Why do we hate Universal Mind Control?

Common – Universal Mind Control
Geffen, 2008

Rating: 3 of 5

On paper, this looks like my kind of Common album.  Com drops the fatherly boho schtick he’s gradually grown into and makes a *fun* album!  Not a pedestrian Kanye beat in sight, and no sign of his flaccid mixes, which have run 2 consecutive Common albums into the ground.  Instead, he calls in the Neptunes and Mr. DJ for a retro, electro vibe (Where do I sign up?!).  I was all set to fly in the face of my hater contemporaries and tell them to loosen their crocheted pants and take that nag champa stick out of their ass.  Loosen up and have *fun*!  The sad fact of the matter, however, is that for the most part, they were right.

UMC is a set of 10 songs, totaling less than 40 minutes in length.  It would fit on a single 12″ record.  If that’s not retro, I don’t know what is.  The record opens with the title track, a Bambaata-aping electro party bounce with the aid of Pharrell on the hook.  So far, so good.  Common is flowing fairly sparsely, but after all, it’s an electro song.  The fast tempo makes it tough for most people to squeeze bars too full of syllables.  True enough, but as the tempos slow back to normal on later tracks, it becomes clear that Com is on straight elementary mode.

Now Rashid Lynn has never been a complex emcee, structurally speaking.  This is the man who gave us “I’m a child of the unh…the ’87 unh…,” and we loved him for it.  If he wasn’t a verbal acrobat, he also wasn’t one to waste words, and there was a lot of impact in those easy-flowing rhymes.  I suppose the most troubling aspect of this album isn’t that he lightens up and sacrifices gravity for accessibility.  It’s that he sucks at it.

“Sometimes the best things are not in your plans/You came to the sand and got more than a tan.”  The man who told us if he’s going to change the world, it’s going to be through [his daughter] is now a free and easy beach bum that doesn’t write well?  God I hope he wasn’t wearing capris when recorded this.  The album mostly alternates between mindless fluff like this and hopelessly blunt sex rhymes that are the rap equivalent of sex scene dialog written by pimple-faced high school boys.  There is a little standard hip hop bragging, but even that mostly falls flat.  

On a slightly more positive note, there is some good production work here.  The grooves are cooler, and more synthesized than on any past Common album, except maybe the musical pariah that is Electric Circus.  Unlike EC, however, this album is too short for any extended flights of…whatever.  Aside from the title track, the Clipse-esque Neptunes guitar licks and synths on Announcement, the anthemic stomp of Gladiator, and the frenetic electro bounce of Everywhere are all winners.  The latter is probably the best-executed track on the album, with Martina Topley-Bird dropping reverb’ed-out vocals that sat nicely with the groove, and once again, Com’s hyper-simplified flow fitting with the overclocked beat.  

I really wanted to like this album, and I’m still probably going to easy on it by rating it a 3, but this is simply not up to par.  Whether Common is pulling a Jay-Z, and completely giving up on creating anything stimulating in his late career, or this is just another left turn by a man who has now made three (EC, Be, and this one) in his 15+ years of rhyming, is hard to say.  It’s time to admit, however, that it has been about a decade since Common was in his prime as a rapper, and he may never reach that level again.  Then again, four left turns and you’re going straight.