He wasn't trying to be subversive, weird or challenging. Nor was he trying to impress his then-girlfriend, Erykah Badu.

If anything, Common admits, he was just being a bit naive when he put out his wild 2002 album, "Electric Circus."

"I'm a dreamer, so I was thinking, 'People are gonna love this,' " the rapper said by phone last week, during a tour that comes Sunday to First Avenue.

A mish-mash of psychedelic rock, weird neo-soul and plain ol' ego, the release had many fans and critics questioning the rapper's ingenuity and genuineness. Commercially, it was a clear misstep in an otherwise burgeoning career.

What a difference a few years and one of the biggest producers in hip-hop can make.

Common's new album, the R&B-flavored throwback "Be," is easily the most critically lauded hip-hop album of the year so far. It's also the most successful of Common's 13-year career, having debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's hip-hop and R&B charts the week of release.

Much of its success -- especially the commercial breakout -- can be credited in large part to Kanye West, rap's hottest tastemaker, who produced nine of the 11 tracks.

"I knew Kanye before he was Superman," noted Common, 33, who grew up in Chicago (real name: Lonnie Lynn), as did West. "He was always a talented and hungry kind of dude, and a revisionist. He's opened a lot of things up in hip-hop right now."

However, Common stopped short of crediting West for the return-to-form aspect of "Be." The album recalls a lot of the soulful, organic, thought-provoking hip-hop found on Common's earlier albums such as "Resurrection," when he worked under the name Common Sense (a little-known West Coast group with that moniker forced the change).

"I knew I wanted to go back to doing raw, soulful hip-hop even while I was making 'Electric Circus,' " he said. "I felt like I'd tried a lot of different things, and 'Electric Circus' was the end of that cycle. It was a natural evolution."

He even started working with West in an organic, unplanned way, he said.

"I was hanging with him in a studio, where he was working with another artist, but that artist wasn't there," he recalled (declining to name the other artist). "He played me some of the music and probably saw my eyes light up. He said, "Yo, you want this beat?'" And that was it. That was the starting point."

One of the best songs on the album, the sexy daydreamer "Go!," came from a collaboration with West and Top 40 singer-songwriter John Mayer after they all saw "Ray" at a movie theater together. It was Mayer who suggested that the rapper "follow a fantasy" to spark the lyricism, Common remembered.

"I wasn't sure if I should be listening to what John Mayer says," he said with a hearty laugh. "I mean, he's great, but I just didn't know if he really knew my music. But as he was messing around on guitar, I got into it, and it became really one of those divine things. It all came together beautifully."

Another standout track is "Chi-City," which comes in a long line of Common tracks to assail more mainstream rappers for their superficiality. It includes such juicy lines as, "So many raps about rims, I'm surprised [we] ain't become tires."

When asked for names, though, Common declined to point fingers directly at who he believes is spoiling hip-hop nowadays. While he's been called the "anti-50 Cent," he says: "The media separates us, but I only see us as different people interpreting the same thing: hip-hop."

"Chi-City" is also obviously a heartfelt shout-out to Common's native town. He says Chicago is still his home "figuratively and spiritually," even though he moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., a few years ago.

"Chicago's a pretty segregated city: whites over here, blacks over here, Latinos over here," he said. "Where I grew up, it was middle-class but it was also very black. So there were a lot of the ghetto elements, and you'd also see a lot of the black bourgeois, too."