Music

Common – I used to love H.E.R.

A Hip Hop classic which really has stood the test of time. I first heard this song when i was 10 years old, i fell in love with it then and am still in love with it now 15 years later. Off the truly great album Resurrection, the No I.D. produced track samples George Bensons “The changing world”. Using an extended metaphor by taking a woman to represent rap music, Common takes us on a journey of his love life with hip hop and his hatred of how she has changed over time.

Blackstar ft Common – Respiration

One of the greatest hip hop tracks of all time, off Blackstar’s album Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Blackstar. The lyrics of the album version of “Respiration” are a melancholy ode to city life. Whereas cities are often derided as inorganic, the song makes uses many references to features of organic life such as breathing, eating, and sleeping. However, most of these speak to a dark reality of life in the city. Mos Def compares the New York City to an apple, but not necessarily the benign “Big Apple” of myth: “the shiny apple is bruised but sweet and if you choose to eat you could lose your teeth.” Talib Kweli talks about “breathing in deep city breaths, sitting on shitty steps, we stooped to new lows, hell froze the night the city slept.” In another extremely poetic line, Kweli gives life and flight to the aspirations of city dwellers, most of which go unrealized: “you look up in the sky for God and what you see behind the smog are broken dreams flying away on the wings of the obscene.”