, I don’t think I had the courage at the time to face the rejection of my brothers and write a love song about a woman. Expressing all the love I had in my heart would take time, maturity, and my own expansion as an artist.
“I Used to Love H.E.R.” was a love story but also an ode to hip-hop. I think that’s why it captured so many people’s attention. For those of us who love hip-hop, we each have our own story. We remember when we met her and when we had beef with her. We know that no matter how much she does us wrong, we’re most likely coming back to her.
The song became controversial, and that blindsided me. There’s a line in there where I say, “Then she broke to the West Coast, and that was cool.” In my mind, it was purely descriptive. I was talking about hip-hop’s life cycle and how the West Coast cats had really taken over by the early 1990s.
Back when I was in high school, we used to cruise the South Side streets bumping N.W.A., “Gangsta, Gangsta,” and “Straight Outta Compton.” They had that raw energy that got us hyped, made us want to get a little bubbly, made us want to fight. After all, my first big concert with CDR, we were opening for N.W.A. We hung out with the dudes after the show, too. I had the ultimate respect for them as lyricists—especially Ice Cube. Being from Chicago, we were kind of neutral in the whole East Coast–West Coast beef, so I was influenced just as much by Cube as I was by KRS-One or Rakim.
But I guess Ice Cube heard my song different. I was in New York, hanging out backstage at an Alkaholiks show, when King T said, “Yo, Com, you heard that Cube verse? He’s talking about you. It ain’t really that bad, though.” The way he was saying “It ain’t really that bad,” I knew it had to be precisely that bad. So I went ahead and listened to the song, “Westside Slaughterhouse” by the Westside Connection. It was Mack 10, WC, and Cube. And Cube was spitting these lines right at me, talking about “Pussy-whipped bitch, with no Common Sense.”
I just kind of smiled, like, “Okay, I see how it is.” I probably wouldn’t even have reacted further if Cube and his people hadn’t kept talking about it. Westside Connection went on BET’s Rap City talking trash about me. That brought my Chicago up. So I decided I needed to bust back with a track. That’s how “The Bitch in Yoo” was born.
The first time I performed the song was down in Atlanta at this music festival. Cube and his people were also on the bill. I didn’t know who else was out in that crowd, but I didn’t really care. “Man, fuck Ice Cube!” I was thinking. So I had them turn down the beats, and I spat that first verse a cappella. The crowd went wild. A few weeks later, I performed the song at the House of Blues—the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in LA! They loved it too. That made me write another verse talking about “even in your town, they be loving my shit!”
All of this was going on in front of a backdrop of far deeper tensions between East Coast and West Coast. The weapons went from being diss tracks to bullets. Then came the day in 1996 that Tupac was murdered. I was in shock. What was happening was scary. Eerie. Who did that? Something evil was going on to suck genius from the world like that, somebody so important to a generation. Tupac was headed toward greatness. He had so much influence. I don’t think there will be an artist of this generation who will have that much influence.
I met Pac only once, and he gave me a lot of love. I went to see him at this place called the China Club back in 1993. He greeted me backstage and embraced me like, “Yo, Common! That nigga Common. What’s up?” He was giving love. I always thought on “I Get Around” that he was giving me a shout-out when he says “Baby, take it EZ.” I was happy that Pac never dissed me, because he didn’t hesitate to come out and just get at cats.
Then I met Biggie at a Howard University homecoming. He was telling Puff, “Man, we gotta do a song with Common Sense.” We had both come through the Source’s Unsigned Hype. That’s how Biggie got heard; that’s how I got heard. Then one time Biggie came to Chicago, and we sat and chilled and got drunk with him and Cease and a couple other people. He treated my guys so well. Biggie was one of the nicest cats in the game. I didn’t know him well, but each time I would see him, he was always throwing love. He did a shout-out for me in one of my promos, and he said, “I wish Common was from Brooklyn.” Coming from him, that’s love indeed.
When Biggie was killed just six months after Tupac, I remember getting the call late at night, right before I was supposed to head into the studio with Erykah Badu. We were recording that song “All Night Long,” but we just couldn’t get into the spirit of it. We couldn’t find the vibe. We were at Battery Studios. That was the moment when I was thinking, “Do I want to be part of this rap thing anymore?” Recent developments were discouraging, draining. I wasn’t enjoying myself. “I love hip-hop. I love the culture. But with this kind of thing going on?” It reminded me of how I felt after a while going to parties, getting drunk, and acting up. Do I really need to be doing this? In that moment, hip-hop was hurting my soul. I didn’t want to be a part of that.
By July 1997, hip-hop was on the verge of self-destruction. Pac and Biggie had been killed. A bicoastal war was on, and even the Midwest was on fire. I thought the world had gone topsy-turvy. “This hip-hop shit is crazy. Cats are dying. This isn’t why I got into hip-hop to begin with.” I needed to make a change. I needed to help change hip-hop.
That’s when Minister Louis Farrakhan stepped in and held a summit. When Farrakhan called, all of us came. I was there. Ice Cube was too. Maybe here we could squash our beef. Farrakhan was talking to us about how we as a people have been divided against one another for far too long. It was time to unify. “All this turf you fighting for—East Coast, West Coast—who owns it? Not you.” He really got through to us.
The only time I ever feared for my son’s life was after he started rapping. Rapping was real different back then. Especially when they started doing that rivalry thing and when Rashid had that thing with Ice Cube. That was about the only time. It was the rap scene. Then when some of the boys here had gotten jealous of him, I didn’t like for him to come back here too much.
You’d hear things about one of his friends who he put on the album, but he didn’t feel Rashid did enough to help him. I felt a little concerned about that. I basically called some of them in. That’s when the street came back in. And they would say, “Oh, Mama, it’s not me.” And I said, “Okay, that’s cool. But you better let whoever it is know nothing better not go down. Nothing. Not even a hint of that.” That’s one thing about street folks: they simply know when you’re serious. That quashed it. A couple came and apologized. That’s the only time I felt any fear. And it was only here.
SO AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED, I was cool with Cube now. Some of my people didn’t let bygones be bygones quite so easily, though. Later that year, I was in LA shooting a commercial for Sprite with a bunch of artists from the East, the West, the South, and the Midwest: Fat Joe, Mack 10, Goodie Mob, Bambaataa. It was all love. But one of my guys was still beefing over the Cube thing. When he crossed paths with Mack 10, he grilled him so hard that Mack stopped and confronted him.
“What you looking at, nigga?”
“I’m looking you in the eye. Chicago niggas look you in the eye.”
Raised in the temple of Chi, taught to look into the eye
I identify with bobs and weaves
And niggas makin’ moves that bob and weave
And niggas with jobs on the side sell weed
—“HEAT”
Even Cee Lo was like, “Damn, he went in kinda hard right there.” Mack 10 was heated, so he sent one of his boys out to the car, and he came back with a mag. That’s when Fat Joe intervened, kinda like a Mafia don. He pulled me aside and said, “Com, ain’t nothing gonna happen to you out here, but you gotta check your man. He’s out of pocket.” I was a little mad at my guy ‘cause he was messing with my money at that point. We stayed around and shot the video, and it was all good from there.
In the years since, I’ve crossed paths with Cube every so often. Now that I’m in the film industry too, it seems only natural that we should connect. That whole thing really got blown out of proportion. I’m just lucky that no one got hurt. Much worse things happened around that time. I’m glad neither one of us became a martyr.
When it came down to it, what mattered was making good music. Those recording sessions for Resurrection were full of adventures. We were in New York finishing up the album, mixing the tracks down and writing some last-minute lyrics for a few songs. It was an exhausting process, and I needed to unwind, so I decided I could use some herbal inspiration.
Mind you, I’ve always been scared of drugs. Maybe it has something to do with having seen at a young age just what kind of damage drugs can do. My father was a loving man when he was sober; when he was high, he became a stranger. My uncle Steve was the most reliable, most loving person, but when he was on drugs, sometimes he would just disappear.
My own experiences with drugs were limited. When I got to high school, my boys and I would drink beer all the time, of course. We might smoke some weed occasionally. I even knew some dudes, not close members of my crew, who would ski every now and then—that’s what we called snorting blow. The idea of cocaine just never appealed to me. I had a hard enough time with weed.
When I was eight or nine years old, my boy Andre and I rolled up some weed and tried to smoke it. I mean we literally rolled up some grass—like, from the lawn! Dried up leaves, whatever. We called ourselves getting high. We got some scraps of paper and put all these leaves in there then lit our little joint with a match. We even knew to puff-puff-pass, handing our improvised spliff back and forth until we smoked it all the way to the roach. I don’t know if I got high, but I sure got sick.
So here we were in the studio. Dion was there and maybe a half a dozen other folks.
“Yo, who’s got a j?” I asked.
To my surprise, not one person in the studio was holding any weed. This had to be the first time in the history of hip-hop studio sessions that no weed was on the premises.
“I’m gonna go find me some trees.”
My engineer said he had a cousin in Queens who sold weed, so I got in a cab and drove all the way out to this neighborhood in South Jamaica. Whatever he sold me must have been laced or something because when I got back to the studio and sparked it up, I almost immediately started tripping. I can remember sitting on the edge of the couch thinking, “I’m about to die. I’m about to die.” I got so desperate that I ended up calling my mom.
“Ma, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I love you.”
“Rashid, what are you talking about?”
“I love you, Ma. I smoked this weed, and I think it was poisoned or something.”
“Boy, you shouldn’t have been smoking that weed! How long have you been smoking it?”
“Ma, that’s not the point! I’m dying over here!”
“Go get some castor oil.”
Not even my mother could help me. So there I was, rubbing my knees and praying to God that I would make it through. “Lord, please, take this off of me. I know you don’t usually step in during moments like these, but I need you right now. I promise I won’t smoke that weed again.” I guess that’s the point in the process they call bargaining. But even God didn’t see fit to release me from my artificially induced struggles.
So I called my pops. After all, he knew a thing or two about coming off a bad trip. He talked me through. “Son, what you’re going through, it’s all in your head. Just focus on something in your immediate vicinity.” So I fixed my eyes on the gold album hanging on the studio wall—until it started spinning and spinning and spinning right off the wall.
Finally, Peter Kana, my A&R man at Relativity, decided that the best thing to do was to take me on a drive, let the cool air blow in my face. We got in his car and when I didn’t move, he reached over and fastened my seatbelt for me. “Let’s just take a little drive,” he said. “This should fix you right up.” But something in that phrase “fix you right up” set off alarm bells in my paranoid mind. Fix me right up. Fix me right up. That’s the sort of shit that the mob guy in the movie says before fitting some sucker for cement shoes. I dismissed the thought from my mind. “Man, I must really be tripping! This weed got me paranoid.”
Peter put on some jazz—Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue—and we drove toward the ocean. I can remember the window rolled down halfway and the cool air tickling my face from my cheekbones to the top of my head. I don’t know what it was about the wind, the weed, and Miles’s silky horn, but I was now completely certain that Peter Kana was going to kill me and dump my body in the river. For some reason, the thought left me completely frozen, incapable of acting or even moving. So I just let my mind fall into the music. When we arrived back at the studio after what must have been thirty or forty minutes, I was mildly surprised to still be alive.
It seemed like it took me days to come out of it, but it was really just overnight. They finally had to send me home from the studio. When I woke up the next morning, my head was still foggy, but my thoughts were clear. There’s a silver lining to all of this: when I made it into the studio that day, Dion had come up with two new tracks. They ended up being two of the coldest on the album: “Nuthin’ to Do” and “In My Own World (Check the Method).” Every time I hear those songs, I think back on that weed. Writing about it now, I can feel the paranoia creeping in all over again.
Since I’ve been out in Hollywood, I’ve had friends and family members ask me about the celebrity drug culture in the entertainment industry. To be honest, I don’t see it. I know it exists, but it’s just not something people bring around me. If I know people who do coke, I’m not aware of it because they don’t do it around me. People look at me at this point in my life, and they know my image and my lifestyle. I’m not judging anyone; I just know how I choose to live my life, and I stand firm on that. Those around me usually respect that.
Put it this way: you have to know who you are before you get to where you want to be. It must be tough for these teenage stars who have grown up right before our eyes and been exposed to all there is in the adult world. We have to take some responsibility as a culture. You have to have a strong foundation to go through all the things that celebrity brings and come out a well-adjusted human being. When you know yourself and know who you are already, you’re not going to get pressured into doing something that you just don’t believe in doing. Even as a shorty, I couldn’t get influenced to do something I knew would harm me. And I’m generally an impressionable person, but my foundation was strong enough that no one could talk me into just anything.
Resurrection came out in late 1994, but I always associate the album with 1995. Maybe that’s because it had such a slow burn. It got decent critical buzz, but nowhere near the commercial attention I had hoped. At least, not at first. Maybe it was the sound, maybe it was the rhymes, maybe it was the fact that we were from Chicago, but it took a little while for people to warm to it. The Source gave it only 3.5 out of 5 mics when it dropped, but four years later, the magazine put it on its “100 Best Rap Albums” list.
I think I most associate Resurrection with 1995, though, because ’95 was such a big year. Not just for me, but for the whole country. The stock market was booming. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including nineteen children, in what was at the time the deadliest act of terrorism in the United States. The Unabomber continued his killing spree. O. J. Simpson stood trial for murdering his wife and her male friend and was found not guilty. And two weeks later, black men from all over the country converged on Washington for the Million Man March.
The contrast between O. J. and the Million Man March is so dramatic when you think about it. They send such different messages about the nation’s racial health. O. J. was contention, it was tribalism, it was pain. Whether you believe he did it or not, you didn’t feel good about it either way. The Million Man March was about love and unity and redemption. It was about the present acknowledging the past and making way for the future.
That tension between these two historic moments was played out within me as well. Here I was, a young man full of contradictions. I was a rapper with two albums who had built a name, but wasn’t exactly a superstar. I was still a knucklehead doing what knuckleheads do, but I had a dawning sense of my greater purpose. It’s no surprise, then, that these moments outside of me offered opportunities for me to reevaluate what was going on within. One of these turning points revolved around the Simpson case, the other around the Million Man March.
It was a Friday night, June 17, 1994, and I was at my godbrother Skeet’s house watching game five of the NBA finals between the New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets. Of course, we were drinking some beers. I lost count, but I had at least four or five. The Knicks pulled out a 91–84 victory, led by Patrick Ewing’s 25 points and 12 rebounds. But the thing I remember—the thing everyone remembers—is watching a white Ford Bronco in an impossibly slow-speed chase across the freeways of Los Angeles. We all know how it ended—O. J. Simpson in police custody, accused of the brutal murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and another man.
It was around ten or eleven o’clock when I got in my car to drive home. I still had a buzz, but I felt like I was more than good to drive. I was driving down a side street when I came to a stop sign. Anxious to get home and get to bed, I did a tap stop and continued through the intersection—running into the side of another car.
Neither of us could have been going more than fifteen miles an hour; it was a residential neighborhood, and we collided in the intersection after a four-way stop. But it was jarring nonetheless. After the initial shock of the collision had worn off and I could tell that I wasn’t hurt, I got out of the car to see about the other driver. He was out of the car now, too, and we exchanged bewildered glances. He was maybe in his midforties, and he looked like he was coming home from work. He was wearing a gray shirt with gray pants, like a uniform.
“You all right?” I asked. “Yeah. How about you?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re Common Sense, right? The rapper?”
For a second, I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t feel much like Common Sense right about then. I felt 100 percent Rashid.
“Yeah. Yeah, man.”
“Well, I’m glad to meet you. Maybe it’s not the best of circumstances, though.”
“I just—I don’t know what happened.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I don’t think we need to call the police. Just give me your information.”
We exchanged information and drove our separate ways. I felt so fortunate. This man didn’t need to show me love like that. I imagined what would have happened had the police shown up. I imagined them putting me through all the tests—touching my index finger to the tip of my nose, putting one foot in front of the other and walking in a straight line, balancing on one leg. I thought of how ashamed my mother would be. Worst of all, I thought of what might have happened under different circumstances—a different road, a different intersection. I paid for the man’s repairs and gave him tickets to my next show, too.
I didn’t stop drinking all at once. I wasn’t scared straight or anything. There were times in the months that followed when I would drink so much that I’d wake up the next morning and couldn’t quite remember what I had done the night before. There were times when I would act the fool and embarrass myself. “I can’t keep doing this,” I’d say. Then the next weekend would come, and I’d end up doing some of the same things. I have an addictive personality. I know that.
What saved me from myself, though, was my sense of purpose. If I needed to stop getting drunk in order to achieve my dreams, then I would do it. Whenever I need to remove something from my life so that I can succeed, I do it. That holds for people, too. It was around the same time as the accident that I started really paying attention to my health. That meant drinking in moderation or not at all and eating a more healthful diet. Those two things brought discipline to my life. Cutting out certain foods actually helped me stop drinking so much, and both of them helped me in my career.
The next year, after the O. J. verdict, I was thinking about the night of my accident. I was thinking about close calls and second chances. I was also thinking about the Million Man March, which was just two weeks away.
“Black, I need you to pick us up from the airport.”
I was calling my friend Sean Glover, known affectionately as Black, for him to come pick up a group of us and take us into DC. It was Thursday afternoon, October 12, 1995, and the Million Man March was scheduled for the following Monday the sixteenth, with events taking place all weekend.
“Which airport?”
“Duels.”
“Duels? You mean Dulles?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Black pulled up in his Nissan Altima, and five of us piled in, bags and all. Needless to say, it was a tight fit. I don’t think we noticed, though, because we were all so excited. This was such a historic moment. Racial tensions were high after the O. J. acquittal, but we were focused on the positive. Our generation hadn’t had its civil rights moment, its March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This was going to be it.
Standing on the National Mall, surrounded in solidarity by brothers of all ages and colors, that was the first glimpse of heaven for me. I had never felt that much love among black men in my life. The way we grew up, it was about competition, this dude getting ahead of you. You’re cool with your tribe, but the rest you’re pretty much trying to fight against for something at any given time. It was a humility I had never felt among black men. Every person was so happy to be there.
A million black men walking towards one direction
The cream of the planet, resurrection.
—“RESURRECTION ‘95”
The thing I remember most about the day of the march is looking around and seeing all the people behind me, around me, and all of them were black men. Multitudes of black men. It made me think, “They’re going to write about this in the new scriptures.”
I was a black man saying I was proud to be a black man. I was there with other brothers on this day of atonement. And even though I hadn’t stopped fucking around at that time, even though just a year before, I had almost hurt myself and someone else because of my poor judgment, I still felt like I had the capacity to start making those steps toward doing the right things. It made me recognize the importance of making conscious choices in all aspects of my life. In my heart and in my spirit, I knew I really wanted to do the right things.
The first thing I remember from that day was the little brother from Chicago, just fourteen at the time, who spoke, Ayinde JeanBaptiste. He spoke about our tradition of struggle and our need for self-determination. That inspired me. He kind of kicked it off. I remember that for sure. I remember Rosa Parks, too. Everyone started chanting, “Rosa! Rosa! Rosa!” Her name echoed across the mall. We were there for a purpose greater than ourselves, greater than the individual. I’m glad to say that I was a part of it. I wanted to be able to tell my children I was there. Our generation doesn’t have too many moments like that. Now’s the time to live your truth.
It was a challenge to be a man—a black man—and to express love for a woman in public. When I did “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” I didn’t have the heart to write a love song. But after the Million Man March, it was like a seed was planted. “This is how you feel anyway, and this is the right thing to do.” I was growing up—and hip-hop was too.