Resurrection Lyrics

[Scratched]
"Resurrection"

[Intro]
Yeah I'ma get this one off for 87th Street
South Side of Chicago, Chicago everywhere, check it
It's like come on, y'all, get live, get down
Common Sense is in your town
I said come on, y'all, get live, get down
Common Sense is in your town

[Verse 1]
I stagger in the gatherin', possessed by a patter-in that be scatterin'
Over the global, my vocals be travelin', unravelin' my abdomen
In it's slime that's babblin' grammatics that are masculine

I grab the men, verbally badgering broads
I wish that Madelyne was back on Video LP
I went against all odds and got a even steven
Proceed to read and not believin' everything I'm readin'
But my brain was bleedin', needin' feedin', and exercise
I didn't seek the best of buys, it's a lie to textualize
I analyze where I rest my eyes
And chastise the best of guys with punchlines
I'm Nestle when it's crunch-time
For your mind like one time
If poetry was pussy I'd be sunshine
'Cause I deliver like the Sun-Times
Confined in once-mines on dumb rhymes I combine
I'm hype like I'm unsigned, my diet I un-swine
Eating beef sometimes -- I try to cut back on that shit
This rap shit is truly outta control
My style is too developed to be arrested
It's the freestyle, so now it's out on parole
They tried to hold my soul in a holding cell so I would sell
I bonded with a break and had enough to make bail

A Mr. Meaner fell on his knee for the jury
I asked No for his ID and the judge thought there was two of me
Motion for a recess to retest my fingerprints
They relinquished Sense, 'cause I was guilty in a sense

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About

Genius Annotation

The title track was released in 1995 as the second single from Resurrection. The No I.D. track was slightly remixed as “Resurrection ‘95” for the music video but still contains the main samples from Ahmad Jamal’s “Dolphin Dance” and Smooth B’s vocal sample from “No Delayin'.” The ultimate example of Common’s early, punchline- and pun-filled style, predating his self-serious later years.

Common talked about how the sample in the hook was chosen:

Once we had the song, we didn’t know what the hook was going to be. Originally, I wanted a scratch from ‘The World is Yours’ because after I wrote the rhyme Illmatic had come out and Nas said, ‘My son, the star, will be my resurrection.’ We wanted to scratch that, but it didn’t come off as well [as we thought it would].

Either DJ Mista Sinister or No I.D. suggested ‘Nice & Smooth is your resurrection’ and that was so right because the way he was saying ‘resurrection.’ Then, Mr. Sinister could create a rhythm with scratching that we got him eventually after I laid the rhymes to do that ‘resurrection’ scratch.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

What did Common say about "Resurrection"?
Genius Answer

We actually started that song with another beat. This track and ‘Nuthin To Do’ both ended up with different beats. A lot of the songs would start with me just trying to come up with a scratch and a beat.

We’d felt the pressure of [Nas’] Illmatic coming out, and we were both ‘like ‘Okay, it’s time for us to step this up three or four notches.’ I hooked the beat up and once he [Common] heard the ”Resurrection” scratch he immediately started writing.

Before that I was just a house music DJ, so when I was working on Can I Borrow A Dollar?, it was more of me digging out of my house crates trying to find samples in there. But after we finished that album, and began work on Resurrection, I’d met the Beatnuts and they taught me how to dig for samples. This guy V.I.C. that was down with them, Buckwild and Ju Ju (of the Beatnuts)—they were the reason I knew how to dig and make that specific style of hip-hop.

We recorded the whole album on Long Island at Erick Sermon’s studio. Since our budget was so small, we didn’t work on songs in the studio. We’d work on the songs at home [in Chicago], and we’d just record them at the studio.

We didn’t actually sit in the studio to listen and write to tracks, it was more like ‘Okay, we’re done writing, now lets go record all the songs at once—then we’ll mix them.’ We’d go to the east coast because they had all the engineers and equipment. They were already prepped in hip-hop. In Chicago at that time there was no real hip-hop studios. The engineers in Chicago were all House music engineers or did jingles or R&B.

via Complex.

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