You may have heard that Common is already following up last year's  Finding Forever  with a new album this summer. You may also be aware of its' particularly Pure Moods-esque title, Invincible Summer. But you probably didn't know that Invincible Summer is already the name of an album by a prominent musician; namely, multiplatinum Canadian adult-pop vocalist k.d. lang, whose own Invincible Summer blossomed eight years ago. (And okay, the phrase apparently comes originally from a famous Camus quote, but that references isn't as easy to clown on; and, for the sake of this post, assumedly out of Common's cultural lexicon.) Anywaaaays, this is funny for the obvious reasons—Kate Bush, Suzanne Vega, watch your album titles!—and, alternately, easily dismissed—Invincible Summer is just the kind of tossed-off, vaguely poetic phrase Common would use for an album title.

But dig a little deeper, and this k.d. lang mimickry is just the symptom of the disease. We still remember when Common was just another one of the legions of lyrically talented, commercially non-viable posi-hip hop MCs; not so different from, say, Pharaoh Monch. And we still remember Electric Circus, the album that nearly capsized dude's career. This was 2002, the height of his hazy-head-wrap spirituality era; Circus was a scrambled mess, leaning away from visionary and towards annoying. Then Kanye West showed up, laced 2005's Be with irresistibly light jazz- samples, and all of a sudden Common's mugging in Gap commercials and popping pistols with Keanu Reeves. (We saw Street Kings, by the way, out of our deep, unwavering loyalty to Mr. Reeves; we are, at this point, still attempting to forget it.) Anyways, not only is Summer his first album since Circus to not feature production by Kanye—the slacker's apparently too busy on the Glow in the Dark tour—but Common has ominously promised an "electro-tinged" sound. Coupled with the fact that the MC has admitted his now solidified acting career puts hip hop somewhere in the backseat, and you have the perfect recipe for an unwieldy Electric Circus 2. The lesson, of course: don't ever rip off k.d. lang.