Common Discusses 'Black America' and Mass Incarceration
Common is in earnest to put in the work. Whether in the booth or tilling the cultural soil for true awakening and social change, he is – unabashedly – both student and professor. The learning, the sharing stoke his perpetual state of becoming – to become a better artist, a better activist, a better man. The proud son of Chicago’s South Side is down for the joys
and responsibilities of music making, of spitting rhymes that tell of black struggle and black love.
The song
“Letter to the Free”, an unblinking meditation on race in America, appears both on Common’s newly released 11th studio album
Black America Again, and as the end-title track of Ava DuVernay’s necessary and devastating documentary,
13th. Written specifically for the film, its lyrics reflect the doc’s core premise that the US Constitution’s 13th Amendment contains a loophole that abolishes slavery and servitude
except as punishment for a crime.
13th – and by extension “Letter to the Free” – connects the historical dots from Jim Crow to the modern-day, calling the current crisis of mass incarceration a legal rebranding of slavery in America.
Common sat down with Mass Appeal to discuss his own awakening regarding mass incarceration and striking a balance between being a rapper and heeding that higher purpose.
On his personally trajectory with coming to understand and decode mass incarceration as a modern-day slavery:
Common: The South Side of Chicago growing up, you got some friends in jail, that’s in prison. You’ve got some uncles inside. So it’s kinda like, ah man, this is part of the way that we grow up. This is normal. And I didn’t think different of that even though I knew that the system was targeting us. I didn’t know the intricacies or like how to really define that. So, whether it was hip hop informing me on that or just me looking and seeing it in society. I see how much we get stopped. We know that there are Black men in prison. It is part of our lives. So, I know that we are targets in many ways. I definitely always felt like, man, I pray for people in prison, meaning that I have always felt compassion towards people lockup, whether they actually committed the crime or not. I was always thinking, man, there has to be a way to help to rehabilitate and give people a second chance. But, I have to be very honest and say even when John Legend and I were receiving the
Academy Award [for Best Song for “Glory” from DuVernay’s film
Selma], and he said that there are more men in prison now then there were in slavery, it shocked me. I was learning as he said it. That was kind of like the little seed planted towards this.
And what really shifted things or just made things go faster was meeting [professor and author of
The New Jim Crow] Michelle Alexander. Encountering her was just like, wow. Being from Chicago, a lot of my focus has been on stopping the violence in the streets because there are young people dying – everyday. And another part of my focus also was on the police killing us, so I wasn’t really thinking about how mass incarceration fit into the scheme of that. I mean, the police are the front line for this whole system, but I wasn’t even putting all that together. I can say meeting Michelle Alexander was really the turning point for me. Then, after reading
The New Jim Crow, not that I thought I knew everything, but [the documentary]
13th, hit me in a way that I felt I knew about some of these issues, but there was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about ALEC [
American Legislative Exchange Council]. Honestly, I didn’t even know the 13th Amendment states that if you are a criminal, you could be enslaved. You know, all that information – and I’m still learning. But, it has been an awakening. And it’s an awakening that this country needs. This is part of American history. The same way teachers are teaching our kids about the American Revolution, we need to teach them about how slavery ties into where we are now. Because if they can see that, they’ll start putting two and two together, they will start functioning different.
On inspiration for “Letter to the Free”:
Spiritually, I have been in a place where I want to do things that have purpose, things that can impact life in a positive way, things that can activate and empower individuals to want to work together and be together and improve our lives. I’ve been citing a lot of great art out there that has been doing it for me – whether it’s reading [Ta-Nehisi Coates’]
Between the World and Me, or seeing
Hamilton on Broadway or going back to James Baldwin – those things made me kind of remember what I’m supposed to be doing with the art that I do. I’ve been drawing from it, and I’ve been praying to God, “Can I do that type of work?”
When I found out that Ava was doing
13th and I had just gotten through with interviewing Michelle Alexander for the [
America Divided docu-series] project. She shook my world. I had been so focused only on the violence that is going on in the streets of Chicago, and it blew my mind when she started tying that into mass incarceration, and the fathers being removed from the home and how that cycle continues. I had already been writing songs for this new album
Black America Again, so I had been in the spirit. Anyway, I found out that Ava was doing the movie, and I was like, man, I gotta write something for this because I was already charged from just learning more and more about mass incarceration and the lineage from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. Being able to see and connect all that, made sense for me, so I had to write something.
I was grateful [to be part of
13th] because I look for stuff that can be impactful. I’m still gonna have fun. On my album,
Black America Again, I’m still gonna have fun. You know, where I’m doing songs where I’m just rhyming, like on a song called “Pyramids”. But where I feel most purposeful and most fulfilled is being able to do a song like “Letter to the Free” or “The People” or [
Selma’s] “Glory” or something like that.
On striking a balance between being a rapper and that higher purpose:
I feel like if I gain enough information and do my diligence to become a better person, the power will come through the song and I don’t have to like try to think: am I rapper or am I… My mountaintop as far as writers is like Dr. King and James Baldwin and Dr. Angelou, Nas. So, I just strive to be going to that level. It’s not always about thinking: am I just a rapper trying to do this? I feel it’s poems that I’ve read that moved me. It’s art work that I’ve seen that has moved me. Short stories, novels that have moved me. Preachers that have moved me. I figure if I reach my truth and deliver it, however it comes out, then that’s when we bring the power.
. wishful thinking but id love to see him possibly link up w/ young rj and black milk in the future.