Common is on a bit of a hot streak lately — selling a sitcom about a fast-declining ’90s rapper to Fox, releasing a new album (out today), and now dropping an artful short film into the mix. Black America Again, which shares its name with his new collection of songs, is a 21-minute meditation on contemporary American blackness punctuated with scenes of Common performing the film and album’s eponymous track on the street with a simple beatbox/drum accompaniment. The short was directed by Selma’s Bradford Young and produced by America’s Hero, Ava DuVernay, and it definitely reinforces the “activist” descriptor Common applied to himself in an interview with Vulture. It also makes us wonder: What else under the sun might the always-incredible, intensely busy DuVernay apply her golden touch to? And can Common come along?
