Author: Tre Johnson / Source: Rolling Stone
Donald Glover may be done making things for you to enjoy. His newest single as Childish Gambino, “This is America,” joins the second season of his FX series, Atlanta (“Robbin’ Season”), in showcasing a darker, more sinister vision than anything he’s done before.
Both works take his audience on a macabre journey through a nation where entertainment is more important than justice. People are dying in “This Is America,” but all they want us to do is sing and dance. It’s an upsettingly vivid illustration of the Faustian bargain that black America makes on a regular basis, trading our bodies for our expression and freedom.Directed by Glover’s longtime collaborator Hiro Murai, the video for “This Is America” opens with an act of horror: Glover shoots a hooded, handcuffed black guitarist execution-style, and a couple of schoolchildren rush in to drag his body offscreen. More children join Glover to dance around the massive warehouse where the video takes place as more and more chaos unfolds. The setting evokes Michael Jackson’s 30-year-old landmark “Bad” video, which made use of a similarly abandoned city space to grapple with internal conflicts about a black artist’s placement in society. In “This Is America,” cars are set ablaze, a man drops to his apparent death from a balcony, and Glover mercilessly guns down a joyful church choir. The children dance unfazed all the while, each time bearing a different type of witness to what’s happening. A child is the one to handle Glover’s weapon after each shooting, and it’s children who sit in the rafters above, recording the bedlam with their phones. Our normalization of racist violence has come at the cost of not only black lives, but black innocence.
Like several other notable works of black American art in recent years, “This Is America” is about absorption. Onscreen and in real life, the black body…
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