One Day doesn’t sound specifically tethered to 1997-it could’ve dropped in ’95 or ’98. There’s no seeds planted here to predict he’d become one of the most important and influential producers of the past 10 years. He was just a guy in Chicago making beats for his friend. He wouldn’t compete with the murderers row of radio dominance by the Hitmen on Biggie’s Life After Death, the kung fu blockbuster mythology of RZA and the Wu-Elements on Wu-Tang Forever, nor was he making blatant jack moves like Trackmasters, or avant garde shit like Company Flow and Timbaland. Like his choices in producers throughout his entire career, Common, with his mother next to him, yearns for a partner. He’s optimistic and isn’t hardened like Nas, who stares completely vulnerable and unshakeable as a kid. Hell, the album title openly screams that Common has no answers. Unlike the cover of Illmatic, where a young Nas is by himself, blended with the grim harshness of a giant city that tests his survival skills, One Day It’ll All Make Sense presumes Common’s need for security in an uncertain future. The cover of this album shows Common as a little boy presumably hanging with his mother, and what I gather from this picture is arrested development, a young man wanting the refuge of comfort. It’s like your first summer after graduating college when you can still hang on campus while knowing you need a fucking job. He believes in Louis Farrakhan about the sanctity of black families uniting but is openly homophobic and goes on a hunt to find the asshole who broke into his apartment. He regrets paying for an abortion but wants to tell wack rappers to fuck off. He’s conscious but he still wants to go bar for bar with Canibus. The original tracklisting is Harvey Dent: flip a coin and get “Rapping His Ass Off Common” or “I’m Becoming an Adult And That Kind of Sucks Common” on every other song. His Chicago kingsmen No ID, Dug Infinite, and Y-Not produce 15 of the album’s 17 cuts spread out over…oh my god…SEVENTY MINUTES, but there’s a tug of war between keeping the backpackers satiated from Resurrection and bending towards the eventual tan cargo pants/afghan scarves of the Okayplayer/Soulquarian world that would later yield Common’s biggest hits on Like Water for Chocolate. Looking back on it for its 20th anniversary, One Day marks the beginning of a long career of Common suffering an identity crisis. I had it on CD because it’s quite skippable as the homie Balibz noted on Twitter (which inspired this here post), it’s one of the worst arranged albums that people still think highly of. One Day It’ll All Make Sense is a terrible cassette album. Retrieved March 30, 2020.Zilla Rocca would never ask you to borrow a dollar.
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