Childish Gambino’s America
Childish Gambino dropped a new single and video yesterday, a song called “This is America.” The song itself is special, an infectious dance…
Childish Gambino dropped a new single and video yesterday, a song called “This is America.” The song itself is special, an infectious dance track that critiques the banal commercialism of dance-pop and stands on its own as agit -prop/art. But, as my friend Tracey said to me on Facebook: “Don’t listen. Watch.”
So, yeah, I did — and she was right. “This is America” is Whitmanesque in that it contains multitudes. It is Baldwinesque in its unflinching vision of an America weighed down by its past and unwilling to see that the violence that remains its defining character is a product of its own sins. It is funny and terrifying and rage-inducing and saddening by turns and simultaneously.
Two years ago, it was Beyonce’s video for “Formation” — with its swooping cameras, its proclamations of pride in identity and its embedded critique of police and power — that shook the musical world. The video — and a Super Bowl halftime show — had police unions demanding an apology and calling for a boycott, but as much as the video looked outward at the nation black Americans inhabited, many critics were concerned that it remained more about Beyonce than about any cause. (The lyrics are pretty clear about this.)
Gambino’s video seems to answer Beyonce, echoing her dance moves, though distorting them. Unlike “Formation,” which lost its power when stripped of the visuals (the song spends a lot of time congratulating herself for her material wealth), Gambino has gone all in with a blistering critique of the violence endemic to the American project an the materialism that is a central part. Gambino — the alter-ego of actor/writer/director/comedian Donald Glover — doesn’t “rock (a) Givenchy dress,” but he does riff satirically on Gucci and cell phones, and makes it clear that even the richest and the most powerful African American is “just a Black man in this world,” a “barcode,” a “big dawg” that’s been “kenneled … in the backyard” — despite his “drivin’ expensive foreigns.”
This line — “just a Black man in this world” — is key, as Glover unveils an assortment of images from American history — of Jim Crow and the civil rights era, of police violence and broader societal violence, hand guns, semi-automatics, all of it unfolding in a white warehouse (someone on Twitter said the warehouse represented white supremacy, which is as good of an interpretation as I could come up with).
The timing of his release is striking, of course, because of Kanye West’s public pronouncement of support for Donald Trump, along with West’s absurd claim that slavery may have been a choice. West was vilified on social media and in the press, and Glover lampooned him on Saturday Night Live. The song, obviously, is not a reaction to West, but Glover, as I said, has celebrity in his crosshairs.
Again, I may be wading into territory that I probably should leave for someone else. I am a white, middle class Jew from the suburbs whose life bears little resemblance to the one Gambino / Glover is describing. But I watch the news and my students tell me what they go through, how they never know how an encounter with police might end, how they feel most of their instructors fail to take them seriously, how they have consistently been let down by an American system that only values them if they can help someone turn a buck.
They know there are more guns in circulation than there are people and that, when they complain that they are targeted by police, someone invariably will blame them for it and blame them for all violence.
I’m curious to see how the American power structure reacts to this video. Alex Jones, conspiracist and right-wing lunatic, has already claimed that Glover is doing a “voodoo” dance. And Breitbart calls him a “machine-gun-toting prophet” and seems to miss Glover’s irony.
The video opens in silence. A white chair sits alone in a white warehouse, guitar on it. A black man enters, picks up the guitar, and sits and plays. Expectations are raised — perhaps we will get an acoustic blues, perhaps we will be entertained. But the music begins, the camera panning past the man and focusing on a shirtless Glover, who begins to move, begins to do a distorted, exaggerated version of Beyonce or Michael Jackson, but more jerky-jerky, jig-like. It is a dance that someone on social media likened to a “Jim Crow Jump,” an early minstrel number attributed to the white performer, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice. Rice created the character of “Jim Crow,” who wore “tattered clothing and a burnt-cork blackface mask” and performed “an explosive dance that he claimed to have learned from an African American slave.”
“Rice’s imitation of a black man and perpetuation of stereotypes was extremely popular with whites in both the North and South, and Rice became a very rich man. Although he did not label his act a minstrel show, his use of blackface, black stereotypes and the overall popularity and financial success from the show set the basis for the Virginia Minstrels to perform as the first professional white minstrel troupe in 1843. “
Minstrelsy is long dead, but echoes throughout our culture in the way whites interact with predominantly black music. I don’t want to get into arguments about cultural appropriation — I am not fully in a position to comment without sounding like a privileged ass — but there is a long tradition of whitewashing in the business, going all the way back to the race records of the ’50s. R&B records were marketed to black audiences, but rerecorded by artists like Pat Boone as a way of making them palatable to white audiences. Yes, artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis hit the charts with recordings that transcended the race line, but they failed to erase it and the history of rock and roll has been marred by race-based genre classifications ever since.
Minstrelsy, I think, is central to Glover’s critique in the sense that performers, black, white, and Hispanic, still allow themselves to be weighed down by a kind of black face. Again, I know I’m treading on some dicey ground, but there is no question that the industry rewards team players and there is a lot of money to be made by all involved when performers play to the crowd. Glover, in “This is America,” literally points a gun at it.
Expectations, a black man and a guitar, a dancer. He sings “We just wanna party / Party just for you.” The music is almost sing-song, childish (an audio pun, perhaps), but the lyrics cut to the core of the viewers’ expectations, to the commercialism and materialism that drive American culture.
“We just want the money,” they sing, “Money just for you,” and the arguments over Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players, and the role of artists, especially black artists, as political speakers hover above. Trump wants them fired, and much of the music-buying or sports-watching public just wants them to shut up and play.
I know you wanna party
Party just for me
Girl, you got me dancin’ (yeah, girl, you got me dancin’)
Dance and shake the frame
Something is not quite right. The dance is exaggerated, almost epileptic. The man in the chair is now hooded, a rope holding the hood in place. The dancer twists, turns, bends himself into the almost exact position the Jim Crow character assumes on the cover of the original sheet music for the “Jim Crow Jump,” a relic of the minstrel era made famous by “Daddy” Rice.
Jim Crow
Sheet music cover image of the song 'Jim Crow', with original authorship notes reading 'na', United States, 1900. The…www.gettyimages.com
As he turns and bends and then leaps, he fires directly into the skull of the hooded man in the chair. Thirty seconds in and the video has shifted, and the three legs of the stool of American injustice are bared for us — materialism, racism, militarism.
The video continues its inexorable march forward, with Gambino / Glover in full Beyonce leading his pack of back-up dancers through scenes of violence: that single shot followed by police assaults and automatic rife fire, images that move past quickly echoing scenes from prison movies, Glover continuing his crazed dance throughout, accompanied by dancers clad in clothing reminiscent of the civil rights movement.
The video reaches its apex with an image of Glover standing atop a car at the center of the warehouse, an image that invokes Beyonce standing atop a police car in a flooded New Orleans in “Formation.” But where the Beyonce image feels triumphant amid the horror, Glover’s dance is atop a red compact car. The screen goes black, then fades back in, the music coming back, as well, and Glover fleeing a slew of police, terror in his eyes. This is America.