Bkyle: What’s up OkayPlayers?! This is your boy Bkyle, and we sittin’ in with our boy, Common, OkayPlayer style. He’s about to break it down for us and tell us about this whole journey into Electric Circus. C’mon man, let’s get into the flow.

Common: It’s a beautiful experience; we’re on the flow. And we want to get into my album and we wanna let y’all know what ‘Electric Circus’ came from - what we were thinking when we did this journey, when we took this journey. This album, ‘Electric Circus,’ when we began it, it began in 2001, in January. And our plan, our plot was to make some music that was free, some music that was pushing the sky, that was pushing the envelope of what we expect hip-hop to be, and what we expect Black music to be. I joined with ?uestlove of The Roots, James Poyser, Jay Dee, Pino Palladino, who plays bass, and Jeff Lee Johnson, the guitarist. That was the core producers of the album. The album is also produced by - the Neptunes did two songs on it, and this brother Karriem Riggins.

(‘Ferris Wheel’ begins to play in the background) The first track on the album is called ‘Ferris Wheel.’ And we began this track with a prayer, and this prayer is done by Vinia Mojica. It’s a prayer to one of the Orishas, one of the Orishas she’s…the prayer is really, it’s like inducing the album, it’s like an invocation to the album, saying we paying homage to this Orisha. This Orisha we go to is named Oggun. And Oggun is about, is about war, he’s also – in the prayer that we say – it’s about freedom. And Vinia Mojica is on the song, along with this sistah Marie from Zap Mama. And basically the…what we tried to create was just a, a song that was like letting you know ‘we’re about to take you out there, we’re about to take you to another place,’ but, we wanted the prayer to still be the core essence of the vocals of the song. And the prayer is really, it’s basically that journey and that trip to let you know we’re about to go somewhere.

Bkyle: Right, right. I’ll tell you what, this’ll take OkayPlayer somewhere right now and talk about this next song on the album, which happens to be one of my favorites. (‘Soul Power’ begins to play in the background)

Common: The next song on the album is called ‘Soul Power.’ And ‘Soul Power’ at this point, we produced this song in January of 2002. And I went to Jay Dee, this song is produced by Jay Dee, I went to his home and was like ‘Jay, we need some raw stuff now.’ ‘Cause we did a lot of the live musical pieces on the album, and this piece, I was in his basement and I was like ‘Jay, we need something raw.’ But I approached this song, and I approached the album by trying to challenge myself and have different rhythms to the music that I did. So what Jay Dee did was program the drums with a sound that was very different. The drums are like, they feel double-time (drums begin to play in the background) they go boom-bap, boom-bap. And I, I had to, when I heard the music, I was like yes, it’s so rugged, but at the same time it was, it was going somewhere else, you know, basically because of the rhythm. And it challenged me as an emcee. This song came out to be so powerful because he had those cuts already, and I just felt like just rhyming, man. The beat just made me feel like, just rhyme the way you know how to rhyme, and rhyme rugged and rhyme with different kind of rhythm, the way the music was going.

(‘Soul Power’ plays out the end of this part of the interview)


Transcript of Pt. II coming later today

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down on the upside