Milestones: Be by Common
By the final fade-out—children chanting aspirations, Lonnie Lynn offering quiet wisdom—Be has traced a circle: ancestry to futurity, despair to deliverance, self-doubt to conviction.
Executively steered by Ye with vital yet sparing assists from the late J Dilla, James Poyser, and Karriem Riggins, its taut 11-track, 42-minute frame instantly signposts a course correction from the expansive sprawl of 2002’s Electric Circus. Where its predecessor sprawled into psychedelic soul and rock abstraction, Be puts the South Side of Chicago back at the centre of gravity, welding chip-munked soul samples to upright-bass warmth, and tightening Common’s gaze on neighbourhood corners, spiritual responsibility, and generational hope. The set’s unity of tone, its unhurried sequencing, and the disarming absence of filler re-established him as a craftsman of lean, cogent albums at the very moment Ye’s own star was exploding, forging a cross-generational Chicago alliance that still feels emblematic of Mid-2000s hip-hop’s most soul-soaked terrace.
In the months after Electric Circus divided long-time listeners, Common confessed he missed the focus of “b-boy” basics. Linking with Ye, whom he’d first encountered in 1996 at No I.D.’s house, presented a natural reset. Ye, fresh off The College Dropout, wanted to produce an album that felt “today’s Marvin Gaye of rap,” urging fans to buy or even bootleg it to spread the message. Their chemistry later left Common wishing they had completed a trilogy rather than the two-album arc that ended with Finding Forever, underscoring how decisive this reunion felt in real time.
Ye’s studio playbook fused live instrumentation and crate-digging precision. Much of the tracking occurred at Sony Music Studios in New York and Encore in Burbank, then was pared to essentials; no track breaches five minutes, and the opener “Be (Intro)” establishes the sonic palette in 123 seconds, looping Albert Jones’s “Mother Nature” until Hodge’s bassline and West’s drums feel like a heartbeat. Only two songs—“Love Is…” and the two-part closer “It’s Your World”—shift production duties to Dilla, whose dusty drum knocks and vinyl pops complement the sepia tint of West’s instrumentation rather than disrupt it. The result is an album that sounds continuous yet never monotonous, its variety tucked into detail rather than genre-switching spectacle.
Chicago itself becomes the record’s unspoken protagonist. “Chi-City” brandishes block-corner bravado, name-checking L-lines and hustler rites while a muscular West beat stalks beneath the verses. Where that track flashes local swagger, “The Corner” freezes time on those same curbs, bringing spoken-word legends The Last Poets to capture the generational echo between 1970s street reportage and 2000s South Side realism. Common’s empathy rests not in sentimentalising poverty but in spotlighting suppleness, where each vignette feels as though it could be overheard at 79th and Cottage Grove on a humid summer night.
“The Corner” exemplifies Ye’s sampling brilliance: Temptations and Temprees loops collide with the Poets’ gravel, conjuring a dusty warmth that lets Common rap in measured cadences, rhyming “broken promises” with “corner pharmacists” until local specificity becomes universal blues. Its success as an anthem of return put critics’ chatter about crochet pants and Psychedelic detours firmly in the rear-view mirror, a reality Common slyly addresses later on “They Say.”
If “The Corner” frames the album’s narrative conscience, “The Food” captures its raw, on-mic spontaneity. The version pressed to wax is the live take from Chappelle’s Show (aired March 3, 2004), with Dave Chappelle’s introduction left intact; the audience cheers bleed into the two-emcee handoff as Ye raps the hook. Ye flips Sam Cooke’s “Nothing Can Change This Love,” turning its tenderness into a head-nod loop that underlines Common’s imagery of single mothers struggling with meager pay and young men fighting temptation. The grain of live microphones and stage monitors adds urgency, underscoring the performers’ chemistry in the moment Chappelle helped immortalize.
“Go!” slides from street reportage into after-hours reverie, propelled by the silvery falsetto snippets of Linda Lewis’s “Old Smokey” and punctuated by John Mayer’s ad-libs alongside Ye’s sing-song chants. Lust here isn’t prurient but imaginative—Common recounts fantasies so vivid they border on cinematic, speaking over brushed snares and airy keys that evoke dimly lit loft parties. The tone is playful yet controlled, demonstrating that returning to foundational hip-hop values did not require abandoning sensuality.
“Faithful” shifts the focus toward spiritual reckoning, elevating D.J. Rogers’s “Faithful to the End” as John Legend and Bilal weave gospel harmonies around Common’s questions about fidelity to both partner and God. By personifying the divine as a woman, he explores patriarchal assumptions in religious contexts, eventually pledging to “wake her up early, tell her I’m sorry,” a confession that lands with particular potency after the confident swagger of preceding tracks.
Where “Faithful” contemplates devotion, “Testify” is pure narrative momentum. Built on Honey Cone’s “Innocent Til Proven Guilty,” the beat chops pitched female vocals into a tense call-and-response undergirding a courtroom drama in which a femme-fatale witness manipulates judge and jury, only for the twist to reveal her guilt. The story unfolds like a three-minute film noir, its tautness heightened by Taraji P. Henson’s appearance in the accompanying mini-movie visual, further proof of the album’s cinematic instincts.
Dilla’s fingerprints emerge most vividly on “Love Is…,” which samples Marvin Gaye’s “God Is Love” yet retains vinyl crackle and feather-light drums that soften Common’s meditations on affection as communal duty. “They Say”—featuring Ye and John Legend—extends that dialogue, with Common acknowledging how quickly public perception shifts in response to an artist’s stylistic choices, a sly nod to the Electric Circus era without descending into self-pity.
The closing diptych “It’s Your World” crystallises the record’s purpose. Part 1 rides warm keys and Bilal’s languid hook as Common addresses Chicago’s children, urging imagination beyond block parameters; Part 2 slows further, handing the microphone to his father, the late Lonnie “Pops” Lynn, whose raspy spoken-word benediction has graced his son’s discs since 1994. Pops’ reflections on perseverance and self-belief tie the album’s street-level vignettes back to ancestral lineage, anchoring Common’s artistry in family as much as geography.
Be’s resonance rippled far beyond 2005. Its concision and straight-spine optimism were hailed as a template for albums that balanced radio-readiness with depth, and its success carved space for a new wave of Chicago voices that could present Midwestern narratives without duplicating drill’s aggression or the backpacker nostalgia of the 1990s. The record also validated Ye’s instincts as a full-album architect, something Common himself later wished they had explored a third time. Yet Be endures principally because it internalizes critique, streamlines purpose, and then lets each song breathe like a neighborhood story told over stoop-sit sunsets—Chicago specificity rendered into a global language. Its upright-bass intro still feels like a sunrise on South Prairie Avenue, reminding listeners that roots, when tended with care and candour, can blossom into timeless work.
Standout (★★★★½)