Thoughts on the Common Vs. Drake Beef

By now it's a pretty common tactic among hip hop artists.  Suppose you're an older hip hop artist, whose best days are behind you.  But you've got an album coming out and you have a reputation to live up to.  You can promote your album while sticking strictly to the conventional means, or you can launch an unprovoked attack on a young artist who happens to be murdering the game at the moment.  By choosing the latter, you at least get your name in the press, and hopefully some of the popularity that your target presently enjoys will be transferred onto you once he's been vanquished.

Given Drake's top 5 status and his reputation as the anti-thug, it's almost baffling that no one tried this on him sooner.  Given the slim likelihood of Drake responding with a diss track, and the even slimmer likelihood of him "taking it to the streets" as they say, this proposition seems like a win-win.  So when I heard that Common went at Drake in the latest single off his new album, I wasn't surprised by the act so much as by the person who was behind it.

I used to be a huge Common fan.  At one point I might have even had him in my top 5 mc's of all time.  In his prime, there was no questioning his lyrical wizardry.  But I also appreciated his subject matter, and the fact that he attempted to tackle heavy issues through a thoughtful and introspective lens that few other rappers dared to don.  But that was then and this is now.  Common has since devolved into a b-list actor who stars in romantic comedies with Queen Latifah.  And after several recent television appearances including The Daily Show with John Stewart and Real Time with Bill Maher, I now realize the whole intellectual persona was largely an act as well.

It's really easy to pass oneself off as an intellectual in rap songs.  Since modern rap is usually a staccato of disjointed soundbites and sentence fragments, the artist is never forced to flesh out or back up their ideas.  Therefore, one can easily cloak their verse in the language of black consciousness, whose buzz words we're all familiar with, and gullible audiences will accept this manufactured image as valid.  That's why in recent years I've grown increasingly skeptical of any musical artists attempting to anoint themselves as thinkers.  With the possible exception of Dead Prez, most so-called conscious rappers are pseudo-intellectual pretenders.  In this respect, I put Common in the same boat as artists like Most Def.  When both artists appeared on Real Time (in separate episodes), as a socially conscious black man myself, and as a member of the hip hop community, I cringed at how incurious, incoherent and uninformed both men were.  To his credit, at least Common appeared to realize that he was in over his head, opting to remain mostly quiet unless probed directly by a question from the host, at which point he'd stumble through some unremarkable rote response.  Most Def, by contrast, wouldn't shut up; his years of being the ostensibly smartest guy in the cipher having apparently robbed him of any serviceable sense of self-awareness.

Watching Common's video for the above-mentioned track, "Sweet", it's hard to conclude that the guy is anything but an actor.  I concede that acting, along with image/persona manufacturing, are a huge part of the game.  And ironically, I think this is the only facet of hip hop where Common outpoints Drake, the former TV actor.  But in this most recent video, Common's resurrected tough-guy act bears the strong sheen of artifice.  First off, he appears to be in Haiti, or some other developing country to which that he has absolutely no connection, and he's all by himself throwing an impassioned temper tantrum aimed at no one in particular.  This, coupled with his ultra-wooly toque being worn in what appears to be 90-degree weather, makes him look more like a homeless person who's off his meds, than a not-to-be-fucked-with rapper.  Then when you consider that this whole tirade was completely unprovoked, the whole thing just seems bizarre.

When Common appeared on the morning radio show of hip hop radio personality Sway, the DJ and his co-host attempted to decipher Common's motives for going at Drake.  In the original tirade, Common's primary gripe appeared to be that he had a problem with rappers who sing too much.  This is odd considering, that probably half of all rappers today at least sing their hooks, and of those, at least half infuse their verses with some melodic inflection.  It's also a strange considering that one of Common's most frequent collaborators and his fellow Chicago native, Kanye West, is one of the pioneers of highly emotional, melodic rap, the same kind that Common claims to be so disgusted by.

Therefore it was obvious that there had to be something more to the beef than just Common's aversion to rappers who sing.  And when asked about this on the radio show, Common effectively copped out by claiming that the rant was only retroactively directed at Drake after Drake assumed it was about him.  In other words, if Drake believed it was about him, then it was about him.  After he grudgingly gave Drake props for being a talented artist, with some coaxing by Sway, Common went on to take issue with Drake's having claimed to be the best rapper in the game.  This is even less credible considering that most top rappers (literally, more than 50%) claim to be the best rapper alive.  In the track "Sweet", Common himself makes this claim several times.  The only difference is that when Drake says it, it's actually arguable.

Given this propensity for misdirection, I'm not inclined to believe Common's latest tough-guy pose.  Not from the guy who, just this year, performed for the Obama's.  Not from the guy who shows up on mainstream late night television in fitted dress shirts and bow ties eager to smile for the camera and talk about the need for positive change.  Now he's going at rappers for being "sweet", an African American epithet used half affectionately, half pejoratively to refer to men that are thought to be gay or effeminate?

I'm not trying to argue that Common is soft.  I give Common props for not backing down when Westside Connection tried to go at him back in the nineties.  In fact, if I'm not mistaken, he even performed his diss track "The Bitch in You" at a concert in LA at the height of the conflict.  But that was then, this is now.  Today Common is a 40-year-old man with a teenage daughter.  A daughter who, like most other girls her age and from her demographic, probably loves her some Drake.  And this, along with the extra publicity, is probably the chief motivation behind this latest hip hop beef. Common is simply jealous of Drake's Success.