Author: Frank Guan / Source: Vulture
Until last Saturday night, the last we had heard out of Childish Gambino was another man’s funk. For all its considerable energy and for all of the critical acclaim it received, the artist’s previous release, “Awaken, My Love! was a throwback album content to bask in the auras of George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic instead of blazing an aesthetic trail of its own. The album’s performance reinforced the existing view of Donald Glover as a talent whose prodigious nature precluded any kind of fixed commitment. When you can do anything well, why do anything for long?
The charm of such an approach — an endless series of apprenticeships, no mastery in sight — was evident. Following Glover’s career, you were always on your toes: anything could come next. This sense of anticipation would only grow once Glover began his work on Atlanta. As a showrunner, writer, and actor, he promoted a worldview where unpredictability took precedence over perfection. Atlanta is odd, encrypted; its flashes of genius gain in frequency but never gather themselves into a pattern. It was a huge and ongoing leap forward for Glover’s art, and as the new video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” shows, its shock of its impact has jarred his music out of competent, complacent imitation. As its title suggests, “This Is America” inhabits the present. The spirit of placid revival had vanished along with Obama’s departure from office.
There had been, to be sure, an alternative vision embodied in the word “America,” one that placed an emphasis on ideals like universal liberty and equality of justice under the law, but this lofty mirage had never managed to elude the matter of its implication in the violence of American racism. Created by guns, overflowing with guns, America had always been a sort of rhetorical weapon, its greatness…
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