Electric Circus

Electric Circus is the fifth studio album by rapper Common, released December 10, 2002 on the now-defunct MCA Records. The album was highly anticipated and praised by many critics for its ambitious vision. However, it was not as commercially successful as his previous album, Like Water for Chocolate, selling under 300,000 copies. An eclectic album, Electric Circus featured fusions of several genres such as hip hop, pop, rock, electronic, and neo soul. This was Common’s second and last album for MCA, released prior to the label’s absorption under Geffen Records.

Common worked with a large (and eclectic) number of musicians on Electric Circus. Among them were Mary J. Blige (who provided vocals for the album’s lead single, “Come Close”), The Neptunes, Laetitia Sadier (of Stereolab), Cee-Lo, Bilal and Jill Scott. The music on Electric Circus challenges the boundaries of the hip hop genre in a similar fashion to The Roots’ Phrenology (2002) and Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003).

The album’s style tended to divide critics; most praised its ambitious vision while some criticized it for the same reason. Most of the criticism tended to revolve around the album’s experimental nature. Some felt Common had strayed too far from his previous sound. Longtime Common fans also viewed his relationship with Erykah Badu as having an overly experimental influence on him, while some critics compared the album to Marvin Gaye’s I Want You and Richard Ashcroft’s Human Conditions, both of which were experimental works that initially received mixed criticism. In a 2003 review, Nick Southall of Stylus Magazine wrote of the album: