I hope that when, a mere handful of millennia from now, archaeologists return to this place to study the people we were, that they might figure out what a compact disc is, that they’ll figure out what it was for, what it meant to us, and how to play one. I hope that the thousands of years will be kind to the voices recorded on those little chunks of plastic, that the data stored on them, the data that reproduce those voices on our stereo speakers now are well-preserved and restorable. But mostly, I hope that if these archaeologists figure the CD out, that the CD they’ve found is Common’s Be.
And maybe, at some point in our future, our leaders will once again reach out to the leaders of other worlds they don’t know about, and they will send a probe out into our galaxy’s big wilderness, like a smoke flare launched from a sinking ship in the hopes of alerting potential rescuers. And inside that little metal can, sent off to be our ambassador, our advocate, our plea for help, along with the various pictures of our species, as part of our explanation of who we are to those for whom our existence might only be the stuff of looney-tunes conspiracy theories - and maybe, they’ve all got problems worse than us – I hope that part of that explanation will come from Common’s Be.
When they arrive to find the remains of our magnificent ancient structures – the Sears Tower, the Hancock Building, our sacred places - overgrown with leafy cancers; when they arrive at a world where indeed, life continues on without the creatures whose recorded voices and images lured them across a thousand light-years of blackness to this tiny, ravaged place, I hope they have these sounds, this music, these grooves and rhymes to help them understand who we were, what it was like to be us, to live in our cities and our times on our planet.
When they unearth a street, and stand on its corner in the shade of the black steel Metra rails, and gaze down at what might have been our storefronts and food counters, I hope that they can match this landscape of decay with the sounds of "The Corner", that our streetlights might spring to life in their minds, that they'll see and hear our public transportations, our public discourses, the public symphonies we make every day; and that somehow we'll feel more real to them.
I hope that when they hear the steamy-summery old-school samples of "Faithful" and the silk-suited jazz horns and electric piano lines of "Real People", that they'll know how good those sounds felt to us, how they could turn the darkest and hottest of our long-since-gone days cool and sweet; that in the breathlessly simple hook of "Go", they'll feel our Saturday night lust; that in creamy soul harmonies, in John Legend's voice - They say, "Wha's happenin'?" - they'll see us at our most beautiful, they'll smell our hot-dog stands and hear the crowd roaring from Wrigley Field; and so even when they hear the suspense, the intrigue, the desperation and the deceit at the heart of the story in "Testify", when the hear something as crowded and raw and restless as "Chi-City", they'll also hear our perseverance; they'll hear the smiley ambition in the collage of children's voices that closes the disc, and they'll know, no matter what the circumstances were to cause our disappearance from this place, that we were capable of really good things.
And even though they'd never known us, they'll miss us for who we were, and wish they had known us way back when.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Be" by Common
G.O.O.D./Geffen Records
Released 5/24/05
Producers: Kanye West, Common, DILLA
43 min.
SONGS: Be (Intro) - The Corner - GO! - Faithful - Testify - Love is... - Chi-City - The Food (Live) - Real People - They Say - It's Your World (Part 1 & 2)
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