“We just want to party” is the opening sentence to one of the greatest Childish Gambino songs. First released in early 2018, this song rapidly became viral and now has over eight hundred million views on YouTube. “This is America”, a song that might sound like any other hip hop song. But when you really pay attention to the lyrics and carefully watch the music video, You realize this song is much deeper and meaningful than what it initially pretends to be.
The first scene of the music video directed by Gambino, starts with an African American adult man sitting in a chair. The man starts playing the blues on his guitar. In the background we can see Gambino slowly appear as he starts singing and dancing to the man’s guitar. The song so far seems to be blissful talking about a desire to party and make money. Until before hitting fifty seconds of the music video, when everything gets much darker. The adult man sitting in the chair suddenly has a beige sack covering his head, Gambino grabs a gun from his pocket and casually dances to shoot a bullet to the adult man’s head. Just to sing the words “This is America” right after killing the man. The blues song transitions into Hip Hop, Gambino keeps dancing as he approaches kids in school uniforms who start dancing with him. In the background we can see people running. Afterwards, we see a church chorus singing, just for Gambino to start singing with them seconds before grabbing a gun and killing everyone who’s in the choir. In none of the two shootings (The time when Gambino shot the adult man nor the time he shot the church choir) we see police address the shootings or try to capture Gambino until the end of the video. The video ends with Gambino running away from the police and more people who are running after him.
“This is America’s music video”, can be interpreted in many ways. But nobody can deny that Gambino is trying to reach topics that are heavily problematic and existent in the United States. Including the entertainment industry, gun violence, police brutality and racism. After Gambino shoots the man in the chair, he starts dancing and then we see the school children dancing with him like he didn’t just kill someone. I interpret this as the entertainment industry and how sometimes it only shows what people want to see (or what the entertainment industry wants people to see) instead of acknowledging problems that affect our country. At the end of the day the entertainment’s industry is looking to gain money and Gambino perfectly portrays this by showing how easy it is to ignore a crime by simply “singing and dancing to it”. Now, when the kids get close and dance with him (A man who just shot someone) it might also refer to school shootings and violence in America, the kids are so used to violence that they are no longer afraid of it because it is now so normalized. When he shoots the entire choir, we see someone take care and clean Gambino’s gun right after, but the people who had just been killed are dragged through the floor just like an object. To me this part talks about gun violence and about the easy access Americans have to guns, how America cares more about the profit of these weapons than the lives of innocent people. Finally we see Gambino running away from the police while these lyrics play in the background: “You just a black man in this world, You just a barcode, ayy, You just a black man in this world, You just a big dawg, yeah”. This scene is conveying what being an African American individual in this country is like. The constant persecution and prejudices the black community have to face daily, and the police brutality that happens everyday because of racism.
I know there are many more things that Gambino is trying to portray with this song. These are just the things that spoke to me the most. We can clearly see Gambino’s video as a raw and real interpretation of America. This is one of the few modern songs with influential meaning and the way in which Gambino transmits meaning makes this song a masterpiece. This is why Donald Glover/Childish Gambino is a real genius.
Communicating Change 