But for now, I figured it'd be best to leave you all my thoughts of a project that I really had no idea was a thing until about a week ago: Common's tenth (!) studio album Nobody's Smiling.
Sometime after the release and critical disappointment of 2008's Universal Mind Control (which was still nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Album, which just goes to show how out of touch the music industry is with what constitutes as a "good" hip hop album), Lonnie Lynn realized that the experimentation wasn't getting the job done. So, he did what would seem natural to most and went back to what gained him fame in the first place: No I.D., the primary producer of his first three albums. And so, his ninth album The Dreamer / The Believer was entirely backed by No I.D.