It was the spring of 2000 when I stumbled on the masterpiece Like Water For Chocolate. I was in college, and copped it from a friend who was going on and on about the album. I have to admit I wasn’t all gung ho about it; Common’s previous 1997 album One Day It Will All Make Sense wasn’t my cup of tea, especially the lead single featuring Lauryn Hill, the bore fest called Retrospect For Life. I thought it was all a half a bottle of weak sauce. I also didn’t dig Common stealing the title from the masterpiece of the foreign film of the same name that I love so much I watch in Spanish with no subtitles.
Still, I’m open to being proven wrong, so I took the CD anyway, hoping it would be an easy skip type of album that I could hurry up and give back. When I got around to listening to it was on my way to Walmart not too far from my campus. Armed with my portable CD player plugged into the aux of my 1987 Volvo 740 GLE, I started the journey of what would become my love of this album, which has been going strong now for twenty-four years with no interruption.
It’s good to note that I never gave the album back. Shame on me for that.
Like Water For Chocolate starts off like cotton candy, melting in your mouth while sticking to your hands. Time Travelin’ brings us in with some Fela Kuti tribute vibes in an all-star ensemble that involved Common’s dad Lonnie Lynn, with a jazz fusion funk that is hard to miss. Heat brings it up a notch with what Common affectionately calls “the hot shit”, a self-explanatory borage of limericks that gives just a taste of his lyrical depth of range that solidifies his rightful place in the cypher of well versed rappers in the game.
Cold Blooded (which is another song with another borrowed title via Rick James) tells no lies. Half diss track, half reflection, half state of Common affairs in a blitz of iambic pentameter that flows on the off beat of Roy Hargrove’s horn intermixed under a Parliament Funkadelic sample make the core of the content, a good banger leading us slowly but surely into the meat and potatoes of the album. Dooinit explodes from the first beat, the four on the floor walking the bass as Common lets his verbal viciousness rip is the proof in the pudding that Common can battle rap with the best of them, a bold open letter declaration that he is here for the beef and calling out rappers without naming them but dropping just enough hints to where you know who he is talking about. Focused like Gordon Parks when he saw the dark, Common makes it be clearly known if you coming jiggy he is going at your jugular.
Now let me bring you to the light, albeit not that bright.
The Light ain’t that great of a song, mostly because it’s Common’s sappy love song announcement to the fact he was dating Erykah Badu (who appears of course in the video), yet they were broken up by the time the video aired. Honestly, it was the weakest song they could have put out on the album for a video though it is a favorite in the hip-hop community for the video and the combined three samples of Bobby Caldwell’s Open Your Eyes, Detroit Emeralds’ You’re Getting A Little Too Short, and Henry Kaiser’s It’s A Wonderful Life for that killer J Dilla beat. For all the hip-hop heads that are in love on Valentine’s Day, here’s your sappy love song.
From here on out the album shines with a few standout bangers that carry the album home.
Funky For You, a tour de force featuring Jill Scott and Bilal, who just absolutely, positively kill the ending of the song. I’m talking mic drop moment to the tenth power. That cut STILL gets play in the ride to this day and is a shame that Bilal and Jill Scott did not do an album with Common with this same energy. The Mos Def duet The Questions is a unique wordplay that slays asking questions and giving answers in a cypher of more questions that give questionable answers if you’re paying attention.
The Sixth Sense featuring Bilal is the second and last song to get a video, spurred by a narrative of a riot in New York (that really stings since it should have been Chicago for obvious reasons) as Common gives a state of afrocentric affairs since it’s rap for real and something they feel. It’s a fire hot cut that digs into the heels of A Film Called Pimp featuring MC Lyte, which featured the hardest bars she had spit since Ruffneck. The tit for tat the two get into at the hustler convention got them set up, as they claim, like the rap game Ashford and Simpson. Trust and believe this song is one of the coldest double entendre cuts ever made, bar none. That leads us to a break here and there with Nag Champa that drives us into the nastiest Common song ever recorded, Payback Is A Grandmother.
Payback Is A Grandmother slaps, and slaps hard. The treacherous tale of old ladies having a night out at the casino (which we in Chicago affectionately call the boat) who get jacked by some cats at a barbershop Common is familiar with set the stage with this classic banger. One of the old ladies is his grandmother, which spurns Common to play Scooby Doo and find out who did it via jungle drums on the block. All roads lead to an explosive end where Common and the crew ride down hard and get into some Chicago shit. It is by far the most truthful Chicago song ever recorded, and the most epic of modern times. Common should be proud he pulled that one out of the dark caverns.
Like Water For Chocolate is that guilty pleasure that Chicago needed. Rashid should be proud.
