About Common
Lonnie Rashid Lynn , known by his stage name Common , is an American rapper and actor from Chicago, Illinois. He is the recipient of three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award. He first signed with the independent label Relativity Records to release his debut studio album Can I Borrow a Dollar? , and gained further critical acclaim with its follow-ups, Resurrection and One Day It'll All Make Sense . He maintained an underground following into the late 1990s, and achieved mainstream success through his work with the Black music collective, Soulquarians.
After attaining a major label record deal, he released his fourth and fifth albums, Like Water for Chocolate and Electric Circus to continued acclaim and modest commercial response. His guest performance on fellow Soulquarian, Erykah Badu's 2003 single, "Love of My Life " won Best R&B Song at the 45th Annual Grammy Awards. He signed with fellow Chicago rapper Kanye West's record label GOOD Music, in a joint venture with Geffen Records to release his sixth album Be , which was met with both critical and commercial success and yielded a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album. His seventh album, Finding Forever saw further success and became his first to debut atop the Billboard 200, while a song from the album, "Southside" won Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards. He released his eighth album, Universal Mind Control to mixed critical reception before departing GOOD and launching his own label imprint, Think Common Entertainment in 2011. Entering a joint venture with Warner Bros. Records, he released The Dreamer/The Believer ; and through No I.D.'s ARTium Recordings, an imprint of Def Jam Recordings, he released Nobody's Smiling . Both albums were met with critical praise and further discussed social issues in Black America; his eleventh album, Black America Again saw widespread critical acclaim and served as his final release on a major label.
Lynn won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for his song "Glory" , which he released for the film Selma , wherein he co-starred as civil rights leader James Bevel. His other film roles include Smokin' Aces , Street Kings , American Gangster , Wanted , Date Night , Just Wright , Happy Feet Two , Run All Night , John Wick: Chapter 2 , and Smallfoot . In television, he starred as Elam Ferguson in AMC western series Hell on Wheels from 2011 to 2014. His song "Letter to the Free" was released for the Ava DuVernay-directed Netflix documentary 13th , for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics. He made his Broadway acting debut on the play Between Riverside and Crazy , which won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Common was born on March 13, 1972, at the Chicago Osteopathic Hospital in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. He is the son of educator and former principal of John Hope College Preparatory High School, Mahalia Ann Hines, and former ABA basketball player turned youth counselor Lonnie Lynn. He was raised in the Calumet Heights neighborhood. Lynn's parents divorced when he was six years old, resulting in his father moving to Denver, Colorado. This left Lynn to be raised by his mother; however, his father remained active in his life, and was able to get him a job with the Chicago Bulls as a teenager. Lynn attended Florida A&M University for two years under a scholarship and majored in business administration.
Lynn began rapping in the late 1980s, while a student at Luther High School South in Chicago, when he, along with two of his friends, formed C.D.R., a rap trio that opened for acts such as N.W.A and Big Daddy Kane. When C.D.R dissolved by 1991, Lynn began a solo career under the stage name of Common Sense. After being featured in the Unsigned Hype column of The Source magazine, he debuted as a solo artist in 1992 with the single "Take It EZ", followed by the album Can I Borrow a Dollar?.
With the 1994 release of Resurrection, Common Sense achieved a much larger degree of critical acclaim which extended beyond the Chicago music scene. The album sold relatively well and received a strong positive reaction among alternative and underground hip hop fans at the time. Resurrection was Common Sense's last album produced almost entirely by his long-time production partner, No I.D., who would later become a mentor to a young Kanye West.
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