Innerviews with Adam Bradley are always filled with laughs, poetry, and stalking. As long as he continues on the Palahniuk (a book a year) path, I'll keep having reasons to chase him down. Game recognize game (borderline-I know, considering I just sent a note to a peer about his choice to use "phat" in a recent essay). But what is this art (and this life) without generational markers?

"It's like Donny Hath helped me see Lonny's path"

-I mention Common in the first sentence in my first book. He’s always been an artist that I’ve admired, one that’s grown with me as a hip hop fan. As I went to college and out into the world, his subject matter grew with what I wanted to hear as a listener. I always felt that he moved into maturity without sacrificing his art. I was asked for my top five people to write the afterword(s) for The Anthology of Rap, and he was on my list. I signed the deal to write his memoir at the same time, so I got that afterword first.

 

-Rashid was a seeker as a young guy. The 5 Percenter Nation held a strong interest in Chicago, and also in the gang culture, but he was always drawn to too eclectic of a faith to stick with any one doctrinal. Even though he had an affiliation with Nation of Islam and listened to Reverend Wright, he went wherever his faith took him.

 

-Real Food Daily in LA is a spot that we ate at a lot, a spot where we drank a lot of wheatgrass. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink. He’s a hip hop puritan. He has, but it’s not part of his life at the present time. He’s a healthy, healthy dood. He works out, plays ball, takes care of himself. He’s found his fountain of youth.

 

-His mother gave me the full set of his children’s books when I was in Chicago and he signed them for my daughter and my nieces. No, there are no plans yet for Samuel L. Jackson to read any of them on tape. Other than in the front cover, it just didn’t come up in our discussions, and we also wanted to reinvent him as an author. We wanted this to be something that young adults could read. Some wanted us to take out the more sexual elements, but there’s nothing that they don’t already know, and we wanted to be realistic and show the consequences of actions with hindsight, adding a layer of looking back as a grown man on his knuckleheaded-ness as a teenager. We didn’t want to reject it, but to understand it and how it shapes how he is today.

 

-I was becoming a father as this book was coming together, and one of the things he wanted to develop was how you translate your lessons onto your child. It was a parallel that I saw move from the abstract to the real. His prospective and experience are valuable because his daughter is now a teenager.

 

-I haven’t missed much of my daughter’s first year of life. It’s important to my wife and I to be around her, even though we both have full-time jobs. In the book, we wanted to discuss how you deal with the circumstances that are outside yourself as a parent. What happens when you don’t get along with your child’s other parent? The luxury of not being away from your kids is something that most people can relate to-with their parents being away because of divorce or work. How do manage your imperfections and still be the best parent that you can?

-It wasn’t a conscious juxtaposition, to start with that story of Pops when Common’s albums usually end with Pop’s wisdom. We were looking for a moment that embodies the tensions of family life, and we wanted to start with the idea of inheritance. What do you get from those who came before, and how do we change it before we pass it along? It’s also a dramatic-ass story. Your boy Neil Strauss has these paint by number celebrity bios and one of his questions is “were you ever near death?” So it was also a satirical nod to that. But he’s definitely someone who’s tapped into the zeitgeist, knows what we want from the genre, and gives it to us- even if he has to cram it into our pores.

-Common’s mom is bossy in the best possible way. She adopted me as her son the moment we met. I spent the day with her-we went to church, she took me out to brunch, we talked all day, and she insisted on feeding me again, even after that gospel brunch. She definitely is a strong voice, and sometimes she steals the show. She needs her own book, and she could write a fascinating one that ended when Rashid was born-it’s not at all about having a famous son. Kanye’s mom did have her own book, and they were so close that she felt a heightened maternal instinct towards Kanye when Donda passed.

-I became part of the family as a consequence of writing this book. One of the challenges was that as much as it felt like family, it wasn’t my family. There were boundaries, with the exception of Rashid-I pushed him. But I let Pops tell me what he wanted to tell me.

-The great thing about his mom is that she doesn’t play. She’ll still call him out like he’s a kid. She said that reading the book she discovered a whole new side of her son. She always felt that she had a close grip on things when he was growing up, but he somehow still found a way to get into trouble. They are very close, and that’s obvious. That bond has inhibited his relationship with women at times, but it is also the reason that he’s a gentleman and a loving person.

-Erykah still calls Common’s mom, sometimes she mentions that he’s looking good. I know that Mama is glad for the influence that Erykah had on Rashid’s healthy life choices.

-She was mama’s favorite, grandma’s favorite too. Grandma has photos all over her house, and there’s one of Common and Taraji that makes her say, “I like that girl.”

-The relationship between the writer and the celebrity in a celebrity memoir is as varied as any relationship, but there’s another layer when you’re working with someone who has made his legacy through words. We had to figure out how to bring his voice to the page that extends what his voice already is to hip hop, and that was my job through my experience as a reader and writer. We wanted to keep the orality of the book, to keep it conversational-but that parabola passage was embarrassing, like when he talks about the first time that he touched a woman, and it was “gushy” or whatever.



-He’s always been a letter writer. He feels that he’s sometimes a better communicator that way. So, it was an idea that came naturally out of talking to him about the most important people in his life and how that will manifest onto the page.

-It was my idea for him to write to hip hop. He didn’t really want to go through that again, but he has a different view now, and the chance to address it in a new medium. I think he killed it, it’s one of my favorite letters, and he continues the conversation that he started on h.e.r.

-We chose the quotes with a lot of listening. I wanted to dig through the catalogue and find something he’d forgotten, but every one I tested him on, he knew. He really has an amazing mind for lyrics. There was even one that involved a fellow professor here in Colorado-who heard “...Brett King like Simba, Bolder than Denver, I ain't a mad rapper just an emcee with a temper” in Get ‘Em High but when I asked Common, he explained that it was “bred king, like Simba”, and just a coincidence, but now that he knows about Brett, he might actually show up in a lyric someday.

-I haven’t received a letter from him yet, he doesn’t do email. He does text, though, so that’s the closest I’ve come to getting a letter from Common. He does remember birthdays, though.

-He is proud of Electric Circus, it just happened to correspond with breaking up with Erykah. He is proud of what it meant-taking chances and his movement from being a straight rhymer to a songwriter. It’s different from anything he was doing on the first couple albums, where that wasn’t in his capacity. It came with his evolution and the evolution of hip hop to adopt different conventions and this was an event album where he unveiled grand artistic changes. People weren’t ready for it in the moment, but who knows what will happen in a decade? Maybe the album cover was too confusing, who knows? One of the reason that he points to its lack of commercial success is because it’s hard to find metrics of when you have captured something. But he’s kept himself centered and continued on his path and managed to stay true to his artistic vision at the risk of alienating his listeners who want another version of something he’s already done. It’s what makes me want to keep listening.

-Morgan Freeman gave Rashid the same advice Lauryn Hill did: “act natural.” We got to the point when we were really real with each other and Just Wright...he said that the problem was that he was cast as the good guy, and he’s a good guy 365 days a year. When there’s a character with some darkness, he comes into his own with it. You’ll see that in the new series- I saw the pilot, and he has a command over his acting that people haven’t seen. Call me November 7 if you don’t believe it now.

-Yea, I got my shoutout in Decoded-it was literal and subliminal. The literal is in the Blue magic exegesis (Acts of Jesus), the subliminal is the whole book, which argues my thesis in The Book of Rhymes. The fact that people dig the book means that a lot of people are thinking the same thing, and it really validated what I was getting into.

-I just finished a memoir I’m reviewing for Barnes and Noble-Harry Belafonte’s memoir, one of the greatest lives of the past hundred years. He was one of the two or three famous black people on the planet, and he found his calling as an activist. He was involved on the grassroots level, he was high profile, and he was everywhere in between. He was the mediator between the discussions Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK had to enact civil rights reforms. I was thinking of Neil Strauss again, you’ll laugh if you read my review-Harry Belafonte’s brush with death is running from the KKK with Sidney Poitier in the front seat of the car as they rushed money to civil rights workers. His life can’t be summed up in this one events, these events have been the substance of his life.

-That’s a good question. As a lit professor, I give people books. I gave Rashid a book he’s already read-a nice copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. We’ve had a lot of conversations about jazz and hip hop, so the obscure title that I gave him was Michael S. Harper’s Dear John, Dear Coltrane, because he comes closest to rendering jazz to the page.

-It’s really gotta be the right book if I want to do this again. This kind of collaboration takes a lot out of you, requires logistical feats of greatness. It’s a short list, but Andre is on it. We’d really have to rethink the format, because a conventional memoir just wouldn’t work, not that this memoir is conventional, but for Andre it would have to be a book plus something that hasn’t been invented yet.

-I am a huge Nas fan, but Toure is a good fit for that. He likes doing lyrical exegesis (lyrical acts of Jesus) and proved it at the 92nd St Y event for The Anthology. I imagined 5-10 minutes for each person, but this dood went line for line, verse for verse of Jay Electronica’s Exhibit C- it was a fascinating display, a virtuoso performance. He can definitely dig into the material and get Nas to reflect on it. That’s gonna be a good book, it’s the same press as ours, with a different cast of characters. I think it will have more of the flavor of Decoded, which we consciously did not-we focused more on Common as a man-much to some people’s chagrin and surprise.