On a song called "Announcement" from his eighth LP, Universal Mind Control, Common raps, "I still love H.E.R., she be needin' the dick/ When it comes to hip-hop, it's just me and my bitch." He's referring to his 1994 song "I Used to Love H.E.R.", where he began to seriously define himself as a moralistic foil to the gangster rap phenomenon. The reference seems ironic on an album this vacuous and amoral.
Then again, the song has been ironic from the start. In conflating hip-hop's downfall with that of a loose woman, Common succumbed to a definitive moral hazard-- misogyny-- of the gangster rap he railed against. During the last faint reverberations of hip-hop's so-called golden age, this odd blend of puritanical defiance and doomed acquiescence wasn't unusual. Notice how, on A Tribe Called Quest's "Check the Rhime", Phife goes from "have all my hos in check" to "my aura's positive, I don't promote no junk" in three seconds flat.
Common emerged (as Common Sense) at the tail end of Afrocentric rap's heyday, which helped him escape obsolescence as his peers fell by the wayside. Treading the precarious line between positive maverick and mainstream star has defined him for his entire career. On Be and Finding Forever, with assistance from Kanye West, he struck a winning, humanizing balance between moralism and hedonism, proving that the two needn't be mutually exclusive. But on Universal Mind Control, his personalities split off into what seem like two wildly different EPs, one awful and one tepid.
The awful half is the first one, a bizarre concoction of featherweight electro, sex raps à la LL Cool J, "Sir Psycho Sexy"-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, party-starting clichés, and interminable A-A-A-A rhyme patterns that were fresh circa "Rapper's Delight". Putting aside the obvious laziness of Common's lyrics and the Neptunes' production, it seems more than anything like a profound failure of self-awareness. On the title track, Pharrell informs us that "This is that new shit and it don't feel the same," which Common contradicts with an almost satirically old-school "dang diggy dang da-dang da-dang dang."
"Punch Drunk Love (The Eye)" is just cynical, with its throwaway Kanye hook (gotta get him in the credits somehow) and buried Auto-Tuned singing by Pharrell. "Make My Day" benefits from a jovial Cee-Lo cameo and a spry jackhammer beat by Mr. DJ that a harder rapper would eat up, but Common needs warm, soulful beats to thrive, and he mostly sounds lost here. At least the inane lyrics ("Baby girl I'm a man/ And we can do this my way/ Take a ride on the highway/ And pretend that it's Friday... and it is!") gain some incidental surging effects from Mr. DJ's efforts. The ugly, blocky nadir "Sex 4 Suga" sounds like an Andy Samberg parody. Things settle down a little with "Announcement", but you know you've got a problem when a Pharrell verse actually livens up your song.
The tepid second half is oddly something of a relief. Common shows signs of life on "Gladiator", surging powerfully over noir strings and jittery piano, but comparing yourself to Nelson Mandela-- not to mention "a radical" who "don't fit the game"-- is a tough sell on this record. At least Common sounds comfortable amid the breezy chimes and canned platitudes. A perfunctory Obama shout-out on "Changes" finds Common taking a rare glimpse outside of himself, but it's too little, too late. Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be-- which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.
