“This is America”
The video has racked up more than 234 million views on You Tube.
It reveals provocative imagery of Donald Glover as he guns down a choir and dances while violence breaks out all around him. The central image is about guns and violence in America. We deal with guns and consume them as a part of entertainment and also as part of our national conversation.
The opening moments of “This is America” show a man strumming a guitar alone to choral sounds. Gambino shoots the man who had been tied up with a head cover. Childish Gambino hands the gun to another man who safely wraps it in a red cloth as the obscured man is dragged away.
The opening moments of “This is America” show a man strumming a guitar alone to choral sounds. Gambino shoots the man who had been tied up with a head cover. Childish Gambino hands the gun to another man who safely wraps it in a red cloth as the obscured man is dragged away.
Ramsay says that the timing; that this is happening during the songs move from choral tones to a trap sound allows Gambinio to straddle contradictions and also allows the viewer to identity with his humanness.
The moment goes right into the first rapped chorus: “This is America/Don’t catch you slippin-up.
Gutherie Ramsey, a professor of music history at the University of Pennsylvania tells us that Glover’s Decision to wear just gray pants without a shirt in the video allows the viewer to identify with his “humanness” as he raps about the violent contradictions that come with being black in America.
“It comes out of two different sound worlds. Part of the brilliance of the presentation is that you go from this happy major mode of choral singing that we associate with South African choral singing, and then after the first gunshot it moves right into the trap sound.
According to Ramsey, “Gambino” could be anyone. He is almost unadorned. He is also totally without the accoutrements of stardom. He dances in neutral colored pants, dark skin with textured hair.
Gambinio and a group of kids clad in school uniforms dance throughout much of the “This is America” video while violence erupts behind them. The dancers could be there to distract viewers in the same way black art is used to distract people from real problems plaguing America.
Towards the middle of the video, a choir sings enthusiastically in a happy tone before Gambinio shoots them all. The massacre and its quickness recall the Charlston shooting in which white supremacist Dylan Roof killed nine black people in a church basement. The image and what it evokes show how people reconcile and separate different instances of violence. We consume violence on all sorts of platforms; the news, music videos, or television shows.
It actually becomes difficult to absorb real instances of mass murder.
“You cannot escape the violence,” Ramsey says, but you are being forced to separate how you feel about it in our digitalized world.” The final moments of the video show Gambino running; terrified down a long dark hallway from a group of people while young thug sings “You a Black man in the world/ you just a barcode, ayy.” Gambino’s sprint goes back to a long tradition of black Americans having to run to save their lives. According to Ramey, “one song dating back to slavery in the 19th century was called,” Run-N-Run.”
One of the more subtle visual cues: the Confederate-style trousers that are visible in almost every scene in “This is America” are indicative of the Confederate soldier’s fight to keep slaves from being freed. The covert implications speak to the still extant racism in modern American culture.
I have a tendency to concentrate on the significant progress that has been made in race relations in America. This video opened my eyes to the feelings of the other side.
John B.
