Though its seeds can be traced back to the mid-'90s heyday of indie labels such as Rawkus Records, conscious rap's renaissance began in earnest last year with the ascension of Kanye West. His debut CD, The College Dropout, sold almost 3 million units by both engaging and criticizing the consumerism that seemingly defines mainstream hip-hop. Success with Dropout led to the creation of West's own label, Getting Out Our Dreams.
But while West may have set the stage, most of the genre's die-hard fans feel that the movement reached its zenith with the May release of Common's Be. And it's understandable that fans would feel this way; Be is multidimensional without being needlessly esoteric, positive though not openly sentimental, and political without being cloistered and overtly confrontational. It's a high-wire act that is not only one of the most critically acclaimed hip-hop records of recent memory, but also immediately accessible to the MTV set, thanks in large part to West's soulful production work.
Of course, what Common and crew are doing isn't new. Though the birth of explicitly political hip-hop can be traced to Grandmaster Flash's 1982 hit "The Message," most agree that the ultimate manifestation of agitprop hip-hop came in the late '80s with the emergence of Public Enemy and its immediate successors.
But unlike the riotous rage of Public Enemy or the aggressive rhetoric of artists influenced by Five Percent Nation religious ideologies (like Brand Nubian), this new breed of conscious MCs is more concerned with integration than imparting fire and brimstone sermons. The new breed appear in Coke commercials and, unlike their predecessors, aren't afraid to weigh in on matters of sexuality and romance (imagine Chuck D trying to put the moves on Sister Souljah!). And though they are peripherally political, most avoid the rhetoric that defined their predecessors.
It's an accessible yet smart approach that was employed by Native Tongues-era acts such as A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, and was later adapted by West. From his 1992 debut, Can I Borrow A Dollar (when he was still known as Common Sense), to his 2003 psychedelic hip-hop opus Electric Circus, Common has always been one of the genre's most PC ambassadors. Of course, that isn't to say that the ghosts of the Civil Rights Movement are completely absent. Proto hip-hoppers the Last Poets appear on the album's first single, "The Corners," while "It's Your World" touches on the issue of reparations. On the intro to Be, Common states that "I want to be as free as the souls of those who left/I'm talking Malcolm, Coltrane, and my man Yusef." But what he says next is key to his approach: "Through death, through conception/new breath and resurrection/For Moms, new steps in her direction/In the right way/Told inside is where the fight lay."
This sense of optimism and self-determination is integral to Be's themes. If Chuck D and Co. launched Molotov cocktails at a dysfunctional and racist system, Common and his cohorts are calibrating the foundations of a new, more hopeful millennium. And though there are inevitably those who will claim that the message has been co-opted and diluted, the previous model just isn't commercially viable anymore. And in the end, what's more effective: Whispering in the ears of a million listeners, or shouting at a few hundred?
