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"  His own handle be damned, just about the only thing that&amp;#039;s actually run of the mill about Common is his career progression\u2014rapper-actors seem to be overtaking screenwriter-fry cooks as Hollywood&amp;#039;s most prevalent hyphenates. Aside from that, everything else about Lonnie Rashid Lynn, born 36 years ago in Chicago, is decidedly uncommon. He&amp;#039;s considered the &amp;quot;conscious rapper,&amp;quot; not for any special facility for staying awake while rhyming, but rather for the themes his work tends to explore; his song &amp;quot;Faithful,&amp;quot; for example, imagines God as a woman, and not one in booty shorts. This month, watch the smooth-domed natty dresser play one cool assassin alongside Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy in Wanted, or listen to his eighth studio album, Invincible Summer, a title referencing\u2014quite uncommonly\u2014Albert Camus. ELLE: When did the opposite sex become interesting to you? COMMON: I was a really sexual little kid. I got a Scorpio rising, and Scorpios are known to be sexual. Even at eight years old, I was always trying to be intimate with my babysitters, trying to kiss them and touch their breasts. They wouldn&amp;#039;t let me, but I was really trying. ELLE : So when did you actually lose your virginity? COMMON : I was 13. It wasn&amp;#039;t too early, but it wasn&amp;#039;t too late, either. ELLE : I understand you&amp;#039;re close to your mom. COMMON : Yeah. My mother&amp;#039;s my best friend. ELLE : How honest is she with you about the women you date? COMMON : My mother will never say, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like her.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;ll tell me later. But my 80-year-old grandmother will say it the first moment she meets a woman.  ELLE:  What&amp;#039;s the harshest thing your grandmother has said about a woman you&amp;#039;ve brought home? COMMON : She&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;quot;She ain&amp;#039;t cute,&amp;quot; or, &amp;quot;She don&amp;#039;t seem like she going to do no good for you, Rashid.&amp;quot; When people get to a certain age, they can tell the truth more. ELLE : What&amp;#039;s the worst thing a woman ever said to you? COMMON : &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to be with you anymore and I&amp;#039;m really liking this other dude.&amp;quot; ELLE: That pretty much covers the biggies. How long had you been with this particular woman? COMMON : It started in 2001 and ended in 2003. ELLE : Oh, so this must have been Erykah Badu. I didn&amp;#039;t know she left you for another guy. COMMON : It wasn&amp;#039;t all at once. She left me, then eventually she said she liked another guy. It was tough, man. I was heartbroke for months. That was one of the biggest love lessons I ever had. ELLE : What exactly was the lesson? COMMON : That no matter how much you love somebody, you&amp;#039;ve got to love yourself first. If you&amp;#039;re truly loving yourself, you won&amp;#039;t allow some things to go down, and you&amp;#039;ll have boundaries. I was so in love that I gave up certain things about me, and that showed a lack of love for myself. It turned out to be such a big blessing that we broke up, because I got that lesson. I actually wrote a children&amp;#039;s book about it called I like You But I Love Me. ELLE : Were there things you did in the relationship you now regret COMMON : Planting flowers with her one time. I look back now and go, Man, I really didn&amp;#039;t want to do that. ELLE: Some of your fans speculated that during that relationship, she influenced your work too much. They blame her for your experimental 2002 album Electric Circus, which wasn&amp;#039;t well received. COMMON : I definitely have to say that although I was in love, Erykah was not the inspiration behind Electric Circus. She was more like a supporter of what I was doing, but I&amp;#039;m an artist, and I just travel where I want to travel. ELLE : You&amp;#039;re known to be quite a clotheshorse. Is there anything a woman could wear that would kill your attraction to her? COMMON: If her purse is wack, I know her style&amp;#039;s probably wack. ELLE : So, bad purse, that&amp;#039;s a stop sign for you. COMMON : It&amp;#039;s more like, bad purse\u2014c&amp;#039;mon, baby, you can do better. Her shoes, too. It&amp;#039;s like, c&amp;#039;mon, baby. And if her hairstyle is wack, that&amp;#039;s a stopper for me. ELLE : If you were told you could make love to only one song for the rest of your life, what would it be? COMMON : &amp;quot;A Love Supreme&amp;quot; by John Coltrane, because I like jazz and it would let me take the lovemaking to many different places. ELLE : If we put all the women you&amp;#039;d ever made love to in a room and they all had to agree on one statement about being with you, what might they come up with? COMMON : That I&amp;#039;m a very giving lover. With me it&amp;#039;s all about their enjoyment. It&amp;#039;s in my nature to be a giver. ELLE : How would you be received if you appeared in that room? COMMON : I think there&amp;#039;d be a lot of long hugs\u2014you know, those hugs where you&amp;#039;re sending a signal that says, &amp;quot;I still want you, and I&amp;#039;m going to hold you close and try to feel this quick sexual sensation.&amp;quot; And then there&amp;#039;d definitely be some tongue kissing. ELLE : Hold on. That sounds awfully specific. Have you actually assembled all the women you&amp;#039;ve slept with in one room? COMMON : Not all of them. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a9109/common-sense-18952/>