Common On His Dream Pot Smoking/Bible Toting Girlfriend

13 years ago view-show 792,990

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So Common has been forced to defend the opening lyrics to the Nas-assisted, No I.D.-produced ‘Ghetto Dreams’, which kicks off with “I want a bitch that look good and cook good”… Well, who doesn’t?

Common insists that the song is a lot more highly conceptualized than we think, and he just ran with it after hearing the beats and vocal samples in the studio:

“Once he sampled that ‘Ghetto Dreams’ sample from Nas, it was like, ‘Man.’ That vocal sample was like, ‘Damn this gives me a straight direction and way to go…”

“I was like, ‘I want a bitch that look good and cook good.’ I was just thinking about being in the ‘hood, what I want, and then the song goes on from there,” he said of the opening line that ends with the lyric “Cinderella fancy, but she still look ‘hood.”

“Right there I’m saying, ‘Look, I want a bad woman.’ She look raw and she could cook and she could get very elegant, but at the same token she has the know-how in the street.”

Common’s woman has to be pretty street-wise, as the song’s lyrics reveal. But while she must be willing to smoke up and get down and dirty in the backseat of a car, she must simultaneously be pretty wholesome too. Preferably with a Bible in hand:

“That says a lot about her. She could get high, you might get high with her, she might drink, smoke a J with her, but at the end of the day, she still got her Bible there.”

Common explained that where he grew up, having the right woman by your side signified success. He wanted to share and personify that hood outlook:

“I wrote it about someone in the neighborhood that got a dream of reaching a higher level and they’re in that process, and their woman is really like the correlation and the parallel and the symbol to that progress. It was coming from me, but it was also the voice of many others.”

Line up ladies, form an orderly queue and have blunts and Bibles at the ready. Spotted at MTV.