Common: Fanfare for the Common man

The hip-hop artist Common is anything but typical. He loves The Beatles and Pink Floyd and is more concerned with global views than local feuds. Andy Gill talks to him in New York

Lonnie Lynn Jnr, the rapper who operates under the pseudonym Common, isn't quite ready to talk yet. He has just flown back this morning from his hometown, Chicago, to the Brooklyn flat he shares with his cousin, and has to sort a few things out before leaving later that evening for Oslo. "The place is a bit of a mess," he says. "Give me 10 or 15 minutes to tidy things up."

I take the opportunity to stroll around the neighbourhood, a short distance from Brooklyn's main drag, Flatbush Avenue. This is no low-life ghetto territory. In fact, it's surprisingly neat and tidy, with pretty communal gardens at the ends of the rows of three-storey terraces attesting to the civic pride of local residents – although the limits of gentrification are evident in the iron bars that protect all ground-floor windows. It's close enough to Manhattan to benefit from New York's social and retail opportunities, but not close enough to glimpse that famous skyline. Common was at home here when the World Trade Centre was hit on September 11. "That night was dark, man, the darkest night. You could smell the flesh in the air." He pauses, then adds quietly, "Weren't nice, man."

The understatement conceals an unspoken acknowledgement that this was a universal watershed that rendered previous petty imperatives of turf and territory insignificant. Not that Common ever bought into all that East Coast vs West Coast, Crips vs Bloods stuff which cast such a poisonous shadow over hip-hop culture: his original stage name was Common Sense, a characteristic that courses through his work.

Lonnie was the product of a broken marriage, but was brought up in a comparatively middle-class milieu: his stepfather owned a plumbing business, and his mother, then a teacher, is now a school principal. "I grew up seeing both the ghetto and the preppy side of life," he says, "absorbing what I could from each." He stayed close to his father, a former basketball player, whose poetry has appeared on Common's albums. Not that Lonnie was starved for role models: in the early Eighties hewas a ball-boy for the Chicago Bulls, and observed as Michael Jordan began his inexorable rise. "It was an indescribable experience," he recalls.

Inspired by the likes of Run-DMC, Afrika Bambaataa, LL Cool J and Whodini, Common wrote his first rap while visiting a cousin in Cincinnati, and went on to make a career of it. After recording three albums of "young, innocent hip hop" with the Chicago producers No ID and Why Not, he got his breakthrough when he hooked up with the Soulquarians production team for 2000's Like Water for Chocolate, which presented the mature Common personality to the world. Thoughtful by nature and generous of spirit, he's one of a small band of "conscious" rappers striving to emancipate hip hop, in the same way that Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield brought a new dignity and intelligence to soul music 30 years ago.

Common agrees that hip hop has been more concerned with local feuds than global views, but holds that this is the inevitable result of poverty and a media industry only minimally concerned with events beyond its national borders. "You can't really knock 'em because they haven't been exposed to global life," he says of less enlightened, localised rappers. "I grew up in Chicago, so a lot of my music came from a Chicago perspective – but once I started travelling, man, I realised there was a whole other world out there, and it's kept growing bigger for me, to the point where I feel I can't just please this little audience. If you just make good music, it touches the souls of everybody. A lot of people in hip hop ain't had a chance to go out of their own country. Even the open-minded cats ain't been to Cuba or Europe or Africa or Japan. When you get there, you be, 'Damn! It's a new world!'"

Much the same reaction has greeted Common's latest album, Electric Circus, a ground-breaking work whose breadth and ambition are signalled by its sleeve design, a pastiche of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band featuring a head-shot photo-montage of his influences and collaborators. Given that the latter include the likes of Brit-soul pioneer Omar, Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier and guitarist Sonny from nu-metallists P.O.D., it's clear that Common is working to a completely different agenda to most of his peers, promoting what he calls his "revolutionary planet rap" with a blend of psychedelic rock, electronics, space-jazz and rap. It's a brave, contrary way to behave in a genre most of whose practitioners struggle to replicate their original hit formula.

"For me, it's not challenging to do that, and it's not fun," says Common. "There's so many new things to discover in music, and in the world, that I would be cheating myself if I did what I'd done before. There are certain subjects I talk about repeatedly: different aspects of love, and hip hop itself; but overall I want to give you somethin' different.

"Each album is an expression of where I am at that point in time. Electric Circus is just a different painting: when you create an album, you might use these colours, show more depth here, use different elements to paint the picture that you want to put across. It can have the same elements of purity and creativity, but I don't want it to sound like the album I did previously."

This time around, the textures reflect Common's new-found interest in the kinds of classic rock staples few other rappers would allow near their sound-systems, let alone their own albums. "I guess it's just human nature, people being comfortable with what they're used to, and not really wanting to try something new," he concedes. "Like, even I eat at certain places all the time, just 'cos I'm comfortable with the food they cook – but sometimes you need that introduction to new flavours, new tastes. That's why I'm into Pink Floyd and The Beatles..." – here he drops his voice to a conspiratorial murmur – "I like The Beatles, man; I like that shit, it's good!... and Traffic, and Van Morrison – Astral Weeks, that hit my spirit right there!"

On his last album Common included a tribute to Fela Kuti; this time the tributee is Jimi Hendrix, toasted in the psychedelic soul symphony "Jimi Was a Rock Star". You might think Hendrix would by now be a pillar of African-American culture, but his legacy has apparently struggled to impress itself on black America. "I never used to listen to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd and John Lennon," admits Common, "but I did get into 'em and I was like, man, this is some beautiful music! I gotta put this into my own music, so I could be like a bridge to my listeners. When they hear this, I want them to go listen to Jimi Hendrix. Because people in the ghettos are not aware of him.

"Most of the artists I mention, I put 'em under the category of Free Artists – like Jimi Hendrix, he's free, James Brown is free, Fela is free, Miles Davis, Bob Marley. There's such freedom in their music – it's like consciousness mixed with spirit and soul, with no restrictions. I listen to Fela and it's a reminder of how powerful music can be: when you make a 27-minute song, you know that ain't gonna get no radio airplay! And his anti-government stance – how many people do that, man? It had a purpose, and it kinda makes you want to discover your own purpose too, man."

Common plays Shepherds Bush Empire, London, on Sunday; the Academy 2, Manchester, on Monday; and the Academy, Bristol, on Tuesday. 'Electric Circus' is out now on MCA