COMMON FINDING FOREVER DOPEFILE SERIES

'Southside' features a guitar riff that sounds like a rote impersonation of the bugged-out synth on Donuts' 'Da Factory' 'Forever Begins' relies too heavily on a washed-out supper-club piano and an obvious break from Paul Simon's '50 Ways to Leave Your Lover' and even the fairly close approximations- particularly the 70s Hancock/Wonder soul-jazz of 'The People' and 'Break My Heart'- lack Dilla's knack for immaculate drum programming and thick, rich bass. Kanye West, who once again produces the majority of the album, has tried making a tribute to Common's Jay Dee-fueled Soulquarian-era sound, and he doesn't fit it well at all, managing half of its vibe and none of its energy.

COMMON FINDING FOREVER DOPEFILE SERIES

And he didn't lace it with a series of warmed-over pop-culture wisecracks, either: Between the references to OK Go's treadmill video, the crazy astronaut lady, and gossip-rag celebrity couples (Kimora Lee and Russell Simmons, sure, but Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon?) on the Lily Allen-augmented 'Drivin' Me Wild,' he's more VH-1 than KRS-One.Д«ut while it's easy to pick and choose the goofiest shit Common says on a record, the lyrics aren't necessarily what makes Finding Forever so tedious. But the narrative in 'Misunderstood' about the loosely defined street hustler and the college girl turned drug-addict stripper seem more distant than the more firsthand-feeling observations in Be's closing track 'It's Your World', and the first verse of 'The Game' has so many disconnected talking points (global warming, spoiled rich teenagers, black power, the greatness of Big Daddy Kane) over the course of 40 seconds that it feels like a suffocating avalanche of conscious-rap clichГ©s.ДЄnd sometimes it gets borderline-Mencia ignorant: Describing white people's supposed unfamiliarity with day-to-day struggles on 'The People' requires a lot more insight than claiming they prefer to 'focus on dogs and yoga' (is that how Jeremy Piven lived on the set of Smokin' Aces?), and if the flirtation in 'Break My Heart' was a real-life conversation, it'd probably wind up being mocked on Overheard in Chicago: 'It was a dream day/ Met her on Spring Break/ Look like the type that be like 'no habla Ingles'/ She said 'you look like you rap, where's your bling-ay/ And your clothes are tight but you don't seem gay'/ I said 'naw, that's dude from N-Sync-ay.'' At least when he griped about black men dating white women, he tried reminding himself to go beyond the surface. The righteousness worked well on Be since Common tended to leave the self- out of it, and there's a few moments on Finding Forever that succeed for the same reason his intricately delivered insights into the vicious cycle of ghetto life in 'Black Maybe' ('We leanin' on a wall that ain't, that ain't stable/ It's hard to turn on the hood that made you/ To leave, be afraid to, the same streets that raised you can aid you') and his barbed fury on 'Start the Show' ('With 12 monkeys on the stage it's hard to see who's a guerilla/ You was better as a drug dealer') don't just hit hard, they hit precisely. There's screw albums with more liveliness than this.Д¬ommon may not have gotten more confident as he's matured- he didn't really need to, already having developed an authoritative voice by age 22, and at 35 he's still as comfortable taking the pulpit as any MC his age- but his street wisdom and his man-of-the-people rhetoric have developed a cynical tone that too often turns his tales of humanistic living and tragedy into joyless scolding.

Although the Kanye West partnership that flourished in Common's 2005 return to form felt like something that could reap a lot of creative dividends over the course of subsequent albums, Finding Forever is a turn toward going through the motions, weighed down by an adult-contemporary atmosphere that mistakes fatigue for relaxation. Seeing as how Be was a commercial, critical, and fanbase success that restored Common's rep, it's weird that its successor follows its winning formula to the letter yet somehow sounds comparatively lead-footed and tired.

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