Obviously the content I don't identify with so much as their general dispositions, our experiences have been quite different lol.

But I agree with everyone who said Phonte because he does just seem to literally tell us all about his growth on every record, whether through his MCing or his singing. That Foreign Exchange commercial w/the girl listening to each of their albums as she grew up really resonated with me, as I'm sure it did a lot of us.

Common tops my personal list. I am a bit younger than him but I felt like I connected with his art on a human level more than any other artist I've really ever listened to. A good example is that I individually got into a Pink Floyd/Hendrix/acid rock/classic rock phase (like most white kids my age range did) my freshman and sophomore year of college. And drop dead in the middle of that time period, Common put out Electric Circus, which obviously borrowed a loooot from those artists and that time period of music specifically. So that really felt like a, "whoa, this guy really gets me," type of moment haha. And even more specifically, I also got exposed to people, things, ideas in college that I hadn't necessarily been truly exposed to in the mostly-white suburb I grew up in - such as, real life LGBTQ people ! So around that time, I was going through the process of learning about, and subsequently shedding my childish bigotry and homophobia that my friends and I had normalized throughout our youth and teenage years. And on Electric Circus, Comm did the same w/"Between Me, You, & Liberation". So again, that particular *track*, and the whole album, made me feel like I was growing up right alongside that dude, even tho he was a bit older.

And Blu just always felt like a new-era Common to me, specifically all his work with Exile.