Childish Gambino This Is America Lyrics
I happened to listen to “,” the new single by Childish Gambino, a.k.a., before I saw the eloquent, ultra-violent accompanying video concocted by Glover and the director Hiro Murai. 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. 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. 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. As such, the artist inculpates himself. In the video, Glover is shirtless and his teeth gleam. He plays a kind of deleterious tramp, all instinct, skitting around an airy parking hangar.
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. Sometimes the movements and how they activate his muscles make him look sexy, at other times crazed. His manic elation erupts into violence at a speed that matches something of the media consumer’s daily experience. Glover strikes a pose, and then, in time for the rhythm drop, shoots a black man in the head from behind. A moment ago, the victim had been strumming a guitar. Glover carefully places the gun on a lush pillow held out for him by an eager school-aged black child.
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. When his character is not dancing, he is killing. 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. 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 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.
Childish Gambino This Is America Lyrics
And then Glover is dancing again—this time, with cars burning and police chaos beyond him. 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. I’ve been watching it on a loop.
Later in the music video, Gambino guns down a choir. That imagery may allude to the 2015 Charleston church shooting, a terrorist attack in which white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. A Deadly Crossroads The crux of Gambino’s “This is America” video lies on the juxtaposition between the typically jubilant events in the foreground and the tragic ones in the background. The burning and explosion of a police car in the background is likely in reference to the uprisings that took place in American cities like Baltimore, Maryland and Ferguson, Missouri after police killed black men and some protestors set police cars on fire.
The “girl” in these lines may be America—Gambino is pointing out how some people are willing to sell themselves just to get ahead, becoming numb to the physical and mental suffering around them. Kodak & Clark Although Gambino directly name-checks Kodak Black on the song’s second verse, he also embeds what seems to be a reference to a recent police shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man. 'This a celly (ha) That's a tool (yeah) On my Kodak (woo, Black)' This line may be referencing the March 18, 2018 shooting of Stephon Clark, a black man who was shot eight times in the back and killed in the backyard of his home in Sacramento, California. The police officers who shot him presumed that he was responsible for local area robberies and was armed with a gun (“tool”).
He was found with only his iPhone (“celly”). As of March 30, 2018, the case is still under investigation. In the music video, multiple teenagers appear on a ledge with their phones out while Bino raps this couplet, alluding to the many instances cell phones have been used as tools to broadcast police shooting, rioting, or violence against black people in America.
Donald’s shouting out Florida rapper Kodak Black, but he’s also playing on the Kodak brandwhich produces cameras. Glover used Kodak’s 2015 song “SKRT” on his television series Atlantain the episode “Go for Broke,” and his 2017 track “Patty Cake” in the episode “North of the Border.”.