- The album art for the deluxe version of Nobody’s Smiling
Common wants you to know his brand-new Nobody’s Smiling is all about Chicago. Specifically it’s about the violence that casts a shadow over the city, but it’s also about Chicago’s hip-hop scene and Common’s relationship with the entire town. In the months leading up to the release of his tenth album the MC has addressed the city’s struggle with gun violence in interviews. He recruited a slew of local rappers to pose for alternative Nobody’s Smiling album covers, ad posters, and Instagram photos. And the track he let loose days before the album’s release, “The Neighborhood,” is a multigenerational Chicago affair—it prominently features a sample of Curtis Mayfield’s rich, vibrant “Other Side of Town,” with Common and drill wunderkind Lil Herb rapping about their experiences growing up in two different south-side communities.
Herb is one of three Chicagoans who appear on Nobody’s Smiling, not counting Common’s longtime collaborator, Executive VP of A&R for Def Jam No I.D. (aka Dion Wilson), who produced the entire album. Rising rapper-singer Dreezy lights up “Hustle Harder” and poet Malik Yusef closes the title track with a bleak spoken-word piece about, you guessed it, violence in Chicago (“Popes, bishops, disciples, stones, counts, princes, lords, queens, and kings, they’re drillin’ on my land but there ain’t no oil to be found”). The fact that more Chicago rappers appear on Nobody’s Smiling‘s cover and promo campaign than on the music is the most disappointing part of the album.
The pair patched things up before this album—No I.D. produced all of Common’s last album, 2011’s The Dreamer/The Believer—but hearing Common candidly address the way he let his close friend down makes up for many of the weaknesses on Nobody’s Smiling. The album isn’t quite a grand statement about Chicago today, but when Common addresses his relationship to the city, his peers, and his past it makes for a compelling document worth revisiting.
