Common - The Light

"Love has no limit let's spend it slow forever."

Album: Like Water for Chocolate [4th album]
Recorded: Dearborn Heights, Michigan
Genre: Hip Hop, Conscious Hip Hop
Album Release: March 28th 2000
Single Release: July 18th 2000 [3rd single]
Length: 4.21
Producer: J Dilla
Vocalist: Common [age 27]
Label: MCA Records

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Music Video


Live from Yahoo! Live Sets in 2007


J Dilla remix featuring Erykah Badu

Charts, Streams & Sales

USA: #44
USA (albums): Certified gold on August 11th 2000
Spotify: 20,000,000 +
YouTube Music: 30,000,000 +
Pitchfork Top 500 Songs of the 2000s: #268
About.com's Top 100 Greatest Hip Hop Songs of All Time: #98
Grammy Award Nominee 2001: Best Rap Solo Performance

Credits

Main Sample - Bobby Caldwell - Open Your Eyes (1980)
Drum Sample - Detroit Emeralds - You're Getting A Little Too Smart (1973). The drums on this record have been used on beats for Raekwon, Lord Finesse, Kendrick Lamarr, LL Cool J, 2Pac and many more.

Details

• The track is a love song about Common's then girlfriend Erykah Badu and she is featured in the music video. 
  
• The album, 'Like Water for Chocolate', takes its name from a book released in 1989 by Laura Esquivel. Common liked the title because he had to think twice about what it meant. He evidently wanted the same for his own album as he reused the title from the book. Common's own interpretation of 'Like Water For Chocolate' is that the water represents him as a pisces and that the chocolate represents black music.
  
  
• The music video features a barefoot Common rhyming and peeling a mango.
• Common's favourite lyric from the song is "it don't take a whole day to recognise sunshine."
  
• The digga-da digga-da was recorded as a placeholder scat by Common because he hadn't yet finished the lyrics. He decided to keep the digga-da despite writing and recording new lyrics what must have been [he said] 20 times.
  
  
• Common changed his name from Common Sense after a reggae band with the same name sued him.
  
  
• In the 90's, artists like Common, Outkast and The Roots were considered to be alternative hip hop because their music was different from the thugged out rap that dominated the charts. Whereas today it's though to be a core part of the hip hop genre and the real alternative is abstract or experimental hip hop.


• "I would do things and say things to provoke a strong emotion, regardless of what that emotion was. "I want to be the one the make you happiest and hurt you the most" I once said in a rhyme. Over time, though, I’ve come to understand myself well enough to know the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy love." (Common in his autobiography One Day It'll All Make Sense) 


• "When we did "The Light" I was really just writing a love song and being really optimistic and candid. I knew it sounded great but I never knew what it would get to be. That was the first song that I had on the radio, on mainstream radio. I was performing at Summer Jam and that was the first time I remember seeing young black girls singing my song. Teenagers to adult women. I was like, wow, this is amazing. Most of the songs I created prior to that were so hip-hop-oriented and weren’t as catchy." (Common talking to grammy.com)
  

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