One of hip-hop's starting points were the black street poets, who emerged in the late sixties. Basically they were an offshoot of the merger that the beatniks formed between jazz and poetry, but their music relied heavily on the beat, and sometimes their only accompaniment was tom-toms. The singing was also completely rhythmic, kind of a precursor for rap, but with less flow and more pulsation, emphasizing every syllable. The content of their songs was highly political, and expressed the tumultuous spirit of the time. Contrary to what is claimed by some, hip-hop itself did not emerge out of this style, but from street dance parties, and drew more from reggae and funk. But hip-hop DJs did sometimes play the records of these street poets, and the rappers listened and internalized. When rap turned political at the end of the eighties, it became apparent how much they owe these pioneers.
Common is one of the rappers who came out of this political wave, and he's also very aware of black history, and believes that one of the roles of hip-hop is to educate the youth about it. Here he joins the Last Poets, the greatest street-poet band, to pay respect for the past. Together, they eulogize one of the most important places in the formation of black culture: the corner. The street corners of the ghettos were the places that gave host to the preachers, the street poets, the doo-wop singers, the break-dancers, the rappers and many other elements in this culture, which so affected the lives of all of us. Common's rap moves on several levels, the main one being just a description of the flow of sights and sounds that pass through the corner on any given day, but on other levels there are descriptions that paint the street-corner as a place where ideas meet, converge and go in other directions, and also descriptions that turn the corner into a modern version of the blues singers' fabled crossroads: a place where you must determine the direction your life will take from here on, your fate always riding on your choice. The Last Poets, on their part, focus more on the political significance of these meetings and choices, and remind us how they shaped and advanced black culture in the past. Thus, the record itself becomes a corner, a meeting between two generations of black music, and Kanye West mixes it all together to make sure it works, and even sounds like great pop.
Another duet between a male rapper and a female singer, but more mature, from two of the more serious artists of black music. Common was an underground rapper in the nineties, one of these rapper-poets who regarded their artform as a profound manifestation of African-American identity, and his records dealt earnestly with black history and culture, and criticized the more commercial and gaudy sides of hip-hop. Erykah Badu is hailed as the woman who brought the soul back into black pop, with her style that combined hip-hop, jazz and soul, and earned the label neo-soul. Together, they sing a rap-soul ballad that can be heard as a regular love song, but also as an ode to hip-hop, the music that filled their life with content and stood beside them in rough times. In a decade that saw hip-hop and R'n'B becoming so popular that even artists like Badu and Common got a lot of exposure, it was good to see that there was still someone fighting to preserve the mature side of the music.
On Common's part, in particular, the record is an important statement. In his famous 1994 record 'I Used to Love H.E.R', he declared a crisis in his love for hip-hop (also personified as a girl), because she started hanging out with gangsters, and became addicted to money, violence and drugs. Here, at a time when hip-hop was coming out of the gangsta-rap years, he reaffirms his love for "her". It was heartwarming to hear.
