Common has always been an entertainer who is artistically vulnerable with fans. Recently, the Electric Circus rapper released a memoir titled Let Love Have the Last Word and it made headlines after he revealed that when he was around nine or 10-years-old, he was molested by his godbrother's relative. "I was excited for a road trip I was about to take with my family. My mother; my godmother, Barbara; her son and my godbrother Skeet; and his relative, who I’ll call Brandon…” the memoir reads.
“At some point I felt Brandon’s hand on me,” he writes. “I pushed him away. I don’t remember saying a whole lot besides ‘No, no, no’…He kept saying ‘It’s okay, It’s okay,’ as he pulled down my shorts and molested me. After he stopped he kept asking me to perform it on him. I kept repeating ‘No’ and pushing him away,” he continued. “I felt a deep and sudden shame for what happened.”
XXL reports that Common has crafted a new record and recently held a listening party for his latest effort, an album that will share the same name as his memoir. The rapper said that throughout the process of writing his book, he was flooded with ideas for new music. “This album is called Let Love Have the Last Word,” he told his guests. “It’s inspired by the book that I just released. I started this album because my team was like, ‘With the release of the book, maybe you should do some music’ and it kinda really sparked me in a way. This book was something really personal and I was going to places that I never went to in my life. So I was thinking as an artist to be able to do the same thing.”