Donald Glover’s music video “This Is America” attracted 7.2 million views in one day, when it went viral after its release Friday. That record-setting number suggests a sort of online plebiscite, and yet it’s still hard to take Glover seriously. His four-minute piece combines rapping, dancing, and violence into deliberately theatrical agitprop, but is a highly specious political statement. In keeping with some of the 35-year-old actor’s recent imprudent social comments, this inflammatory video conforms to the entertainment industry’s current “resistance.”
Viewers were easily fascinated by Glover’s provocation. He first appears shirtless and wild-haired, moving toward the camera in anguished-erotic convulsions and with a frightening grimace. It could be a lynching victim’s finale, except that it conjures a reverse image out of America’s racial nightmare: the blackface acts of 19th-century minstrelsy.
What’s politically significant about the throwback image of “This Is America” is that it hit cyberspace just as pop and political culture is struggling with the question of black political independence. Glover sweeps his audience, hip-hop fans as well as other pop-culture followers, back into a “safe space.” It’s not Kanye West’s eccentric freedom of thought but Millennial groupthink and its attendant anxiety. The video’s dance celebration is disrupted by shocking events that vaguely reference recent social tragedies — beginning with a cameo appearance by a man who resembles Trayvon Martin’s father, and then on to a black gospel choir massacred by a machine-gun-wielding Glover.
These confused symbols intrigue a politically naïve audience, including celebrities such as Megan Mullalley and Trent Reznor, sudden political adepts tweeting “woke” affirmation to their own Twitter followers. Their knee-jerk sentimental endorsement is more clearly motivated than Glover’s own, supposedly political consciousness.
Affluent performers claim the ghetto imprisonment that, presumably, they argue African Americans should escape.
Performer-writer-producer of the TV series Atlanta, Glover also makes hip-hop records as a side gig. “This Is America” features his hip-hop alias Childish Gambino. Through both business enterprises, Glover exploits black youth culture, to questionable success. He appeals to consumers’ social restlessness — the source of a generation’s political identification. His new minstrelsy demonstrates the unique situation of affluent performers who feign the status of disadvantaged social types. (Cameo appearances by the mothers of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin exploited their working-class grief in Beyoncés Lemonade extravaganza.) In performance and appearance, they claim the ghetto imprisonment that, presumably, they argue African Americans should escape.
So far, few Internet fans have seen through Glover’s pageant of destruction and paranoia. Nor have many realized that it represents the worst kind of manipulation — a strangely self-conscious version of a blackface Jim Crow coon-show that embarrasses black culture’s politically enlightened history.
Should we expect a rapper approaching middle age, who goes by the name Childish Gambino (a bit too cleverly merging hip-hop juvenilia with black drug dealers’ admiration of Italian mobster swagger), to fully understand the politicized enlightenment exhibited by their R&B forebears of the Sixties and Seventies? When the Isley Brothers recorded “Fight the Power” (1969), The Funkadelics made America Eats Its Young (1972), and Curtis Mayfield released There’s No Place Like America Today (1975), those artists had actually lived through segregation, discrimination, and urban riots; and those records (all bitter yet also inspirational) reflected sober realization about American life, as well as a spirit of self-determination that was newly earned.
For those who remember that rich period of soul-music renaissance, the exhibition of black folks raving and ranting in This Is America is little more than a pale distortion of Mayfield’s truly provocative album cover for There’s No Place Like America Today. Mayfield repurposed Margaret Bourke-White’s 1937 photo of blacks standing in a Depression-era food line, beneath a billboard depicting a prosperous white family. Mayfield flipped cultural nostalgia to show his exclusion from it. But Gambino-Glover’s nostalgia for the civil-rights-era version is uninformed by reality. (He catalogues Black Lives Matter bullet points rather than personal grief, like Ice Cube’s classic 1990 video “Dead Homiez.”) His pop-culture disillusionment is warped by the disoriented expectations black Americans felt during the Obama era, which, now, has led to the bewilderment of some during the Trump era (despite Trump’s having served as a heroic capitalist icon for hip-hop artists before his presidential election).
Gambino-Glover’s video takes place on a soundstage that resembles the parking-garage setting of Eminem’s 2017 freestyle anti-Trump tirade that was commissioned by Black Entertainment Television. It’s an insular and patronizing location for a blackface performance that, ironically, evokes the antique graphics of the first white minstrels, such as Theodore Dartmouth (T. D.) Rice, who originated the Jim Crow figure. Scholars Eric Lott and William T. Lhamon (in their respective studies Love and Theft and Jump Jim Crow) described the history behind the Jim Crow stereotype that eventually named the period of “separate but equal” segregation, which did not end until the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Gambino-Glover’s weird choreography modernizes the legend that Rice, supposedly, based his early racist caricature on a crippled Negro man he saw busking on a Midwestern street in the 19th century.
‘This Is America’ leeches from the civil-rights past to validate today’s marketable discontent.
No matter how popular “This Is America” is for the moment, it is the work of an ideologically crippled pop star — and proof that contemporary black popular culture has a crippled sense of history.
Like the TV series Atlanta, this video is as much art project as it is social alarm. Director Hiro Murai suppresses his own Japanese-immigrant knowledge within the artifices of music videos that appropriate urban black experience for the pretense of emotional authenticity. “This Is America” leeches from the civil-rights past to validate today’s marketable discontent. It hasn’t shaken the culture the way Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” music video did when it debuted simultaneously on several TV networks in 1991, with a premiere audience estimated at 500 million. Jackson’s controversial coda, in which he morphed into a black panther to portray his personal and political rage, was a high point in black pop, as daring as anything in then-ascendant hip-hop.
Decades later, Beyoncé’s Lemonade music videos set an egregious standard of excessive cultural exploitation. Beyoncé’s pseudo-Afrocentric posturing defined how this new form of music-video minstrelsy could revive Jim Crow segregation through a pop star’s distanced emphasis on black grievance and high-art artifice. Gambino-Glover continues this artsy phase of black pop segregation. Only black faces appear in the video until its final scene, when Glover, adopting the wide-eyed fright of Get Out, is seen running for his life, chased by a mob of whites.
What does that all mean? Simply that the mixed messages in “This Is America” are also superficial. They allude to race-based catastrophes without explanation, therefore without justification, just a pop artist’s sanctimony. This spectacle of American chaos is vague and safely “radical.” Its style of eternal paranoia keeps viewers from thinking. They can, instead, fantasize that clicking on Glover’s squandering of black cultural and political history equates to a militant political act.
Editor’s Note: This piece originally incorrectly stated that Trayvon Martin’s father made an appearance at the beginning of the video. In fact, the man in question is an actor.
Childish Gambino’s new music video for his song This is America was viewed almost 50m times in five days. It is a remarkable artistic achievement given that it utilises finely-tuned choreography to satirise the role of the black man’s supposedly “joyous” song and dance routine.
The release of the video was particularly timely. Encountering the Hiro Murai-directed promo brought some much-needed satisfaction – and sanity – to a week that had notably featured a Trump-endorsing Kanye West claiming slavery was “a choice”.
After already amassing over 49m YouTube views, This is America has demonstrated the potential for an artist like Donald Glover – aka Childish Gambino – to use popular culture to critically address ongoing and deeply-ingrained issues surrounding race.
Not so ‘happy’ after all
It achieves this while simultaneously criticising popular culture for placating audiences. It can be seen as the antithesis of Pharrell Williams’s Happy – a video that achieved its own constant rotation via more obvious feelgood escapism.
Glover’s hard-hitting cynicism can be pitched against Williams’ most buoyant song in a way that recounts Public Enemy’s 1990 citing of Bobby McFerrin’s similarly rose-tinted Don’t Worry Be Happy as little more than a distraction within their own call-to-arms, Fight the Power.
Perhaps most controversial of all, This is America appears to openly question the entertainment industry’s support for what amounts to a continuation of “minstrelsy” (the once highly popular 19th-century “blackface” tradition that relied on damaging racist stereotypes). This aspect was picked up by creator of the comedy Dear White People, Justin Simien, who observed how Glover even contorts his body into the caricatured figure of Jim Crow – a slave archetype who was a mainstay of such performances.
Utilising sharp choreography as part of his own bewitching performance, he leaves no misunderstanding about where he locates either the origins or the current role of the black man’s upbeat song and dance routine.
As a video, it immediately appears to have some kinship with Beyoncé’s Grammy-nominated Formation. Both appear to pull us towards the motivation behind the Black Lives Matter campaign but, more than that, these are both examples of the music video as a politicised event. Formation is a fierce commentary on events from Ferguson to Sandra Bland to Eric Garner and Freddie Gray. The video marked Beyonce’s entrance into the political sphere while also ensuring that it is couched in mass appeal.
As cultural theorist Sunil Manghani identified, these videos transcend the format of the music video itself, resulting in “a combined ‘object’ of music-video-news as it forms and reformulates through social media, news networks, and print journalism”.
Glover has now had a “moment” where he has dominated a cultural conversation by presenting work that is so fully formed in its complexity and accessibility.
A satirical dance
What is so remarkable about the way in which Glover used the form of the music video as a politicised event is in the layered and nuanced content with a direct message. Peppered throughout the video are the traces of various dance styles, from viral video moves to Blocboy JB’s shoot dance, to the South African Gwara Gwara. Brought together, the differing origins form something that looks very American and which Glover appears to comment on directly.
Placing the choreography so front and centre seems to be saying that that mainstream culture is all America sees when they see the black community. The exaggerated facial expressions while dancing in the video, further pointing to the disparaging caricatures of the black man popularised in the Jim Crow era.
The Sunken Place
This Is America Childish Gambino Wiki
At the end of the video, Glover is seen running in semi darkness being chased by a group of what seem to be non-black people. Like many on Twitter have theorised, it is plausible to suggest that Glover is in fact running from the Sunken Place – a concept developed in Jordan Peele’s film Get Out.
The Sunken Place represents a system that no matter how hard individuals and groups protest, it will silence them. As Peele explained:
You know when you’re going to sleep and it feels like you’re about to fall, so you wake up? What if you never woke up? Where would you fall? And that was kind of the most harrowing idea to me. And as I’m writing it becomes clear that the sunken place is this metaphor for the system that is suppressing the freedom of black people, of many outsiders, many minorities.
Glover in effect represents this concept through choreography and visual imagery in just four minutes and four seconds. Like Beyoncé, Glover has offered up a multi-layered political statement and one which the mainstream is now grappling with. If ever the music video had a moment, it is right now.
In his opening monologue as the host of “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, Donald Glover quipped: “I’m an actor, a writer and a singer. Some people have described me as a triple threat. But I kind of like to call myself just a threat.” As if to drive home the point that he’s scarily talented, Glover, who created and stars in the surreal FX comedy “Atlanta” was also the episode’s musical guest, performing two new songs as his hip-hop alter ego, Childish Gambino.
The music video for one of those tracks, “This Is America,” appeared the same night, and it suggests that he is actually a quadruple threat: He can dance, too. But Glover’s graceful moves aren’t exactly the point. There’s plenty of messaging about race, violence and the entertainment industry in the song and video — which helps explain why fans and critics have devoted so much time to dissecting its references and debating its meaning. Here are some of their sharpest insights. (Excerpts below are unedited.)
[Read our interview with the director of “This Is America,” Hiro Murai]
‘Unpacking All the References in Childish Gambino’s Phenomenal New Video’ [Dazed]
“This Is America” is dense with allusions to American history and pop culture. Natty Kasambala assembles a list of footnotes to the video, from its Jim Crow imagery to Glover’s references to other musicians.
‘Childish Gambino’s Video Grabs You by the Throat’ [CNN]
“What Gambino put together is a true picture of America, where so many of us get to dance and sing and laugh and create,” writes Isaac Bailey. “All the while others are largely ignored and trapped in the background, struggling and sometimes dying in a sea of ugliness that many of us would rather not acknowledge, knowing it would ruin the pretty pictures we’d rather focus on.”
‘The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” Video’ [The New Yorker]
Doreen St. Félix notes that “The video has already been rapturously described as a powerful rally cry against gun violence, a powerful portrait of black-American existentialism, a powerful indictment of a culture that circulates videos of black children dying as easily as it does videos of black children dancing in parking lots.”
She continues: “It is those things, but it also a fundamentally ambiguous document. The truth is that this video, and what it suggests about its artist, is very difficult. A lot of black people hate it. Glover forces us to relive public traumas and barely gives us a second to breathe before he forces us to dance.”
Justin Simien Breaks Down ‘This Is America’ on Twitter
In an appreciative Twitter thread Sunday night, Justin Simien, the creator of Netflix’s “Dear White People,” analyzed the imagery of “This Is America” and concluded that the video asked black viewers, “How can those of us granted a moment in the proverbial spotlight just use it to entertain ourselves to death?” He continued: “It’s a challenge and a series of questions. Like art should be.”
‘What It Means When Childish Gambino Says “This Is America”’ [Vulture]
Frank Guan analyzes the lyrics of “This Is America,” which draw heavily on trap music, a gritty rap subgenre with its origins in Atlanta. “The incongruousness of Glover, raised middle-class and a NYU graduate, bragging about his Mexican drug supplier and threatening to have you gunned down, is intentional,” he writes. “It’s a tribute to the cultural dominance of trap music and a reflection on the ludicrous social logic that made the environment from which trap emerges, the logic where money makes the man, and every black man is a criminal.”
‘Donald Glover’s “This Is America” Is a Stylish, Ambitious Provocation — But What Is It Actually Selling?’ [Vanity Fair]
K. Austin Collins takes issue with Glover’s critique of black America’s complicity in the violence that plagues it. “I’m wary of any claim that ‘We’ are distracted from black violence,” he writes, “because who’s ‘we,’ really? Every other day of the week, America’s complaint is that the blacks doth protest too much.”
‘Making Donald Glover the “Anti-Kanye” Is Gross and Wrong and Will Backfire, So Please Don’t’ [The Root]
Childish Gambino This Is America Lyrics
Damon Young points out the danger of setting up Glover as the antidote to another black male artist, Kanye West, whose recent political pronouncements have frustrated many fans. “Between ‘Atlanta’ and his music, Glover’s work could have an antiseptic quality, cleansing us of Kanye’s descent into anti-blackness and celebratory idiocy,” Young observes. “But at the very least, this comparison fails because it reduces Glover’s work to that of a palate cleanser. And also implied is that only one of these types of men can exist concurrently.”
‘The Filmmaker of the Year Hasn’t Even Made a Feature Film Yet’ [The Ringer]
Adam Nayman turns his attention to the director of “This Is America,” Hiro Murai, who got his start making music videos and has also directed many standout episodes of “Atlanta” and HBO’s recent critical favorite “Barry.” As Nayman sees it, “The power of Murai’s aesthetic is bound up in the balance between the camera’s visual overstatement and its subjects’ deadpan dismissal.”