Analysis of a protest song: "This is America," Childish Gambino
A new idea of what protest music is and does
Twelve years ago, my favorite person in the world, the late Bob Frost, asked a question only he would have cooked up. “Why aren’t y’all protesting?” he asked our small class of nine graduate students. The answer I gave him then was that the wages of protest weren’t worth the cost, a good response at the time and one that led to some fairly good discussion about social class, income and the rising cost of everything including reputations.
Today I have a different answer, one that would break his heart more than any other response. The answer is, we don’t know how. Protests are milieu-specific, as Nancy Welch notes in her conclusion to the recent collection Unruly Rhetorics, and to come up with a grand unifying theory of protest is futile. A grand unifying theory would also sweep aside any of the social underpinnings of protest for pure intellectual exercise. A protest shakes up society. Its music should, too. And protest songs should come in every conceivable guise.
Up until now, I’ve picked white guys with guitars from the 1960s as my focus for this series, and that’s mostly for two reasons: there’s a lot of them and they concentrate in my favorite era of popular music. I’m pretty good at speaking well about the songs from this decade. In other words, I’m a bit complacent even about a topic that’s all about change and reform. Hence, today’s selection.
To fully appreciate “This is America”, it has to be seen as well as heard. It’s a one-camera single-shot video, itself a relatively edgy technique even though it hearkens back to films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” and music videos like Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma”. The technique eventually proves disruptive, as a brief description of the opening shot proves. Initially, the camera focuses on a static chair claimed by a single guitar player. The camera pans out to the figure of Donald Glover undulating to the music, shirtless and moving as a wave. It can be read two ways – as someone enjoying the music, or as a snake in the grass. He continues to sway until he comes to a hooded figure tied to a chair. Glover then takes a gun from his back pocket and shoots the hooded figure in the back of the head. The composition of this first section of the video is shocking, fracturing the narrative and forcing the viewer to take stock in the action from here to the end.
The musical forms are equally disruptive, with a hip-hop base track punctuated in areas with a gospel chorus. It begins with the chorus of voices as the tune migrates into a pop-friendly arrangement. The opening line? “We just wanna party.” The blasé nature of that line and the effervescent music is cut short, is in direct contrast with the next movement of the song which kicks in with that same violent gunshot mentioned above.
The tenor of both song and video change immediately, rushing into the opening lines. “This is America/Don’t catch you slipping now.” The tempo picks up in both song and visuals as the gun is placed into a cloth held out by another character. As Glover moves forward, the body of the person Glover shot is dragged away as if they no longer exist, as if the intention is to forget that person entirely and focus only on Glover, who takes up most of the screen. Glover’s body evokes both caution and joy, swapping places with each second of the song. A group of dancers joins Glover as the background includes people of color running past and a grey car driving through. The images of dancing and pleasure in the foreground effectively overshadow the tension in the background. We have alternating images of happiness and anger competing for the viewer’s attention.
The camera subtly rotates as Glover turns his head to the background, turns back to the camera and says “Guns in my area/I got the strap/I gotta carry ‘em.” Here the narrative also begins to turn as the screen is populated with more people and cars, all uniformly in shades of grey and medium blue. They are filler, they are invisible, and the camera zooms out before whip-panning to a gospel choir in dark red and black against a maroon backdrop.
“Tell somebody! Ooh, you gon’ tell somebody!” the choir sings. “Grandma told me get yo’money/Black man get yo’ money” The choir is dancing but reserved, swaying in unison as an initially jubilant Glover comes out from a side door. He makes his way to the front of the screen, where he stops dancing and his face changes tone from happy to serious. From the right, a semiautomatic gun is tossed to him and he strafes the choir with the gun. All the singers collapse. The refrain “This is America/Don’t catch you slipping now” returns, now with, again, another shooting rapidly disappearing in the background. The camera moves forward, now with police lights and people clad in black who may be officers.
Rinse and repeat: The minute a Black person exhibits pleasure of any kind, within or without the “This is America” musical theme, an image of violence appears and the camera persists in moving away from the action, simulating forgetfulness, inattention, a sense that this scene, now captured, no longer matters. The ending scene, where Glover is seen running from police, is shot over a vocal proclaiming he is merely a dog.
The song is powerful. The video is harrowing to watch. Together, the flow of contrasts is intended to raise anxiety while demonstrating perseverance at once. It portrays joy as a rebellious act, which rarely occurs in protest music yet gives the song a humanity many protest songs lack. It’s a masterful work which redraws the possibilities of protest music and creates a fresh take on the nature of protest.