FEATURE:
Groovelines
Childish Gambino – This Is America
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I wanted to do another Groovelines…
as a huge song, This Is America, turned five back in May. It was recorded by Childish Gambino. The alias of Donald Glover, I also wanted to celebrate his upcoming fortieth birthday (on 25th September). One of his defining songs and this extraordinary moment, it is a song that was relevant back in 2018. It still holds a lot of weight and has this raw and unsettling power. Written alongside Ludwig Göransson and Jeffery Lamar Williams (Young Thug), its video, directed by Hiro Murai, created quite a storm. It is visceral and beautiful. One of the best and most striking videos in recent memory. A track that tackles racism and brutality against the Black community, it was released five years after the #BlackLivesMatter movement started; a couple of years since the murder of George Floyd. Maybe prescient in that sense, it shows that, sadly, the messages through the song – about police brutality and violence against the Black community – never goes away. I am going to come to some reaction and reception of this immensely moving song. Few songs of the past ten years have had multiple features written about them. Such as the sense of controversy and attention it acquired, it has been subjected to scrutiny, praise and critique. I want to bring a bit from several articles, just to give you a sense of how people reacted to This Is America in 2018. In many ways, not a lot has changed regarding laws and the prejudice and violence against the Black community in the U.S. Rolling Stone wrote about This Is America in the context of it being timely and a big political statement. This nightmare and lesson that we cannot afford to look away from or forget:
“Like several other notable works of black American art in recent years, “This Is America” is about absorption. Onscreen and in real life, the black body gets exposed to so much terror and injustice and keeps going. How does the black body endure, and in what ways or spaces is it allowed to live out its emotions? Beyoncé’s Lemonade used the body as a diary of past pains and potentially redemptive experiences. Get Out showed us the price of a body that is literally inhabited by the constant white gaze. Lena Waithe’s The Chi on Showtime has reminded us of how often black people – particularly children – are asked to absorb the dangers of America and still required to be happy. Black Panther is about a hero who has the ability to absorb the violent energy thrown at him and reflect it back.
PHOTO CREDIT: Hiro Murai
But this is America, and while there are no superheroes here, Glover’s video calls back to the long history of black folks coming up with ways to barter our physical existence for a slice of the pie. It’s meant trafficking in our pain to get paid even a little, a dynamic steeped into our conjoined history with America. Throughout the video, he acts out a familiar tightrope walk for many hip-hop artists who have found success through revisiting painful experiences. “Get your money, black man” is sage advice that has been passed on through generations. Glover keeps dancing as he talks about the relationship between materialism, blackness, consumption and exploitation.
“This Is America” reflects the desire to use every one of our available platforms to punch at America’s conscience. So we keep recycling our trauma into art, which mainstream America then consumes and judges on the same scale as black entertainers’ less burdened white peers. That tension has been at the heart of countless pop-culture flashpoints: Kendrick Lamar losing the 2014 Best Rap Album Grammy to Macklemore; Lemonade losing 2017’s Album of the Year Grammy to Adele’s 25; the dramatic Oscars finish between Moonlight and La La Land in 2017. It bears repeating that blackness rarely gets the liberty of being free from its circumstances, while the rest of America gets to sit back and be entertained by us. Glover forces us to look at exactly who we are as a result.
With Get Out’s Sunken Place, Jordan Peele gave a name to the desperate, gasping, hellish depths that surround Black America – a place that so many of us are trying to escape while others seem to dive and wallow in it. There’s an echo of this image in “This Is America,” which closes with Glover running frantically in the dark with indistinct people in close pursuit. After a breathtaking four minutes of violence, somehow this moment is the most terrifying of all. Why are they trying to capture him: for causing so much destruction, or for revealing the truth about our country? As the mob closes in on him, the thought occurs that his captors plan to return Glover to his scripted role in a culture where the black entertainer isn’t a mirror, but a toy. This is America. Shut up and dance”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Hiro Murai
Let us take a brief pause to look at some of the reaction to the song and the accolades it received. Wikipedia collated some of the takeaways from reviews of this immense song. It is one that, when I first heard it, shook me to my core! It is such a stingily direct and vital song. This Is America remains this warning and caution. I don’t think we can ever afford to overlook what it is trying to say:
“The music video received widespread critical acclaim. Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic described the initial reaction on Twitter as "a gushing river of well-deserved praise" and the video as "the most talked-about music video of recent memory." Daniel Kreps of Rolling Stone commented that the video "is a surreal, visceral statement about gun violence in America". Pitchfork awarded the song the distinction of "Best New Track". Billboard critics ranked it 10th among the "greatest music videos of the 21st century." Mahita Gajanan of Time quoted music history professor Guthrie Ramsey at the University of Pennsylvania:
He's talking about the contradictions of trying to get money, the idea of being a black man in America. It comes out of two different sound worlds. Part of the brilliance of the presentation is that you go from this happy major mode of choral singing that we associate with South African choral singing, and then after the first gunshot it moves right into the trap sound.
Will Gompertz, arts editor of the BBC, asserted that "This Is America" was a "powerful and poignant allegorical portrait of 21st Century America, which warrants a place among the canonical depictions of the USA from Grant Wood's American Gothic to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, from Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware to America the Beautiful by Norman Lewis".
In December 2018, Billboard ranked "This Is America" as the 6th best song of the year.
The music video won the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography Camerimage Award for Best Cinematography in a Music Video, as well as the Grammy Award for Best Music Video at the 61st Grammy Awards”.
Because the video is so powerful, a lot of the reaction and analyses was of that - rather than solely the lyrics. Of course, the lyrics are key. Yet it is that visual representation that brings the song vividly to life. There are features like this that analyse the key scenes and what they mean. The visceral nature of the video did divide people. Some wondered what its messages were and what it was trying to sell us. That is what Vanity Fair asked in May 2018:
“Glover’s obviously got the upper hand on insight, however. His incongruously cheerful performance is the sharpest thing here, a compendium of arch, knowing references to everything from Jim Crow to Internet dance trends that kept Rap Genius users busy for the entire weekend. Maybe the slickest reference of all is to the Pied Piper: Glover dances a group of pre-teens in magnet-school uniforms clear of the surrounding violence like a siren-song distraction from the homework of everyday terror—which, in a way, is what he is.
I don’t know that this video (which was directed by Hiro Murai, who has also helmed much of Glover’s FX show Atlanta) changes that, really. But Glover executes it fascinatingly enough that it immediately sparked a flurry of responses online: some raves, others to the tune of “I wish he hadn’t.” A prominent complaint harped on the insistent use of images depicting violence against black people. In a world oversaturated with real images of real black death, maybe the bar is higher for deploying those images in fiction. Isn’t the shooting of that church choir, for example, a nod to the Charleston massacre? It’s a painful sight. Is it worth it?
PHOTO CREDIT: Hiro Murai
To be honest, my immediate response to the video was to wonder since when has Donald Glover been a furry beefcake who could dance—how’d we all miss that? I appreciate the more serious readings, like the angle that the violence and entertainment here are side-by-side spectacles, ordinary and co-extent, just as they are in everyday life; a quick scroll through Twitter, past mass shootings and Marvel movie trailers, confirms as much. I take that to be an incomplete read on Glover’s point, however. His constant foregrounding of his own googly-eyed gyrations distracts from the surrounding violence, but it also, I later realized, distracts from the fact that we barely even see that violence. We don’t home in on the chaos, really, save for when Glover picks up the gun himself.
That should feel self-effacing. Instead, in Glover’s hands, it feels a little insincere. I’ve often struggled to make sense of where Glover really stands on things—of whether the political statements in his art are expressions of genuine fury or Glover just playing around with political rage like it’s a costume he can slip on and off when convenient; I must have missed the point at which Glover transitioned from apolitical black nerd to bona fide political artist. A recent profile in The New Yorker didn’t exactly clarify the timeline, but it did give us a lot to chew on, to that end. Glover is quoted likening himself to Jesus (he may have been stoned) and claiming to pick up new styles and skills (like making a TV show) strategically. Jordan Peele is quoted claiming that Glover’s show Atlanta provides “the catharsis of, ‘Finally, some elevated black shit.’”
PHOTO CREDIT: Hiro Murai
“Elevated black shit”—I still don’t know what that is or why it’s categorically admirable. But the phrase came to mind while watching “This Is America” for the first time. The video somehow feels too convenient, too neat a gloss on whatever ideas it thinks it has. Its ambition, I sense, is to seem provocative enough that whether or not Glover actually means what he says here is ultimately secondary to the fact that he sells it well.
And that he does: it’s a bravura performance. But what’s he selling? I’m wary of any claim that “We” are distracted from black violence, because who’s “we,” really? Every other day of the week, America’s complaint is that the blacks doth protest too much. If not for the fact that it’s profitable to tell blacks that we should stick to sports, quit the protests, worry more about black-on-black violence, and be thankful for Obama’s eight years, people like Tomi Lahren wouldn’t be able to pay their rent. Is this not a sign that black anger and awareness are widespread and persistent, that blacks are not distracted—that we are, in fact, too keyed-in for America’s comfort? “This Is America” is predicated on a misdiagnosis. America, writ large, has not been unconsciously deterred from paying attention to the spectacle of racial injustice. It knows it’s there: it just doesn’t care to do anything about it.
It’s equal parts intriguing and tedious that Glover should feel the need to diagnose us, however. “This Is America” openly appeals to an America that loves to be told about itself, which is a strategy in itself—I am overjoyed, truly, for every white person on Twitter who “gets it.” They ought to: the video is tilted toward a liberal pop-culture intelligentsia so in love with getting spanked by black truth-tellers that even an artist such as Glover—who as recently as that New Yorker profile reminded us that he prefers to be excluded from the expectations of “woke” art—is answering the call to put us all in our place”.
One more feature before I wrap things up. Creative Review reacted to the massive impact the song’s video had. This Is America stormed YouTube and it really got people talking. I can’t remember how people reacted to the song before the video came out. It is clear that the video articulated something that was very moving and unforgettable:
“Racking up almost 50 million views in under five days, Childish Gambino’s This Is America has struck a chord with audiences all over the world. Here, Rob Turner examines the many political and cultural layers that lie within the hit video.
“You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out,” Gil Scott-Heron warned America, back in 1970. “You will not be able to skip out for beer during commercials, because the revolution will not be televised.”
Maybe not, but it’s currently storming the internet. In just five days, Childish Gambino’s latest video – This Is America – has racked up almost 50 million views. And that’s not counting all the memes and GIFs, the viral shots of the Georgia rapper throwing crazy shapes on a warehouse dancefloor, smoking a blunt on a car roof, and emptying an automatic rifle into a gospel choir.
But is this America? Where are the MAGA caps, pitchforks, and burning torches? The director of this new nightmare, Hiro Murai, keeps the white supremacists, and the bloodthirsty police force, at the periphery, out of focus and rushing past the camera eye. Most strikingly of all, Gambino himself becomes a stand-in for one of the angriest young men to emerge from the cauldron of 21st-century racism: raising his weapon, he turns into Dylann Roof, who murdered nine churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015.
Why turn the lens away from the perpetrators of violence? Again and again, from the Rodney King beating to the Eric Garner murder, cameras have been central in exposing (if not prosecuting) hate in America. Here, though, the fascists are off the hook, and we find a row of apathetic kids, lounging on a balcony and following the revolution on their phones, as the warped voice of Young Thug drifts into the mix, flaunting his web presence: “America, I just checked my following list, / And you mothafuckas owe me…”
A few bars earlier, Gambino anticipates Thug’s studied narcissism. “This is a celly,” he raps, “that’s a tool, my Kodak.” Even if you miss the shout-out to yet another Southern MC (Kodak Black), this is a tight cluster of images. We are reminded that a camera-phone can be used for something other than Instagram: it can become a tool for exposing murder. But there’s another thread lurking here. The camera can also be (wilfully) mistaken for a tool – a handgun – as it was earlier this year, when Sacramento police fatally shot Stephon Clark, a young black man who was ‘armed’ with what turned out to be an iPhone.
These flickering parallel lives, as the device used to unveil police violence turns into the excuse for a curbside execution, capture the sick juxtapositions of being black in Trump’s America. Throughout the video, Sherrie Silver’s choreography thumbs through the book of African and African American dance history, placing Blocboy’s trap moves alongside the distinctive popping of South African gwara gwara. Gambino’s shirtless body becomes a dense intertextual sign, throwing allusions in all directions as he glides through a blank warehouse space. It’s a sexy and infectious sight, and you can see the GIFs sprouting every second.
Elsewhere, though, Silver leads Gambino into more frightening territory, lifting the jolting wobble and the boggling eyes of the minstrel cakewalk. Already, the film has been dissected by an army of YouTube analysts, with freezeframes of Gambino set alongside grotesque cartoons from the Jim Crow South, blurring the rapper with a caricature from the Wilson era. The black performer is destablised, yet again, by all these commentaries, as he is read (and re-read) in relation to both authentic self-expression and white pastiche.
Oddly enough, this is an increasingly common gesture in contemporary hip hop, with the phantoms of minstrelsy and racial passing looming in a number of videos in the last 12 months, from Jay-Z’s appropriation of Sambo cartoons in The Story of OJ (dir. Mark Romanek), to Tyler the Creator’s grisly surgical adoption of white-face in Who Dat Boy (dir. Wolf Haley). Jordan Peele’s Get Out was the multiplex apotheosis of this trend, offering the most horrific commentary on American racism since the closing shot of Night of the Living Dead.
As a short film, This Is America is sharp as hell, and it holds its own alongside a spate of violent fantasies imagining life after Obama. As an MC, though, Gambino still seems a little unsure of himself. A taste for irony has shaped his work ever since the early mixtapes, back in the late 2000s. Even the alias turned out to be a joke: it was what popped out when he typed his real name into an online Wu-Tang Name Generator. This new cut feels closer to a warped commentary on Atlanta trap than a sincere engagement with it, reducing guests like Quavo and 21 Savage to parodic ad-libs (“skrrt skrrt!”).
For some, this is the sound of trap music growing up, as Gambino shows the stars how to get woke. For others, it’s an inauthentic carbon copy of the real sounds of Atlanta, borrowing the triplet flows and distinctive beats of the sub-genre and gobbling up their bandwidth with an indelible video. Perhaps it’s both: an unresolved tension between sincerity and salesmanship hovers over the track. As Young Thug puts it, in the mysterious refrain that closes the film: “You just a black man in this world / You just a barcode…”.
Donald Glover is forty on 25th September. I wanted to use this opportunity to highlight his Childish Gambino moniker. This Is America was top ten in the U.K. and went to number one in the U.S. You hear it played now and then. I feel it will always be teaching people. Lest we ever forget the song’s lines and those indelible images in the video! I don’t think there have been too many protest songs. Concerning violence in ghettos and brutality against the Black community, it also concerns never-ending gun violence and the carnage it brings. Even though there is a black mark against the song in that This Is America, with many pointing out the similarities to American Pharaoh by Jase Harley, it takes nothing away from Childish Gambino’s gem. It opened eyes and provoked conversation. In such a stressed ands fractured time, we need a lot more songs…
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