Common - The Corner video

Time for another resurrection of the blog. So it's appropriate this post is about Common.

I must have signed up for the mailing list on Common's site a while back (something I've done at way too many websites, though I still don't get an unmanageable amount of spam somehow).

Nothing much had come through Common's list lately, but this weekend I got an e-mail promoting the digital release and the video for his new track, "The Corner." I've listened to it a few times over the past month. It was either leaked or surreptiously released digitally, as it appeared on a bunch of audioblogs around the same time. I got it from this post on Soul Sides, the one audioblog I've been frequenting most frequently. Brady later pointed out that it had appeared on others, such as this post of Cocaine Blunts.

Enough with the audioblog links. Here is where you go to view the video for "The Corner", which I highly recommend you do, esp if you've spent some time in Chicago. Some highlights: plenty of shots of the lake and skyline (to give you a warm embrace, so to speak)...cruising South Side streets ("the stories told by Stony and Cottage Grove")...Common rapping on the corner--down the street from an El station...numerous shots of el trains and tracks (reinforcing the idea that a motif in Common's writings is public transportation as a public space: "sometimes I take the el/to gel with the real world...")...the projects (Robert Taylor & Ida B Wells?)...

Overall, Kanye does a good job directing.

Had a thought to put up some other hip hop links, related to the few shows we've been to in the new year (Questlove spinning a set at Club Six in back in January, Crown City Rockers tearing the roof off of The Independent in early Feb, and the Stones Throw show at Mighty a couple weeks ago (for which you might find the flyer here))...I'll maybe come back to those in a future post.

(Although the show wasn't all that, it's alway interesting to drop by the Stones Throw site. For example, they've got something up about the upcoming release of a compilation of psychedelic West African funk/soul...and a peek at the DJ Rels page revealed a 30-minute RealAudio mix, which I'm listening to and recording right now (with a new and hopefully improved version of iRecordMusic) ).

One last link: surfing to Common's site led me back to okayplayer.com, which I hadn't visited in a while. Got to make it a point to put that back into the daily operation, if only for The Boondocks. Check out today's edition here.