Crowd-pleasing Summer Jam keeps vibe upbeat

With positive rappers Kanye West and Common leading the bill at Saturday’s Summer Jam in Carson, the seven-hour affair reflected the best in hip-hop music and attitude.

Some 10,000 fans at the Home Depot Center for the annual KKBT-FM (103.1)-sponsored show created a laid-back and respectful vibe early in the afternoon for such up and comers as Keyshia Cole, SWV, Brooke Valentine and Trey Songz.

The biggest hit of the first half was veteran R&B; diva Toni Braxton, who proved she can still work a crowd with her powerful voice. Another seasoned act, Naughty by Nature, elevated the mood further with old-school favorites “O.P.P.” and “Hip Hop Hooray.”

Headliners usually appear after sundown at these marathon radio-station concerts, but Saturday one of the key acts took the stage while it was still light.

Chicago’s Common, a former underground star who’s been helped to mainstream success through his friendship with West, received a standing ovation on being introduced.

Opening with “Go!,” the upbeat first single from his new album, “Be,” Common kept the mood up throughout, bringing a girl from the crowd on stage to dance with him on the new album’s “The Corner.”

Common’s stylish attire -- green-collared short-sleeved shirt and beret -- typified the high-minded tone of the day. Even the usually controversial Lil’ Kim was on her best behavior less than a month before she’s scheduled to start serving a one-year jail sentence on a perjury conviction. Feeding off the crowd’s energy, the emcee generated the loudest ovation of the night, spoke frequently between songs, danced and even threw in a reggae-tinged track to close her nearly 30-minute set.

West arrived after a crowd-pleasing, high-energy set by Atlanta’s T.I. and one by Jermaine Dupri that focused too heavily on his guests (save for a nice turn by Da Brat).

It was only fitting that the show climaxed with the man whose hit “Jesus Walks” has given the positive-rap camp a major boost. The rapper-producer mixed “Spaceship” and “Get ‘Em High” from his Grammy-winning debut, “College Dropout,” with a couple of new joints (the dance-y “Touch the Sky” and the soulful lead single “Gold Digger”) from his forthcoming “Late Registration” album.

More important, by the time he closed his set with “Jesus Walks,” West’s impassioned performance demonstrated that despite the critical and commercial success, he’s striving to conquer new peaks rather than sit contentedly at the top of old ones.