I'll never forget buying EC because I bought that cd and Nas' God Son on the same day(a Saturday night). Don't remember what I was doing through the week that I didn't buy the Common album because I was always buying releases on Tuesday. Anyway, I get home with the lil lady, listen to Common's album first and thought, "This is the worst shyt I've ever heard in my life." I tried again a week later and thought the same thing. I didn't like one song on it and was shocked that Jay Dee's beats were so weak.
A year later I tried to listen to it again and it sounded even worse. I stashed the album with the rest of my Common albums and wrote him off until BE was released and I thought BE saved his career. Finding Forever was a released and a few more(I didn't like UMC either). Fast forward to 2018; by then I'm in my 40s. I've done the whole indie hip hop things over the years, toured and did shows with lots of artists(both mainstream and underground) along with placements on underground releases. By this time, I'm just not feeling hip hop music as a whole anymore. it's no longer a turntable and a beat machine going into a console. My team and I are into EDM, funk, and combining genres together uses less and less quantizing if any at all. Live drums, bass, moog, an assortment of instruments and percussion creating soundscapes with a hip hop feel to it. So one day I decide to just put the cd on through the studio monitors and what I heard last year was different than what I had heard before.
Now, I'm hear crisp production, instrumentation, and an album not made for the hip hop fan. I was in my mid 20s in december of 2002 and now I was in my early 40s and for the first time I understood it. I listened to that album 3 times straight that day and for the rest of the month. I understood now!! It's a musical masterpiece. One of the guys I worked with mostly worked in a vinyl store. He was barely 20 and young enough to be my son and we agreed that it wasn't an album for the hip hop heads as we discussed it and he said that he had always liked it(he plays multiple instruments a lot better than me). It's really an album ahead of its time that got the criticism because it was marketed wrong. Common was coming off the classic LWFC and everyone expected a similar follow up and didn't get that. I now understand how great it is. I've always loved other genres of music, but once I started doing production in other genres, it made me kinda scoff at the simplicity of hip hop that I had been listening to for over 30 years. This is how I feel about the album.
Later on, I listened to Tribe's TLM again and I now like it as well because I understood it better as I got older and was more mature musically..
tracks and some of his lyrics are kinda weak
