"People Dreaming They Live Free"

This is a very mellow — and quite extended — track by hip-hop artist Common from his album of a few years back "Electric Circus." It features guest appearances by a number of the most creative voices on the hip-hop scene like Bilal, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Cee-Lo, Mary J. Blige and others. It's sort of a meditative suite on spirituality, mortality and the meaning of heaven, with perspectives ranging from earthy to sublime. It's such an ultimately optimistic and humanistic perspective: this song isn't about religious dogma but about hope and acceptance. I find it quite profound.

I'm posting this not only because I really love this track, but because I was listening to this a few days ago and it set me off on an attempt to write something deep and meaningful for the blog at Easter time just passed. I wanted to tie this song in to a reading of the Bible verse it mentions and proceed to a commentary on high and low religion. But that post failed to come together, so I thought I'd just play this song instead.

You can read the lyrics, with the guest vocalists ID'd, at one of those song lyric sites, sing365. Strongly recommended!

"all mighty love,
watching over me....
a smile........brillant.....
all over .....constantly.....
warm .....comforting.....
perfect...like ...no..thing
no hate..no confusion...no strain
simply peace"

(The youtube uploader cut the last half a minute off the song, a sort of instrumental breakdown, to fit a youtube time limit so this clip ends a little abruptly but no vocals are lost).

Evolve!

This is the brilliant new Erykah Badu video, Window Seat, from her brand-new album. Yes, this is filmed at the site of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

Update: the Universal Music Company's Sales Prevention team seems to have pulled many copies of this videos from Youtube. Which is too bad cause watching one of these caused me to buy this album. Anyway, if the replaced link above goes away again, you can watch a weird backwards version of this video at an official Erykah Badu site; worth it for the clearer narration and the word "groupthink" graffiti sort of running out of Badu's head.

Awesome Erykah Badu video

so cool. classic record covers come to life. Thanks to 4 brothers beats blog for turning me on to this.