The 1990s legend Common believes exemplified conscious rap
Common has developed a reputation as an exemplar of conscious rap, a label he’s been proud to bear, but when it comes to assessing other rappers who embody the tradition, he has his own thoughts about who leads the way.
Com believes that Tupac Shakur was the ultimate model for what a conscious rapper could be, and it wasn’t only because of the sharpness of his social and political commentary. Pac’s music revealed the complicated, often contradictory person that he truly was, which, as Com sees it, is what made him great.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2007 about his own characterisation as a conscious rapper, Com revealed that, after some initial reservations about it, he came to embrace the label. That was helped by looking back through pop culture history and noting the artists who, in their own way, represented a “conscious” strain of their own respective scenes.
It was “the Marvin Gayes or the Bob Marleys, Bob Dylan,” he noted. These were the conscious artists that he was more than happy to carry the torch for.
In terms of hip hop, he highlighted that conscious rappers can sometimes be subjected to dissing from those who reject the approach. He cited Ice Cube and 50 Cent as artists who have talked “trash about conscious rappers”, but he clearly thinks they’re missing the bigger picture.
It’s here that his thoughts about Tupac become relevant. Pac wasn’t only a conscious rapper, as he dealt with a range of different subjects in his songs. Some of his lyrics and actions in life were arguably entirely contrary to the values of conscious hip hop, but that was OK; it was human to embody contradictions like that.
“I think Tupac was a good example of the balance of who we are as people,” Common argued, “You could do songs that would be going at another rapper and be talking about thug life, but then you could do a ‘Dear Mama’.”
Pac could do it all; when he was alive and making music, he could express thug life, and he could express a profound awareness of social and political injustice. These instincts could, at times, clash with each other, making a simple assessment of his views difficult, but there is an authenticity to his contrasting features.
Pac was still such a young man when he was killed, and his short life had been an intense one lived under public scrutiny. It is only natural, then, that his views were confused sometimes, but for Common, his contributions to conscious rap remain as clear and powerful as they ever did.