The rise of Donald Glover: how he took over America

Try, if you can, to watch This Is America, the new music video from Childish Gambino, while keeping your eyes off the man in the camera's sightline. It's not easy. You might need to watch it twice, maybe three times, maybe more. In the clip, Donald Glover crafts a piece that's danceable, homicidal and cheerful all at once, without a single pause. Your eyes want to follow him, to soak him in. But if you do, you'll miss what seems to be happening in the video, an enigmatic and provocative effort that has racked up over 74 million views on YouTube just six days after its release.

Instead, try turning your attention to everything happening in the background, as Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) moves through an industrial space amid a string of consecutive gunshots. These details serve as a steady foundation for the frenzied action we're watching.

Childish Gambino is certainly the star, playing the role that some have suggested is America itself. Watching within the context of the background action makes the video dizzying. It tackles racism, gun violence, joy, spirituality, hip hop and entertainment in the United States. Its symbolism has been linked to Jim Crow, Michael Jackson and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. There are various YouTube videos exploring these Easter eggs. In turn, these tend to get more views than many actual music videos.

Childish Gambino

captures the grim surrealism of being black in America.

Mitchell S Jackson

A look at the video

There are kids in school uniforms dancing to African and American-derived music. There's a white horse with a hooded rider. There's police. There are people running through a space that increasingly looks like a prison as the video unfolds. There are chickens, girls on bikes, money in the air, mobs running in pandemonium that looks straight out of riots. There are kids lost in their phones, car fires…

"This is one of the greatest performers in contemporary America," says TV host Touré, whose books include the 2012 Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness. "He shows a really interesting ability to make soul music, television, film, comedy and drama, and to make art that has political substance, but not so much that it becomes propaganda or preachy."

Who could stay unmoved?

'This is America' dared us to decide what we're going to do. The background action of the video kicks in the moment it reaches its central point: Childish Gambino pulling a gun from his waistband and shooting a hooded man in the back of the head, execution-style. That's when he lays down the song's guiding principle: 'This is America'.

The implication is that the violence and general chaos are no different from everyday life in the US, where guns, entrenched racism and police violence against Black Americans are the norm. Donald Glover guns down a gospel choir in an instant, bringing to mind the 2015 Charleston massacre, in which nine people died during a prayer service at one of the country's oldest Black churches. The guns are handled with great care, wrapped in red cloth. Some believe it symbolizes the red state's reverence for the second amendment. Meanwhile, the fallen bodies are casually removed from the frame.

I don't know whether the actual killings we've witnessed have brought us any closer to justice

This repetition of tragically common violence was unsettling for some. "In recent years we've seen a lot of young African Americans killed," says Blair Kelley, professor of history at North Carolina State University. "Usually the argument is that transparency will bring us closer to justice, but we've found that we're not there yet. So when I saw Donald Glover reenact such a killing, I was shocked. I don't know who was supposed to watch this and I felt called upon to deliver justice myself. Because I don't know whether the actual killings we've witnessed have brought us any closer to justice."

"I don't hate the video," Kelley continues. "I'm glad it keeps the conversation going about pressing contemporary political questions. But I also want us to be careful about how we think about Black death."

How would one interpret a video packed with so many references

Others see 'This is America' as a pointed critique of the way this violence falls out of a culture in which mass shootings and the killing of unarmed Black people are so common that we've become numb to them. Our minds get distracted by entertainment the same way that, in the video, the joyful dance sequences distract us from the chaos happening in the background.

"It's a careful conversation about violence in the American landscape. About how guns are a constant and tragically necessary part of life in America," says Touré. 'I think it's crucial when [Gambino] says "I've got the strap, I gotta carry it." He's not bragging about having a gun. It's more like he has to. That's America. That's just how things go here. That's ultimately the message.'

The video was directed by Hiro Murai, who also directs the show Atlanta. The show follows rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), his cousin Earn (Glover), his friend Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) and Earn's girlfriend, Van (Zazie Beetz). All the characters navigate their way through Atlanta's rap scene. Across its two seasons, Atlanta has been widely celebrated and awarded for its honest yet melancholic vibe. It's packed with black humor and often shows the surrealism of Black America.

"I'm always thrilled to see Black performances that complicate this idea that Black people are just one thing or another," says Kelley. "That they all like this, that or the other, and everyone shares these same common traits. Black people are far more complex than that. Glover did a great job honoring them without flattening out those different ways of being."

Atlanta respects the diversity of African Americans

"Atlanta is the best show on TV right now," Chris Rock said. Jordan Peele noted: "For Black people, Atlanta provides catharsis."

In fact, Peele used Childish Gambino's biggest hit, Redbone, during the opening credits of Get Out, the 2017 Oscar-winning horror film about the everyday terrors of being Black in America. The biggest hit off the LP Awaken My Love! is Redbone. The track is a slow gospel-soaked cruise that showcases Gambino's soulful (and surprisingly high) vocals. "Stay woke," the song's chorus says. A warning message for the threats to come.

"Stay woke, that's the theme of the film," Peele said about the song during a 2017 interview with HipHopDX. "I wanted to make sure this film satisfied the Black core audience's need for the characters to be smart and do the things smart, observant people would do."

Redbone won the 2018 Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance. That's an award Glover probably shelved alongside the two Emmys and the pair of Golden Globes he picked up for Atlanta. The album Redbone came from earned three Grammy nominations and showed a significant evolution from Childish Gambino's first two albums, which were defined by humor, simpler beats and pretty lyrics.

Redbone won the 2018 Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance

Awaken, My Love! found Childish Gambino overhauling the structure of his earlier work. We see a shift toward psychedelic fun along with a rich dose of tradition and vocals reminiscent of Prince at his coolest. The lyrics stirred up the same surreal sense of dread that runs through some of Atlanta's best scenes. "All I see are zombies. They're feeding all around us. All they eat is people. And you won't survive," Gambino sings on Zombies. In this way he carried forward the racial politics of This Is America. Childish Gambino debuted the album with three shows in California. Cameras were strictly banned.

"He always had the technique and talent and was clearly a good rapper," says Touré. "But it was that funny brand of hip-hop that made him stand out. To watch him evolve into this deeply psychological, Parliament-style R&B artist. It's remarkable."

"It sounds like I'm blowing my own horn -- 'Oh, he thinks he's great at everything,'" Glover told The New Yorker. That's how he described his lifelong ability to spot the algorithms that would make him successful at whatever he tried.

He knows what he can do and there's no reason to doubt it

What Glover was saying is that he knows what he can do and there's no reason to doubt it. He can rap while nailing the South African Gwara Gwara perfectly. He can spark a massive cultural conversation and rack up uncontrollable praise in the process. ("Donald Glover is a genius," Erykah Badu wrote after the video came out. Likewise, Janelle Monáe's tweet mentioning Glover's name got over 5,000 retweets.)

He's making one of the top TV shows of the decade and has picked up a slew of awards. Later this month, he's part of one of the most successful movie franchises of all time as Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Next year, he'll play Simba in the live-action reboot of The Lion King. He started out as a writer. After three years he wanted to focus on acting. Even so, he walked away from his beloved role on the community sitcom because he wanted to focus on music. It's been suggested that the next Childish Gambino album will be his last, since he keeps switching up his interests.

Considering the scope of his career so far, Glover's statement seems less like self-flattery and more like a sober assessment of the extraordinary gifts he's fully aware he has. Gifts that, like in the video's extraordinary joy and terrible violence, are hard to look away from.

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