Today in Hip-Hop: Common’s ‘Be’ Turns 21 — The Kanye-Dilla Reset That Saved a Career

May 24, 2005. Common drops Be on Geffen and pulls the South Side back into the conversation. Sixth studio album. Eleven tracks. Forty-two minutes that don’t waste a second. Kanye West executive produced nine of them. J Dilla closed the album with the other two — one of the last Dilla credits to land before he passed in February 2006. Twenty-one years in, Be is still the bar Common gets measured against.

Why Be hit different in 2005

Common needed this album. Electric Circus had landed in 2002 and split the room — sprawling, Soulquarians-deep, but commercially flat. He moved to New York, started recording at Sony Music Studios in Midtown, and let Kanye — fresh off The College Dropout — drive the entire production. The result was disciplined where Electric Circus was loose: short songs, no skits, soul samples cut tight, drums that swung. The album debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200 with 185,000 first-week, earned a Best Rap Album Grammy nomination at the 48th awards, and went RIAA Gold by the end of summer.

The receipts matter. “The Corner” sampled The Last Poets’ 1970 spoken-word piece — Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole actually appear on the record, naming intersections back to back like they did on This Is Madness. “GO!” pulled John Mayer onto the guitar before anyone admitted that was allowed. “Faithful” flipped Bobby Caldwell’s “Open Your Eyes,” the same break Tribe touched on “Hot Sex” and J Dilla looped a hundred different ways. And Dilla’s two contributions — “Love Is…” and “It’s Your World” — closed the record with a 12-minute ode to Chicago that included Common’s father, Lonnie Lynn Sr., reading a poem before he passed in 2014.

Be reset the lane. Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor showed up a year later. Kanye’s Late Registration took home the Grammy Common lost. The whole Chicago wave that followed got built on what Be made commercially viable: conscious rap with chart math behind it.

The Common piece in our catalog

We made the Common Black America Again Hoodie for the heads who never stopped paying attention after Be — the people who followed him all the way to the 2016 album that made his political voice impossible to ignore. Print-quality cover art on a heavyweight blank. Wear it when you need the South Side energy without saying anything else.

Also today in hip-hop

• Heavy D turns 59 today. Born Dwight Arrington Myers, May 24, 1967, in Mount Vernon. The Overweight Lover ran Uptown Records as an executive while still charting his own dance-floor records when the rest of late-’80s hip-hop was going hard. Passed November 8, 2011 — every birthday now is a posthumous one.
• “The Corner” peaked at #82 on the Billboard Hot 100. Modest chart math. The song outlived the chart by a decade and a half.
• Be was the first time Kanye executive-produced another artist’s album. The blueprint for what he’d do next with John Legend, then Pusha T, then the whole G.O.O.D. roster.
• “It’s Your World (Pts. 1 & 2)” is the J Dilla closer — recorded while Dilla was already fighting the lupus and TTP that took him eight months later. One of the last things he tracked.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team