I Used To Love H.E.R.

“I met this girl when I was ten years old, and what I loved most, she had so much soul”. In “I Used To Love H.E.R.”, Common describes a girl he met as a kid in Chicago. He describes how over time, she and her beliefs changed. In the first verse he describes how she and Common got to know each other. He would imagine being with her and he would listen to her whenever she was around him. In the second verse he describes how she became Afrocentric and began to praise non-violence. “Out goes the weave, in goes the braids, beads, medallions. She was on that tip about, stoppin' the violence.” Her personality changed, her appearance changed, and her home changed. She moved to the “West Coast”. She dumped Afrocentricity and non-violence and began to just have fun, and that was one thing Common still liked about her. In the third verse he describes how she changes for the worst. “Talking about poppin' glocks, servin' rocks and hittin' switches, now she's a gangsta rollin' with gangsta bitches.” She turned into a “gangsta”. Whenever she visited Chicago, she would only talk and about guns, drugs and drinking. He begins to reminisce about how he knew her before she changed. How she was the realest person to him and how he wants her to become what she once was.

By the end of the song, we know that he was not talking about a woman. She was a metaphor for Hip-Hop. How Hip-Hop changed over time. How it went from being soulful and Afrocentric to gangster. This song criticizes Hip-Hop in the “West Coast” by implicitly claiming that they ruined it with their creation of “Gangster Rap” and its rapid change to commercialization. H.E.R. is an acronym for Hearing Every Rhyme. Common believes that Hip-Hop had changed so drastically during the 80s and 90s that the conscious Hip-Hop of his youth was gone. Even though I believe this song was made to criticize the reason for the downward spiral of Hip-Hop, it is still a small history lesson in one of the best songs of the genre.