Common

Lonnie Rashid Lynn (born March 13, 1972), known by his stage name Common (formerly known as Common Sense), is an American rapper, actor, and activist from Chicago, Illinois.

He has received three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award.

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.

He maintained an underground following into the late 1990s, and achieved his first mainstream success through his work with the black music collective, Soulquarians.

When C.D.R dissolved by 1991, Lynn began a solo career under the stage name of Common Sense.

He signed with the independent label Relativity Records to release his debut studio album Can I Borrow a Dollar? (1992), and gained further critical acclaim with its follow-ups, Resurrection (1994) and One Day It'll All Make Sense (1997).

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.

Westside Connection first responded with the 1995 song "Westside Slaughterhouse," with the lyrics "Used to love H.E.R., mad cause I f*cked H.E.R.".

"Westside Slaughterhouse" also mentioned Common Sense by name, prompting the rapper to respond with the scathing Pete Rock-produced attack song "The Bitch in Yoo".

Common Sense and Westside Connection continued to insult each other back and forth before finally meeting with Louis Farrakhan and setting aside their dispute.

Following the popularity of Resurrection, Common Sense was sued by an Orange County-based reggae band with the same name, and was forced to shorten his moniker to simply Common.

In 1996, Common Sense appeared on the Red Hot Organization's compilation CD, America Is Dying Slowly (A.I.D.S.), alongside Biz Markie, Wu-Tang Clan, and Fat Joe, among many other prominent hip hop artists.

The CD, meant to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic among African American men, was heralded as "a masterpiece" by The Source magazine.

Initially scheduled for an October 1996 release, Common released his third album, One Day It'll All Make Sense, in September 1997.

The album took a total of two years to complete and included collaborations with artists such as Lauryn Hill, De La Soul, Q-Tip, Canibus, Black Thought, Chantay Savage, and Questlove – a future fellow member of the Soulquarians outfit.

After attaining his first major label record deal, he released his fourth and fifth albums, Like Water for Chocolate (2000) and Electric Circus (2002) to continued acclaim and modest commercial response.

He would later also contribute to the Red Hot Organization's Fela Kuti tribute album, Red Hot and Riot in 2002.

He collaborated with Djelimady Tounkara on a remake of Kuti's track, "Years of Tears and Sorrow".

The song "I Used to Love H.E.R." from Resurrection ignited a feud with West Coast rap group Westside Connection.

The lyrics of the song criticized the path hip hop music was taking, utilizing a metaphor of a woman to convey hip hop and were interpreted by some as directing blame towards the popularity of West Coast gangsta rap.

In 2003, he won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Song for his guest performance on fellow Soulquarian Erykah Badu's single "Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip-Hop)".

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 (2005), which was met with both critical and commercial success and yielded a Grammy Award nomination for Best Rap Album.

His other acting roles in film include Smokin' Aces (2006), Street Kings (2008), American Gangster (2007), Wanted (2008), Date Night (2010), Just Wright (2010), Happy Feet Two (2011), Run All Night (2015), John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), and Smallfoot (2018).

His seventh album, Finding Forever (2007) saw further success and became his first to debut atop the Billboard 200, while a song from the album, "Southside" (featuring Kanye West) won Lynn's second Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.

He released his eighth album, Universal Mind Control (2008) 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 (2011); and through No I.D.'s ARTium Recordings, an imprint of Def Jam Recordings, he released Nobody's Smiling (2014).

In television, he starred as Elam Ferguson in AMC western series Hell on Wheels from 2011 to 2014.

Lynn won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for his song "Glory" (with John Legend) from the film Selma (2014), wherein he co-starred as civil rights leader James Bevel.

Both albums were met with critical praise and further discussed social issues in Black America; his eleventh album, Black America Again (2016) saw widespread critical acclaim and served as his final release on a major label.

He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for his song "Letter to the Free" for the Netflix documentary 13th (2017), directed by Ava DuVernay.

He made his acting debut on Broadway with the play Between Riverside and Crazy (2023).