Resurrection

The title track was released in 1995 as the second single from Resurrection. The No I.D. track was slightly remixed as “Resurrection ‘95” for the music video but still contains the main samples from Ahmad Jamal’s “Dolphin Dance” and Smooth B’s vocal sample from “No Delayin'.” The ultimate example of Common’s early, punchline- and pun-filled style, predating his self-serious later years.

Common talked about how the sample in the hook was chosen:

"Once we had the song, we didn’t know what the hook was going to be. Originally, I wanted a scratch from ‘The World is Yours’ because after I wrote the rhyme Illmatic had come out and Nas said, ‘My son, the star, will be my resurrection.’ We wanted to scratch that, but it didn’t come off as well as we thought it would.

Either DJ Mista Sinister or No I.D. suggested ‘Nice & Smooth is your resurrection’ and that was so right because the way he was saying ‘resurrection.’ Then, Mr. Sinister could create a rhythm with scratching that we got him eventually after I laid the rhymes to do that ‘resurrection’ scratch."

"We actually started that song with another beat. This track and ‘Nuthin To Do’ both ended up with different beats. A lot of the songs would start with me just trying to come up with a scratch and a beat.

We’d felt the pressure of Nas’ Illmatic coming out, and we were both ‘like ‘Okay, it’s time for us to step this up three or four notches.’ I hooked the beat up and once he heard the ”Resurrection” scratch he immediately started writing.

Before that I was just a house music DJ, so when I was working on Can I Borrow A Dollar?, it was more of me digging out of my house crates trying to find samples in there. But after we finished that album, and began work on Resurrection, I’d met the Beatnuts and they taught me how to dig for samples. This guy V.I.C. that was down with them, Buckwild and Ju Ju (of the Beatnuts)—they were the reason I knew how to dig and make that specific style of hip-hop.

We recorded the whole album on Long Island at Erick Sermon’s studio. Since our budget was so small, we didn’t work on songs in the studio. We’d work on the songs at home in Chicago, and we’d just record them at the studio.

We didn’t actually sit in the studio to listen and write to tracks, it was more like ‘Okay, we’re done writing, now lets go record all the songs at once—then we’ll mix them.’ We’d go to the east coast because they had all the engineers and equipment. They were already prepped in hip-hop. In Chicago at that time there was no real hip-hop studios. The engineers in Chicago were all House music engineers or did jingles or R&B." - via Complex