Made worse by being live. Cheering, crowd work, and a moment where Common calls for someone from the crowd to come up and dance with him were all detracting from this being an audiobook.

It's not entirely an audiobook though; it's poetry, a few stories, and hiphop that are really well paced. He has some clever lines and rhyming schemes, which I expected, but he also tries out different subgenres based on who the story is about or when it took place.

It would have been 4 stars if it were just recorded in a studio ( )

Fall 2020 (October);

While not a deep fan of any of the musical interludes that took place in the book (and probably then not the music he produces on the normal), I was seriously and deeply enrapt by the stories between then, by the words and world I could so easily parallel to mine, to those I know, to those kids in my classroom's lives I heard so much about. I walked out of this book with my heart more full than when I walked in. ( )