Common / Thisisme Then: The Best of Common / 2007
Resurrection
restless, boastful, wired
An early showcase of Common's dense, freestyle-adjacent wordplay, this track is less about narrative than about verbal virtuosity — a rapper flexing internal rhyme, alliteration, and puns as proof of skill. Underneath the acrobatics runs a loose autobiographical thread about self-discipline, near-arrest, and coming up rough on Chicago's South Side.
wordplay as identity self-improvement and discipline legal/moral peril Chicago street life artistic dominance
Who's speaking
First-person, addressed mostly to an unnamed audience of listeners and rivals; the narrator is a confident, unreliable-in-detail braggart whose claims blur fantasy and memory.
What happens
The song moves less through plot than through association: it opens with the speaker overwhelmed by his own verbal output, shifts into boasts about lyrical supremacy and self-restraint (diet, drinking), detours into a surreal courtroom vignette about being 'arrested' for his style, then closes on a grounded image of driving through his old neighborhood with his crew before departing 'with the storm.'
How it's built
Two long verses with no traditional chorus, built on rapid internal rhyme schemes and punning couplets; a brief spoken/near-hook repetition of a crew acronym near the end functions as the closest thing to a refrain, giving the piece a sense of arrival before the abrupt sign-off.
Section by section
Opening lines
“possessed by a patter-in”
The song begins with the speaker describing his own flow as something almost involuntary, an overflow of language he can barely contain, setting up the idea that skill here borders on compulsion.
Mid-verse boast run
A cluster of punchlines built on brand and cultural references positions the narrator as effortlessly superior, but the density of wordplay also functions as evidence rather than mere claim — the skill demonstrates the boast.
Courtroom vignette
“my style is too developed to be arrested”
This stretch imagines his own rap style as a criminal suspect processed through arrest, trial, and parole, playing on the double meaning of being 'arrested' creatively versus legally, and hinting at real tension between artistic freedom and external judgment.
Second verse turn
The tone shifts slightly toward personal history — references to giving up drinking and to moving safely through a rough part of town suggest a narrator who has survived real danger, not just imagined courtroom drama.
Closing repetition and exit
“we don't get no thicker”
The near-refrain about loyalty to his crew grounds the song's abstraction in something concrete before the narrator exits abruptly, comparing his departure to weather — sudden, uncontrollable, and final.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Legal language — arrest, parole, fingerprints, jury — is used throughout to describe the uncontainable, almost criminal power of his own rhymes, turning a courtroom into a metaphor for artistic freedom.
- double entendre
- Multiple lines pun on brand names and slang (a candy bar, a newspaper) to link commercial familiarity with lyrical dominance, rewarding close listening.
- alliteration and internal rhyme
- Nearly every line stacks consonant sounds and mid-line rhymes, mimicking the 'possessed' verbal flood the narrator describes feeling at the start.
- self-reflexive narration
- The rapper repeatedly comments on his own rapping in real time, making the act of freestyling itself the song's subject.
Reading it
Read literally, the song is a display piece: proof of lyrical dexterity with only loose narrative glue. Read more generously, the recurring legal imagery suggests a young artist processing anxiety about being judged, contained, or criminalized — by the industry, by the streets, or by his own past — and using the freestyle itself as the space where he outruns all of it. Both readings can coexist; the technical bravado is the point, but the legal/spiritual imagery gives it stakes beyond wordplay.
Context
This song appears on a Common best-of compilation but stylistically and lyrically it reads as very early, dense, freestyle-era material, likely from before his more narrative-driven and socially conscious later albums. I'm not certain of its original release date or album, so this dating should be treated cautiously.
Listen for
- the rapid internal rhyme chains that mimic an uncontrollable flow
- the shift from pure wordplay into the extended courtroom/arrest metaphor
- the contrast between abstract boasting and the grounded closing verse about his neighborhood
- the crew-loyalty refrain near the end functioning as the song's only hook
- the abrupt, almost mid-thought ending
About Common
Lonnie Rashid Lynn, known professionally as Common, is an American rapper, actor and activist. The recipient of three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award, he signed with the independent label Relativity Records at the age of 20.
b. 1972 / United States
Full biography and catalogue