To fully grasp the significance of Georgia-born rapper Childish Gambino’s latest track – actor / screenwriter Donald Glover’s musical double – you have to watch the clip, once, twice, three times, then put things in context. .
Glover (30 Rock, Community, Atlanta…) Was hosting the weekly Saturday Night Live televised mass on NBC on Saturday night. Usually, the host of the evening takes part in the team’s skits and then announces a musical guest, who often has little to do with the world of the master of ceremonies for a night. But on Saturday, never better served than by himself, MC Donald Glover announced himself by launching the artist Childish Gambino, his musical alter ego, not without having as an introduction ironic about the multiple talents that he recognizes. (he will be among others Lando Calrissian young in the next Star Wars opus, Solo).
Media bomb
But if Glover the actor leans more towards the side of the big cinematographic productions without consequences, until being treated of “Black of service” by a part of the African-American community, his double, Gambino the rapper, seems to do much less compromises in his albums, especially in “Awaken My Love”, a funk getaway that is difficult to access. A clip aired the week that self-proclaimed genius Kanye West fell, entangled in pro-Trump considerations and undermined by claims that slavery was black’s choice. Complicated sequence for West, which SNL derided this Saturday in a sketch modeled on the film Without a sound (A Quiet Place in original version, which here became “A Kanye Place”), where the slightest overly loud tweet sent a group of friends to the slaughterhouse, grappling with bloodthirsty monsters. The only survivor of those hilarious few minutes: Donald Glover, who ended up paying homage to Kanye, so as not to offend anyone.
But a little later, on the same show, Gambino was not going to take the same kind of tweezers to assert himself and tell America everything wrong with her, materialistic and unintelligible rappers included. The music video for “This is America”, announced by Daniel Kaluuya (main actor of the film Get Out, which Kanye claimed to want to write the sequel to, leaving director Jordan Peele quite perplexed), was like a media bombshell. It will then be watched 30 million times in 48 hours, a record for Gambino.
What exactly does “This is America” say? Precisely, what Kanye West no longer dares to shout in the face of his own country, swallowed up entirely by the system, visibly lost and certainly drowned by its own inertia. In 2005, under George W. Bush, he still had the strength to challenge his president after Hurricane Katrina. What Gambino did in 2018 with incredible panache, not content to encompass the low front president and citizens, is a matter of genius; but of a genius that ignores itself. What makes all its strength.
Black face et afrobeat
First, there is this body, black, shirtless, which we have understood over the years to be synonymous with fear in the United States. From slavery to the so-called “anti-miscegenation” laws prohibiting mixed unions (until 1967 for certain southern states), from discrimination to the assertion of over-virility and excessive wealth by US rappers, the black man is the primal threat that replaced those of the “Indians” to the American white man. No protruding muscles in Childish Gambino, no imposing gold chain representing the shackles of slaves but a thin and elastic body reminiscent of that of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician, between return to roots and afrobeat trance. A visibly assumed homage.
This twisted, absurd body, at a standstill when Gambino pulls a gun from his back pocket, is inspired by the cartoons of the «minstrel shows», from the days of the Jim Crow laws (series of decrees founding racial segregation in the United States), when white actors dressed up in black to make fun of African-Americans: the now famous “black faces”. In 1828, a song and a dance interpreted by Thomas Rice, “Jump Jim Crow”, were indeed inspired by a paralyzed black native of Cincinnati, whom Childish Gambino imitates here, going so far as to put on the same yellow shoes.
Before shooting Calvin The Second, a guitarist that some activists first confused with the father of Trayvon Martin, this teenager killed in 2012, in Florida, by a neighbor, in Florida, by a neighbor (one of the founding acts of the Black Lives Matter movement). Then, as the beat has started, the gun is neatly placed on a red napkin, as if to signify that guns have more rights than citizens in the United States.
The shadow of white terrorism
When the crazy choreography imagined by Sherrie Silver begins, the eye is irremediably drawn to the singer’s sometimes playful facial expressions and dance steps. But the message is in the background, during a meta exercise that forces us to turn away from a simplistic first vision to focus on what Childish Gambino was deliberately hiding behind the joyful footsteps of South African gwara-gwara: suicide of a man live, videos of smears recorded by witnesses armed with cell phones located in the aisles, urban riots, while innocent schoolchildren continue to dance without perceiving the threats …
The clip’s second cold-blooded murder, completely unexpected, is that of the black choir; it is all the more shocking that with his ten victims, he refers directly to the massacre in Charleston (South Carolina), perpetrated in 2015 in a church by the white supremacist Dylann Roof. But Donald Glover / Childish Gambino adds a layer of “black-on-black crime” straight out of the poor neighborhoods of Chicago, mingled with blind terrorism, before continuing his mad race without looking back. Uneasy and daring.
A horse, ridden by what looks like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, then bursts into the background alongside a police car, the same one that had ignored the rapper a few shots earlier, one way to recognize that his star status protects him from possible blunders. In the New Testament, in chapter 6 of the Apocalypse of St. John, we can read: “I looked, and behold, there appeared a horse of a pale color. His name was Death, and Hades was with him. Power was given unto them over a fourth of the earth, to destroy men by the sword, by famine, by mortality, and by the wild beasts of the earth “. Unless the horse is a tribute to Behold A Pale Horse, a book by Milton William Cooper, a conspiratorial writer who believed the US government had tried to eliminate him.
Downgrading of blacks
Some references are less obvious to find. According to the Washington Post and The New Yorker, who both analyzed lyrics and music video as early as Sunday, the old cars the singer SZA patiently awaits near in the final dance, as well as the disused hangar, represent the social downgrading of the black community. American, structurally stuck in poverty. “Some also believe that the footage of these vehicles traces back to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which began after a jury acquitted police officers for using excessive force during the arrest (and beating) of Rodney King ”, tente le Washington Post.
The end of the clip shows Childish Gambino terrified, trying to escape a horde of pursuers, in a repeat of the film Get Out, where a black man is confronted with the “leftist racism” of a right-thinking white family, which turns out to be far more dangerous than its politically correct facade suggested. By thus amalgamating contradictory sections of society in an electrifying collective therapy, Donald Glover has just shaken America. The New Yorker writes: “That’s it, being black in America today: at any time you can be vulnerable to joy or destruction. When his character isn’t dancing, he kills… Glover forces us to relive common traumas and barely gives us a second to breathe, before forcing us to dance again ”.
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And musically? Even the ad libitum, triplet flow style, of guest rappers (Quavo de Migos, 21 Savage and Young Thug), initially seem to act as critiques of what became of commercial rap in 2018. Which doesn’t. did not prevent Kanye West retweet clip, Sunday, on his own account, just to give up his crown, already badly banged up by Kendrick Lamar, and to say that he is not so resentful. America too can look at itself in a mirror, shocking as the reflection it sends.
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