Happy 20th Anniversary to Common’s fourth studio album Like Water For Chocolate, originally released March 28, 2000.
Actor. Author. Philanthropist. Activist. Spokesperson. Voiceover Talent. Entrepreneur. And first and foremost, emcee. Born Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., Common’s many talents and multiple endeavors have made him a shining example of what multimedia stardom looks like in the 21st century. And while Common has rightfully earned household name recognition, there are many of us who have been well acquainted with the man and his original passion—music—for just shy of a quarter-century.
For nearly three decades dating back to 1992, the trajectory of Common’s recording career has been an intriguing one to witness. Never one to rest on his creative laurels, the Chicago-bred emcee has refined and reinvented his sound with each of his twelve albums to date (and thirteen if you count his August Greene project’s 2018 eponymous debut), none of which have succumbed to the monotonous carbon copy syndrome that often plagues other less adventurous artists. Indeed, he has continually placed a relentlessly high premium on innovation and experimentation, while keeping his artistic integrity firmly intact. Common is progression personified, and he has irrefutably fulfilled his self-proclaimed prophecy of becoming a hip-hop pioneer.
I was first introduced to Common—known at the time by his original moniker, Common Sense—by Yo! MTV Raps back in ’92 and more specifically, through the video for his first-ever single “Take It EZ.” Impressed with his spirited rhymes, commanding delivery, and unique voice, I picked up his debut long player Can I Borrow a Dollar? (1992) a short time later and could instantly hear the wealth of promise contained therein.
Two years later, his sophomore album Resurrection (1994) dropped and my 17-year old mind was officially blown. Resurrection quickly became one of my all-time favorite LPs, hip-hop or otherwise. In fact, when I began penning album reviews for my high school’s student newspaper in the fall of my senior year, Resurrection was the first album I selected to review. Happily forsaking any attempt at critical objectivity, my effusive, gushing love for the record jumped off the page. Initially driven by its first single, the iconic ode to hip-hop affection “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” and utterly devoid of filler tracks, Resurrection arguably placed Chicago on the hip-hop map that had previously been monopolized by New York and Los Angeles. And beyond its geographic implications, Resurrection earned its creator a broader audience who began to revere him as a legitimate artistic force poised for longevity in the hip-hop game.
Three years elapsed between Resurrection and the release of his third album, largely due to Common becoming a new father in the interim. Finally released in the fall of 1997, One Day It’ll All Make Sense was a noticeably more mature, poignant, and polished LP than its two predecessors. With his producer-in-arms No I.D. spearheading the soundboard for the third consecutive album, Common was joined by a handful of esteemed colleagues, offering testament to the fact that his reputation had become well-fortified throughout the hip-hop community. Notable contributors included Lauryn Hill, De La Soul, Q-Tip, Black Thought, Erykah Badu, and Cee-Lo Green, among others. Critically applauded at the time of its release, One Day It’ll All Make Sense contains some of Common’s best and most balanced work to date.
Three solid albums under his belt, and hoping to circumvent the creative and spiritual complacency that can often accompany newfound acclaim, Common uprooted himself in more ways than one. In 1999, he relocated from his native stomping grounds of Chicago to the fertile soils of New York City. “Comin’ to New York was like an opening for a new chapter and new creativity,” he told Complex magazine in 2015. “Being exposed to new things.” This notion of embracing the dynamism of life in New York City as a way to revive and nourish the soul certainly resonates with me, personally, as I too moved there one year later in 2000, after feeling stagnated and uninspired in Los Angeles. As a matter of fact, I recall seeing Common – as well as his former paramour, Badu—strolling around my adopted neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn from time to time, during my first few years living there.
In addition to moving east, Common shifted record labels, from the indie Relativity Records, which had commissioned his first three LPs, to MCA Records, one of the largest record companies and home to The Roots, GZA, and Mary J. Blige, at the time. In a new city, with a major label now backing him, Common was able to harness his energy more than ever before toward exercising his artistic freedoms and exploring new paths for his music.
One Day It’ll All Make Sense marked the last of Common’s albums that No I.D. would produce until the duo later reunited for 2011’s The Dreamer/The Believer and 2014’s Nobody’s Smiling efforts. And in his longtime collaborator’s absence, Common sought out new co-conspirators that would help to inspire a new, evolved sonic direction.
Inspiration arrived soon after he landed in New York, in the form of the kindred musical spirits he found in the Soulquarians. Following in the footsteps of that other beloved bohemian artist commune, Native Tongues, the Soulquarians were a vibrant collective of like-minded musicians that embraced an unyielding passion for pushing sonic boundaries and creating, quite simply, good music that moved people. Questlove, D’Angelo, J Dilla, James Poyser, Badu, Q-Tip, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Roy Hargrove, Bilal, Pino Palladino, and their adopted brother, Common, were the exalted visionaries that comprised the soulful fellowship. And together, their music successfully blurred the line between avant-garde sophistication and mainstream appeal. Not an easy feat to pull off, mind you. According to Common in the aforementioned Complex interview, “We really did want to create a collective that possessed the ability to push music forward and to also put out a positive energy towards music, and elevate people’s consciousness, opening their minds.”
By the time the new millennium arrived, the crew’s eclecticism had already been gloriously manifested on a trio of dynamic full-lengths: The Roots’ Things Fall Apart (1999), Slum Village’s Fantastic, Vol. 2 (2000) and D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000). The next Soulquarian-blessed project would be Common’s fourth and most ambitious effort LP to date, Like Water for Chocolate.
Recorded at the storied Electric Lady Studios in New York City and released in late March 2000, Like Water For Chocolate was—and still is—a revelation. The album constituted Common’s formal coming of age as an artist by embodying an Afrocentric grace, poise, and intimacy that his previous output had only teased but never fully achieved. When contrasted with the vast majority of today’s contemporary hip-hop, one can’t help but recognize that Like Water for Chocolate established an insurmountable benchmark for artistic credibility, quality, and substance, one that few hip-hop albums have come even remotely close to emulating since.
Before I even pressed play on the album for the first time, two things stood out to me as noteworthy, relative to Common’s previous LPs. First was the album’s title, lifted from the wonderful 1989 Laura Esquivel novel (and 1992 film adaptation), which I fondly recall reading in my high school Latin American Literature class. A fantastic work of magical realism, the novel’s chief protagonist, Tita de la Garza, expresses herself most profoundly through her cooking, which, when eaten, channels a visceral effect upon those around her. Similarly, Common’s musical concoctions, when consumed, have been known to impact listeners in magical and meaningful ways. Common has previously discussed the parallels between Esquivel’s novel and his album of the same name, while clarifying the symbolic meaning of the title within the context of his music, explaining, “The water (represents) the water sign of me: the emotion within the music. And the chocolate is representing the Soul: the Blackness in this music. (Like Water for Chocolate) is a metaphor to represent what I strive for my songs to do. If I’m feeling angry, I want the people who listening to feel mad. Or if I’m feeling like, ‘Yo Man, this is the struggle we goin’ thru. Man we gotta fight, we gotta uplift,’ I want them to feel that. These songs are like meals for the Soul.”
In drawing inspiration from a globally revered work of literature, it’s obvious that Common didn’t envision his fourth album as just another hip-hop record, but rather as a vital work of art evocative of more universal themes of life and love.
After the title, I was struck by the album’s cover image, which appropriates the legendary photographer Gordon Parks’ starkly powerful photograph Drinking Fountains, Birmingham, Alabama, 1956. Parks’ photograph depicts one of the hallmark symbols of American racial segregation and degradation, as a young black woman drinks from a “colored-only” water fountain juxtaposed with a “white-only” fountain. Understandably, some have interpreted a symbolic connection between the album’s title and cover image, with “water” represented by the fountains and “chocolate” represented by the woman. And some others have taken the connection one step further, suggesting that in the context of the image, “Like Water for Chocolate” means that while water itself is the same whether the person drinking it is black or white, there were separate means by which black people were allowed to obtain it. What’s more, the cover was the first of Common’s albums released up to that point not to feature his own likeness, which again reinforced the notion that he was devoting his music toward a more universal aesthetic and philosophy, above himself and beyond hip-hop alone.
Appetites for the album had already been sufficiently whet by the superb DJ Premier-produced and Bilal-assisted lead single “The 6th Sense,” featuring Common spitting fire with a re-energized confidence and swagger, as best evidenced on the track’s ruminative 2nd verse, as he spits, “I’m the truth, across the table from corporate lies / Immortalized by the realness I bring to it / If revolution had a movie I’d be theme music / My music, you either fight, fuck, or dream to it / My life is one big rhyme, I try to scheme through it / Through my shell, never knew what the divine would bring to it / I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want millions / More than money saved, I wanna save children / Dealing with alcoholism and afrocentricity / A complex man drawn off of simplicity.”
Common’s intensified self-reflection and righteousness, as he seeks to reconcile the inherent conflicts of the material versus the cultural and the spiritual, are the dominant themes peppered throughout Like Water for Chocolate. Tracks such as the J Dilla-produced “Nag Champa (Afrodisiac for the World)” and the Afrobeat-inspired Fela Kuti homage “Time Travelin’ (A Tribute to Fela)” exemplify this deeper level of introspection that defines the album.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the virtues of Common’s Soulquarian compatriots permeate all facets of the album. Broadly speaking, the Soulquarian ethos is most notably evoked through Common’s thematic focus on attaining a higher state of self- and group consciousness, through a shared love and respect for the redemptive power of music and an undying devotion to his craft. On “Nag Champa,” Common confides that “Affecting lives is where the wealth and the merit is / I realize what I portray day to day, I gotta carry this / And beats, rhymes and life is where the marriage is.”
Likewise, on the gorgeous D’Angelo collaboration “Geto Heaven Part Two” (subsequently released as a single in remixed form with Macy Gray standing in for Mr. Archer), he declares that “to choose words, and be heard across waters / Doin’ something you like to support daughters” is what makes music both “a gift that is sacred” and “so much bigger than me.”
Elsewhere throughout the album, Common traverses a handful of other themes. He explores hip-hop artists’ complicated relationship with the music industry’s superficial temptations on the MC Lyte-sparring “A Film Called (Pimp),” pays homage to exiled political activist and former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur on the eloquent “A Song for Assata,” and celebrates love and fidelity on the album’s second and most widely recognizable single, “The Light.” In his conversation with Complex, Common reflects that “The Light” was the song that “reached people I had never reached before.”
Rest assured, however, amidst the variety of subject matter on display throughout the album, there are still plenty of cuts that showcase Common’s signature battle-rap like bravado, including “Heat,” “Cold Blooded,” and “Dooinit.” The album concludes as Resurrection and One Day It’ll All Make Sense do, with the reassuring voice and heartfelt spoken word soliloquy delivered by his late father, Lonnie “Pops” Lynn, on “Pop’s Rap III…All My Children.”
Like Water for Chocolate is not just an exercise in the cerebral, however. Far from it. Sonically, it’s his most fully realized and dynamic album to date. Which is impressive, when you consider that each of Common’s albums to date sounds as if it was meticulously produced to ensure optimal listening pleasure, never feeling rushed or cobbled together. From the opening moments of first track “Time Travelin’ (A Tribute to Fela),” which finds Vinia Mojica singing in Spanish atop breaking waves and hushed horns, you know you’ve just embarked upon a totally different and more imaginative listening experience, relative to Common’s previous works.
The characteristic sound of Like Water for Chocolate is an expansive, incessantly funky one that bounces along jauntily, propelled by a savory mix of crunchy beats, piano loops, horn riffs, unorthodox samples, and perfectly placed backing vocals. Executive produced by Soulquarian father figure Questlove, the album’s sound is defined by the masterful production handiwork of fellow Soulquarians J Dilla, James Poyser, D’Angelo, along with honorary members DJ Premier and Karriem Riggins. Truly an extended family affair, guest spots include all of the aforementioned artists, plus Hargrove, Jill Scott, Slum Village, Black Thought, Rahzel, Mos Def and Cee-Lo.
People often ask me why I am so insatiably obsessed with music. Granted, there are a handful of reasons, and surely too many to outline here. But one of the most salient ones for me is that music possesses a time capsule-like magic. Music can instantly transport me back to specific places or periods of my life, enabling me to lucidly remember and relive at least fragments of the experiences in question. In the case of Like Water for Chocolate, no other album—except perhaps Jill Scott’s debut offering Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1 (2000)—induces such vivid recollections of my early days in New York City and my acclimation to life in Brooklyn. Making the transition from west coast to east in 2000 was the most profoundly formative time in my adulthood thus far, with opportunities for both personal adventure and professional expansion knocking everywhere. And throughout this period of change, a small handful of records soundtracked my experiences, with Like Water for Chocolate one of my most constant aural companions.
Common’s fourth LP still sounds as fresh and exhilarating as it did when I first heard it twenty years ago. And while it may not stand as my favorite album in Common’s prolific discography (here’s looking at you, Resurrection), it is indisputably the first classic hip-hop album of our current millennium and one of the greatest ever to emerge in the genre’s rich and ever-evolving history.
LISTEN: