Today in Hip-Hop — October 6: Common’s Can I Borrow a Dollar? Turns 34

October 6, 1992 — a 20-year-old from the South Side dropped a debut nobody outside Chicago was braced for. Common (still going by Common Sense back then) released Can I Borrow a Dollar? on Relativity Records, and it’s the record that put Chicago hip-hop on the map, period. 34 years later, the jazzy, laid-back sound he and a teenage producer named No I.D. cooked up in a basement still runs through everything from Kanye’s early beats to the entire “conscious rap” lane.

Here’s the jewel most people sleep on: the primary production credit belonged to No I.D. — then going by Immenslope — years before he’d be known as the architect behind Jay-Z’s 4:44 and the man who discovered Kanye West. Can I Borrow a Dollar? is basically patient zero for that entire lineage. Twilite Tone and the Beatnuts filled out the boards, stitching samples and drum breaks into something AllMusic called “minimalistic, jazzy and laid back” — a direct ancestor of the sound Tribe and De La were perfecting on the other coast at the same time.

The album never charted big, but three singles — “Take It EZ,” “Breaker 1/9,” and “Soul by the Pound” — built Common’s underground reputation brick by brick before the mainstream ever caught up. That’s the real lesson in this one: no shortcuts, no viral moment, just a kid with word play and a producer with ears, grinding out a reputation one single at a time. Everything Common became — the Grammys, the Oscar, the acting career — traces back to this basement tape.

We made a Common tee pulling from Black America Again — same unflinching, unapologetic voice he’s carried since Can I Borrow a Dollar? first put Chicago on the map back in ’92. Shop the Common – Black America Again T-Shirt.

Also today in hip-hop:

• Cypress Hill — IV (1998, 28 years): DJ Muggs handled every beat on this one, and the skeleton-wise-monkeys cover art is still one of the group’s most instantly recognizable looks. Went gold in the U.S. and three other countries off the strength of a sound nobody else was making.
• Rahzel turns 62: the former Roots member and human beatbox legend who could sing, rap, and beatbox at the same time — his trick on “If Your Mother Only Knew” is still a jaw-dropper for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Doug E. Fresh himself handed him a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2017 American Beatbox Championships.
• Headie One turns 32: the UK drill breakout whose 2020 album Edna (named for his mother) topped the UK charts and proved the genre could carry real emotional weight, not just bars.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones