Electric Circus (album)

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	80/100[5]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[6]
Blender	[7]
Entertainment Weekly	A[8]
The Guardian	[9]
NME	8/10[10]
Pitchfork	6.5/10 (2003)[11] 8.4/10 (2017)[12]
Q	[13]
Rolling Stone	[14]
Spin	6/10[15]
The Village Voice	B[16]

The album's style tended to divide critics; most praised its ambitious vision while some criticized it for the same reason. Most of the criticism tended to revolve around the album's experimental nature. Some felt Common had strayed too far from his previous sound. Longtime Common fans also viewed his relationship with Erykah Badu as having an overly experimental influence on him, while some critics compared the album to Marvin Gaye's I Want You and Richard Ashcroft's Human Conditions,[17] both of which were experimental works that initially received mixed criticism. In a 2003 review, Nick Southall of Stylus Magazine gave the album a D+ and wrote:

So, is this genius or is this madness? As enjoyable as it is on occasion, I’m inclined to side with the latter. Marvin Gaye tried it. Richard Ashcroft tried it. One of them did a fantastic job, the other did not. Common sits somewhere between the two. Odd. Very, very odd.[18]

Official reviews were mostly positive. "Pushing past the accepted boundaries of contemporary black pop" is how PopMatters described the album by giving it all ten stars.[19] Likewise, Playlouder gave it four stars out of five, calling it "a brilliant, visionary album",[20] as did Rolling Stone who only gave it three stars out of five and saw it as "breaking hip-hop rules with a freewheeling fearlessness."[14] Ink Blot Magazine's Matt Cibula called it his "favorite record of 2002".[21] The Independent gave it a favorable review and called it "is the most heartening recent development in hip hop, the kind of album that might help lead the genre out of its present darkness."[22] The Village Voice gave it an average review and said it "sounds chocolatey and recombinant even when it doth protest the Enlightened Guy angle too much."[23] RapReviews gave it a score of 7 out of 10 and said, "Last time around on 'Like Water for Chocolate' Common still had his Chicago flows, just spiced a little differently with Okayplayer oregano. This could and SHOULD have worked again, but the mix this time is bitter and leaves me feeling a little salty. The 'Electric Circus' could rightly have been called the 'Eclectic Circus' for the unconventional way it tries to combine disparate elements into a cohesive whole."[24]

In the decades since release, critical reappraisals of Electric Circus have noted the album's artistic significance, with Pitchfork describing the album as providing "the groundwork for what we see black popular music as now [...] a flawed but classic album".[25] Others have noted its enduring influence on hip-hop, with Patrick Corcoran considering Electric Circus as one of two albums — the other being The New Danger by Mos Def — to demonstrate that hip-hop had no limits. Corcoran concludes that artists like Kendrick Lamar would not have been "inspired to craft the transcendent" To Pimp a Butterfly without Electric Circus.[26] Electric Circus was also chosen by Record Collector for inclusion in their 70 Landmark Albums of the Last 70 Years[27]

Despite the critical approval, the record debuted at #47 on the Billboard 200 chart, 31 spots lower than Like Water for Chocolate's highest chart position. With "Come Close" as the only single, the album quickly fell off the charts altogether, and MCA Records halted any further promotion. Part of the reason for its lack of promotion was MCA's absorption under Geffen Records in the summer of 2003, a mere six to seven months after the album's release.[28] Since both labels were under the Universal Music Group, Common's record contract would be carried over to Geffen, which itself was a subsidiary of another Universal Music label, Interscope Records, whose co-founder Jimmy Iovine oversaw the direction of both labels. Either way, the handling of Electric Circus (an already under-performing album) was neglected. The lack of promotion may have also led to only 295,000 copies being sold based on 2005 Nielsen SoundScan statistics.[29]

In a 2006 interview concurrent with the release of The Roots' album Game Theory, Questlove, the album's executive producer, maintained that Common's relationship with Erykah Badu had little influence on the album and stated that the greater influence was the recording atmosphere at the famous Electric Lady Studios (built by Jimi Hendrix) and the group of artists that Common was collaborating with at the time:

To understand that record is to understand the history of what Electric Lady Studios was to this whole Soulquarian unit. We started off in the spring of '96 and that's where we created Things Fall Apart for The Roots, D'Angelo's Voodoo, Erykah's Mama's Gun, Common's Like Water for Chocolate, the Black Star record, Mos Def's record, Bilal's record, Musiq's album... Pretty much the left of center of hip-hop was using that place as much more than a studio. That place was like a clubhouse: you'd [go] even if you didn't have a session, just hopin' somethin' would come up.[4]