Common - Nag Champa (Afrodisiac for the World)

"Affecting lives is where the wealth and the merit is."

Album: Like Water for Chocolate [4th album]
Recorded: New York
Genre: Hip Hop, Conscious Hip Hop
Album Release: March 28th 2000
Length: 5:10
Producer: J Dilla
Vocalist: Common [age 27]
Label: MCA Records

Official Audio

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 2 million
YouTube Music: Over 1.8 million

Credits

Guitar

Details

• On 'Nag Champa', J Dilla made a luscious beat full of warm pulses that are the auditory equivalent of a lava lamp when it starts bubbling up. You could slow dance with your girl to it, ideally in a dimly lit, warm room while its cold outside. It could be sex music. Nag Champa actually refers to an aphrodisiac, which comes in the form of incense. Of course, in the song title aphrodisiac has been changed to afrodisiac. Common has never shied away from aligning himself with Africa where possible and in the early 2000's afrocentricity was still popular amongst certain black musicians.
  
  
  
• To this day, Common is considered to be a conscious rapper whose songs are more enlightened than those in the aggressive forms of the genre, but he was never considered soft. Even though he raps about love and similar topics, it's still done in a masculine way and the rapper is known for having hard bars, such as "you couldn't hang if you was a poster" on this track, and his Ice Cube diss 'The Bitch in Yoo'.
  
  As a song from the year 2000, 'Nag Champa' features lyrics that would raise eyebrows today. The first example is Common saying "had dreams about fucking R&B broads it came true" when referencing his then current girlfriend Erykah Badu. I'm sure some of todays more sensitive feminists would cry misogny at such a line.
  
  However, the second example, "It's rumors of gay emcees, just don't come round me with it" is perhaps more problematic. At the time, rumors of the gay rapper spread through hip hop like wildfire and the notion was anathema to the perceived ideals of masculinity and strength embedded in both hip hop music and culture. There weren't any openly gay rappers in 2000 and even today the list is surprisingly limited.
  
  In his 1998 song 'Buckingham Palace' Canibus has the line "you aint the gay rapper but you got fucked by him", which is meant as a diss, and it seemed as if the nearly mythological figure of the gay rapper was lurking in every shadow, ready to jump out at an emcee and transmit his gayness onto them. Out gay people were becoming more commonplace in society therefore it made sense that one of the rappers must be gay, they just didn't know who it was, and the other rappers became increasingly obsessed with unmasking the culprit, as if they were in a particularly strange episode of Scooby Doo.
  
  That Common saying words to the effect of "it's okay if you're the gay rapper just don't do it near me" was considered to be progressive shows how regressive the attitudes of the time actually were when compared to today [2024]. In his defence, maybe Common intended the line to mean "you can be gay, but don't hit on me", but even then the lyric shows an intolerance to gay people. Why include the line in the first place? Does it make you masculine to not want gay people near you? It goes to show that what is, and what isn't considered conscious is largely a matter of time.
  
  
• J Dilla provided the vocals on the hook.
• 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 part of the core genre while the real alternative is abstract or experimental hip hop.

Artwork