Atlanta Music Experts On Donald Glover’s ‘This Is America’
If you’ve been paying any attention at all to popular music this week, chances are you’ve seen the new music video by Childish Gambino. That is of course the stage name for actor and musician Donald Glover.
At the same time as he was pulling double duty as host and musical guest for “Saturday Night Live,” he dropped the video for his new song “This is America.” The clip immediately began generating conversation and controversy over its mixture of dance and violence and symbolic imagery.
In the video, Glover appears shirtless and performs a variety of dances while also appearing to shoot and kill numerous people. The clip was directed by Hiro Murai, one of the primary directors of Glover’s FX series “Atlanta.”
“I responded very viscerally to it,” Atlanta hip-hop writer Christina Lee admits to “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes. “This reminds me of images of real people getting killed.”
In the course of the video, Glover dances with a group of children in school uniforms as scenes of chaos play out, just out of focus, in the background.
“Glover’s doing these viral dances,” explains hip-hop scholar Dr. Regina Bradley, “he’s doing invocations of African dance, he’s doing minstrelsy — he’s doing all these things to get you to not really pay attention to what’s really happening and what’s really significant, which is in the background.”
“Glover was playing around with this idea of distraction,” Bradley says, “this idea of black art, black performance, as not only a reflection of reality, but also the maneuvering that black folks have to do to be visible in the first place.”
Billboard is reporting that “This is America” may debut at number 1 on their “Hot 100” chart next week.
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