common

Although a large portion of my writing tends to focus on electronic music, hip-hop and rap have always been my first love. I fell in love with the genre 20 years ago and it’s one of the few things that’s remained constant over the greater part of my life. One of the elements that always made rap so special is…

“Escuchela…la ciudad respirando” the opening sample of Blackstar’s ‘Repiration’ translates to “Listen to it, the city breathing”.  A perfect sample for a track that so perfectly captures the feeling of city life. Mos deliver the first verse giving listeners a strong visual of NYC laced with political commentary and intelligent metaphors, “The shiny Apple is bruised but sweet and if you choose…

As 2014 comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on a stellar musical year. To do so, we’ve rounded up the top 50 songs of the year. In developing this list we weighed each track against the following criteria: overall song quality, impact and popularity, and support (blogs, charts, DJs, etc.). We’ve been counting down 10 songs per day…

  Common sense. When you get a dope spitter from Chi-town and one of the greatest producers of all time on a joint together, you can expect great things. In the year ’99, Common linked up with DJ Premier to record a few songs for his album “Like Water For Chocolate“, and one of those joints is today’s Throwback Thursday…

Hearing Every Rhyme. For this week’s throwback we take you back to the Chi-town streets in ’94. Common, or better known as Common Sense back then, dropped I Used to Love H.E.R. off of his sophomore effort entitled “Resurrection”. The album was entirely produced by No I.D. and I Used to Love H.E.R. has a really smooth beat. In regular 90’s…