Childish Gambino - This is America

There are a few songs that we just can't dissociate with their music videos. Michael Jackson's Thriller triggers images of zombies doing a flashmob, Chris Isaak's chords for Wicked Game immediately take us to a tropical paradise in black and white with a couple making out, and Blur's Coffee and TV will be always better known as "The cartoon milk song". A good music video can reshape the importance of a track, but Childish Gambino's This is America is showing what are the guidelines to consider a post-MTV music video a successful one.

Back in 2010, when Arcade Fire released their immersive interactive music video for We Used To Wait, for a second we thought that the evolution of the music video reached a postmodern trans-media point where the experience would be what count more for a video. Years passed and if a few successful interactive videos emerged, not much really changed as a whole. 8 years had to elapse to be clear, that it is immediacy what matters: an image that is ready to become a GIF or a Meme. This is America is just that, a collection of iconic images ready to be distorted and transformed in so many ways to please any set of mind the common viewer might have.

But the fact that people have changed the song to have Donald Glover dancing to Taylor Swift's Shake it Off or Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You, or used his images of killing people to comparing it to Thanos and The Avengers, or Kanye West and Kanye West's fans defending him, only make the importance of this song even wider. This track is about the states of shock and elation that media is provoking in people. This is America: a country where outrage for a mass killing in a school will be taking less and less space in ours news feed, being replaced by Kim Kardashian memes and Buzzfeed quizzes asking "What Disney princess are you based on your brunch selection?".

Glover contrasts the funky gospel light-hearted opening with broken dark trap beats on the chorus to get this idea of this state of the nation. As outraged we can be with nazis marching on the streets or children being put in cages at the southern border, we are forgetting it with the vacuities of the online world, like Instagram stories, the harsh realities of world are ephemeral and disappear after 24 hours. This musical contrast can also point at the representations of black people in the media: either cheerful entertainers or violent criminals.

Gambino tackles race identities in a harsh way: he not only goes for police brutality, racial profiling and systemic discrimination, he puts himself, a black man, as the one making the kills, thus questioning what is the role that black people play in this perpetuation of violence that have them as the most common targets. The fantasy of an inclusive and open minded country finished with the Obama administration and the true colors of the United States are pretty visible for those who are willing to see them; and the perception of the US from "leader of the free world" has abruptly changed to an "everything that's wrong with western capitalism".

A multi-talented man, Glover might be the postmodern version of the "Renaissance man": he raps, he acts, he writes, and he is the king of breaking the Internet. His art is highly political and incendiary as it is appealing and immediate. This might be a pop culture hit, but it is also quite an accurate diagnosis of the situation that America is facing.