During Donald Glover’s astounding guest spot on Saturday Night Live, the multi-hyphenate took to the stage as Childish Gambino to debut a new song titled “This Is America.” Glover gave a thrilling performance of the track, then unleashed the single online, as well as the official music video, which many are calling brilliant and disturbing. With a title like “This Is America,” both descriptions fit.
While the song itself is a great sonic follow-up to what Gambino put forth with 2016’s Awaken, My Love!, there’s a lot to unpack with the visuals, which, as Akilah Hughes pointed out, take place entirely in a warehouse, similar to the video for Gambino’s 2011 single “Freaks and Geeks.” Both feature Childish showing out for the camera, but instead of a one-man performance, “This Is America” brilliantly takes on a number of issues plucked directly from recent news.
Very early on, an actor by the name of Calvin The Second (who definitely resembles Trayvon Martin’s father Tracy, but is not, in fact, Tracy Martin) strums on a guitar to the track. By the time the camera moves with Gambino back to the chair the man was sitting on, he now has a hood covering his head, and Gambino’s standing behind him, hitting a terribly familiar Jim Crow pose, before aiming a gun and shooting the man through the head. A well-dressed person in a polo shirt and slacks then brings a red cloth out so Gambino can carefully place the gun into it. This special cloth makes it clear there’s real care and consideration given to how the firearm is being handled. Meanwhile, the dead man’s body is left lying on the ground, only to be dragged off-screen, all while Gambino continues his performance, smiling and dancing like nothing has happened, as if that black body isn’t worth anywhere near as much as the instrument used to end its life. A similar moment of gun violence during a happier singing sequence happens later, after Gambino uses an assault rifle to mow down a church choir.
Those two sequences alone have a few messages buried within them. At the top is a play on how Americans view their guns. Whether it’s the NRA or anyone who grips their 9MM tightly while reciting the Second Amendment, the last thing some Americans want to lose is their right to bear arms, even though the NRA was slow to speak on the murder of Philando Castile, an African-American man who was shot to death by a cop despite alerting the officer that he had a permit for the gun in his vehicle. The guns many say they acquire to protect their lives end up being more important than the growing number of lives taken by police officers on a disturbingly-regular basis. The church choir sequence is even more tragic when you realize that it’s more than likely a reference to that horrific 2015 massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Immediately after he takes someone out, Gambino looks right into the camera and starts his verse with the phrase: “This is America.” You can’t get more direct than that.
Speaking of the turn up, there’s a lot of awesome dancing in this clip. Gambino, surrounded by a number of younger kids, hits everything from Blocboy JB’s now-iconic shoot dance to the gwara-gwara, which hits even closer to home when you realize that the kids dancing with him appear to be dressed in the school uniforms that South African children wear. This symbolism speaks to how folks will stay scrolling timelines, searching for the perfect meme or commenting on the latest songs, consuming distractions while the world around us burns, figuratively and literally. It’s hard to tell if this is ignorance to what really matters or a coping mechanism and escapism from the fuckery of everyday life, but it’s definitely something that Gambino touches on in this video. Many are also seeing Gambino’s performance as a way to dance in the face of the oppressors.
Now, while all of this is going on in the forefront, there’s a ton of chaos erupting in the background. There are fires, people rioting, and a bunch of cars that look at least 20 or 30 years old (remember, Castile was killed in his ’97 Oldsmobile). There’s even a hooded figure riding a white horse, which could be a reference to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which anyone up on their Bible knows is a reference to the end of the world in the Book of Revelation. According to the Word, the first horse was a white one.
One of the most interesting moments in this video is when Gambino says, “This a celly / That’s a tool.” In the clip, the camera pans to a group of kids with their faces covered, appearing to be recording the insanity on their cell phones. It’s either highlighting just how powerful the cellphone has become in documenting these horrific acts of violence being brought upon us these days, or a reference to the Stephon Clark case, where police thought Clark was holding a gun or a tool and shot him to death in a backyard, only to find out he was holding his cellphone.
If that interpretation is correct that would mean that Glover wrote and recorded this song, then shot the video for it, some time after Clark’s death in late March 2018. Glover swiftly turning around art that speaks directly to recent news isn’t unheard of, considering that Glover “leaked” that script for his now-cancelled Deadpool animated series referencing #WhoBitBeyonce during the same week we tried to figure out #WhoBitBeyonce. AKA we’re just amassing proof of how much of a creative genius Donald Glover truly is.
One of the heaviest moments is the end of the video, which finds the warehouse dark and seemingly barren, until we see Gambino running for his life from a lynch mob of what appears to be all-white faces. There are a number of schools of thought on this ending; some posit that it’s the ideals of white supremacy intruding on the life of black people. Others have likened it to a slave running through the woods at night. One has to wonder if this was Gambino’s attempt to escape The Sunken Place, which could explain why Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya introduces Childish Gambino on Saturday Night Live right before the performance of “This Is America.”
Look, Childish Gambino does a lot of insane dancing in what appears to be a one-shot onion of a video. As you peel back the layers, you get a beautifully dark portrait of the ultra violence and rage running through America, and, most importantly, residing in the minds of black Americans trying to survive this insanity. That Gambino can take these strands and weave them into a cohesive narrative over song, dance and video underscores that he is today’s foremost creative voice for our people.
