Shamefully, the most interesting song on the album, "Misunderstood," leaked months before the disc's drop date. Here Dilla is West's Kubrick, except "Finding Forever" is infinitely better than "A.I." West, who produced all but three songs, says he went about creating the sound for this album as if he were J Dilla - much the way Steven Spielberg completed "A.I." for Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999 before he could make the movie. He hums his way through like a human brass section, but because the song originally appeared on J Dilla's posthumous album "The Shining" in 2006, it can't technically count as a D'Angelo sighting. The track features D'Angelo, who aside from random sightings at Best Buy stores in Virginia has been out of the spotlight for most of the millennium. Molded along the same soft lines, but with a few too many double entendres, "So Far to Go" is another playfully sensual call-out to the lady listeners. "Rocked a fur in the summer so somebody would pet it."Ĭommon openly admits to making love songs (as opposed to chick records), and "I Want You," a will.i.am track apparently put together when the two linked up for those Gap commercials, and "Breakin' My Heart" are more than acceptable guilty pleas. "They say 'Ye is, but dude was big-headed," he raps. Though not nearly as playful as he was on his 1994 classic, "Resurrection," Common still flashes a sharp wit, even poking fun at West on "Drivin' Me Wild," a drum-and-piano set accented by singer-songwriter/MySpace success story Lily Allen. "The People," "The Game," and "Southside" aren't so much song titles as prompts, allowing Common to fill every nook of every bar with his humanizing verses. "Finding Forever" finds Common at his best lyrically, which means at his most basic, bending beats to fit his deliberate delivery.Īs West's drum-and-string buildup gives way to harp strums and flute puffs on "Start the Show," Common drops a jewel - "Twelve monkeys on a stage hard to tell who's a gorilla, you better off as a drug dealer" - then leaves it open for the guessing game to begin. Set to drop today, "Finding Forever" is another stage in Common's growth as an artist.Ĭommon has developed a deeper sense of self and a deeper sense of soul, refining what was evident on "Be." Here he's teamed almost exclusively with Kanye West, whose mission is apparently to create truly timeless music.
The title was nebulous, pretentious, and lofty, the blogs said. The concept was noble, and if any artist could do it, Common would be the one.īut by telling the world a year in advance that the follow-up to 2005's critically acclaimed and - finally - commercially viable "Be" would be titled "Finding Forever," the Chicago rapper/conscious rapper/rapper's rapper left himself at the mercy of the hip-hop intelligentsia.
0 kommentar(er)
