His hashtag-rap witticisms, which privileged punch line over narrative, seemed too flimsy to contain a philosophy. Childish Gambino was Glover’s imp, born from an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator. Our staff and contributors share their cultural enthusiasms.Ī few years ago, among Glover’s various evolving creative modes (“I’m an actor, writer, and singer,” he said in his “S.N.L.” opening monologue), his career as a musician seemed to be one with a ceiling, and notable for its relative callowness. The song ends with an eerie melody from Young Thug, who is almost-singing, “You just a big dawg, yeah / I kennelled him in the back yard, yeah.” At the video’s end, Glover is running for his life, the police gaining on him. And then Glover is dancing again-this time, with cars burning and police chaos beyond him. The ten actors fall down in a gruesome heap, reminding us of the night we got word that a young white man had killed a gathering of black worshippers at a church in Charleston. The reprieve ends abruptly when, in another room, Glover is passed another gun, a rifle this time, and murders the members of a black choir. The camera amiably follows Glover and a new set of companions, a troupe of uniformed schoolchildren doing the gwara gwara, and then a slew of viral dances. When his character is not dancing, he is killing. The awful syncopation of murder and music recalls Arthur Jafa’s seven-minute video “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” from 2016, in which footage of a police officer shooting Walter Scott in the back corresponds to a climax in Kanye West’s “Ultra Light Beam.” This is what it’s like, Glover’s video seems to say, to be black in America-at any given time, vulnerable to joy or to destruction. Glover carefully places the gun on a lush pillow held out for him by an eager school-aged black child. Glover strikes a pose, and then, in time for the rhythm drop, shoots a black man in the head from behind.Ī moment ago, the victim had been strumming a guitar. His manic elation erupts into violence at a speed that matches something of the media consumer’s daily experience. Sometimes the movements and how they activate his muscles make him look sexy, at other times crazed. Dance is its own language the choreographer for the video, Sherrie Silver, has taught Glover to contort his body in a manner that induces memories of the grotesque theatre of jigging and cake-walking. He plays a kind of deleterious tramp, all instinct, skitting around an airy parking hangar. In the video, Glover is shirtless and his teeth gleam. The video, which was released online as Glover performed the track on live television, turned the single into a pessimistic statement on American entertainment-both the making and consumption of it. The song, which Glover performed during his hosting gig on “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend, seemed like a portal into a successful black man’s psyche, consumed as it is by guilt and by vanity. One of the song’s three strands is set to a benign Afrobeat rhythm, with Glover and a backing choir echoing old, edifying dogmas of black striving (“Grandma told me / Get your money, black man”) in another, Glover assumes the tempo of a jazz poet as he declares, “This Is America” in the third, the familiar voices of Quavo, 21 Savage, and Young Thug are incorporated into the song as ambient reverberations, rather than as discrete guest features. Donald Glover, before I saw the eloquent, ultra-violent accompanying video concocted by Glover and the director Hiro Murai. I happened to listen to “ This Is America,” the new single by Childish Gambino, a.k.a.
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