Childish Gambino is a Genius
The last week has been an interesting one for us black folk. Quite the divide went through the community when good old Kanye West said that slavery was a choice. Some people think that we’ve gotta defend him because “he’s our brother” or whatever. To which I say, hell no, that nigga is crazy. So there has been many a disagreement among the black community as of late.
One thing I think that we can all agree on is that Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino aka our negro savior of the week absolutely killed it with his latest single. While the lyrics themselves are powerful enough, it’s the video that really drives this home.
The song starts out with a melodic, carefree tune that seems like it could be a new summer anthem. We see Gambino just strutting along hitting all the moves and seemingly having a good time. Then he pulls out a gun and shoots a man in the back of the head, terrorist execution-style.
Oh, shit.
That’s what both my wife and I said at that moment in the video, which kicks off the true theme of the video and the song.
For the next three minutes, we see Gambino and a troup of dances busting out all the latest moves in hip hop while scenes of carnage unfold behind them. The dancing is crudely juxtaposed against the sour backdrop.
This is America.
While the dancers are getting down, Gambino is rapping lines like “We just wanna party / Party just for you / We just want the money” and “Guns in my area / I got the strap / I gotta carry ‘em.” Perhaps the most resounding line of all comes in the chorus and Gambino repeats “This is America / Don’t catch you slippin’ up.”
In a world where many of the most popular rappers just rap about well, nothing, there is a plenty of bad shit going on around them. Gambino and the dancers are the rappers who are just ignoring everything going on behind them and just rapping about bullshit and doing the “shoot dance” popularized by BlocBoy JB. Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with doing those things, but simply ignoring the greater world around them is where the problem lies.
This message is similar to what we got from J. Cole on the “1985” track from his latest album, KOD.
These white kids love that you don’t give a fuck
’Cause that’s exactly what’s expected when your skin black
They wanna see you dab, they wanna see you pop a pill
They wanna see you tatted from your face to your heels
And somewhere deep down, fuck it, I gotta keep it real
They wanna be black and think your song is how it feels
The message that both J. Cole and Childish Gambino are bringing to the table is an important one. There are a lot of issues going on in the world. We shouldn’t ignore it. By just playing up to the hype and all the dabbing and popping pills, we simply feed into the narrative that they (i.e. white people) want. Rather than highlighting our plight and trying to lift up the community, they just glorify the “fun” shit while ignoring everything else.
While that message is assuredly a theme with This is America, there is still another way we can look at this. The dancing we see in the video isn’t necessarily that they’re ignoring what is happening behind them, but rather that they are dancing in spite of the carnage and mayhem. The dancing is a defense mechanism or more simply, a way to forget that there is a lot of bad in the world.
Actually, it’s not really an either-or type deal because these different views on coping with the injustices and the heartache of the world all exist independently of one another.
We’ve got people like Bruno Mars who seek to entertain and bring happiness to the world with their music. Then we’ve got people like Lil (insert whatever rapper with a lil in their name because I believe there are actually a million of them) who just rap about bullshit and nothingness while playing into the stereotype of being black.
That’s the beauty of what Gambino is giving us with This is America. He is showing us all of what’s going on in our world and the reality of what blacks face.
Most importantly, he is showing us that there really is some terrible shit out there. He reenacts not just the terrorist shooting, but the various church shootings in America where domestic terrorists took the lives of dozens of innocent people. He doesn’t just give us a good song, which this undoubtedly is, but hits us with one hell of a message while he’s at it.
At the end of the video, we get perhaps the most striking image of all. Gambino running from an angry mob with a look of absolute terror on his face.
“Don’t catch you slippin’ up”, indeed.