Some 9 out of 10 times I feel like "visual albums" are gimmicky and bad but I'd love an album full of videos on par with This Is America.
I played the song at work with no video, I think even just having the gunshots added would be a big improvement, that transition seems so much less jarring. The song is good, maybe great even, but the video is on such a high level its going to be hard to separate them.
Honestly I can’t listen to the song without seeing the video in my head the whole time. The imagery is so striking that I can’t separate the two even if I wanted to. Together they’re an insanely effective statement.
I just got around to reading this thread. Pretty much sums up everything I got from the video/song combo myself as well. Very well put by Justin.
People will keep propping up celebrities and putting them under a microscope and continue to wonder why they always fail them.
This was a thoughtful piece. The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” | The New Yorker I think the complexity and variety of readings and perspectives on the video make it too easy to just call it “brilliant” or “amazing” and laud it. It’s more than that in good and bad ways and deserves full engagement, including questioning your initial readings and instincts and feelings, including thinking it’s good or bad, liking or disliking it. I’m ultimately glad for an artist putting out a piece that challenges an audience the way it does, but I’m cautious against the instant lionizations of Glover and the video.
Yeah, just like when Me and Your Mama dropped, I’m pretty blown away and the song has been stuck in my head since
IMO the video succeeds as 'art' because it is so highly polarising, because it has given rise to so many different interpretations. I think there are elements of it that are deeply challenging, discomforting, threatening and controversial to all viewers - certainly as a white, non-American watching it I felt uncomfortable, threatened and confronted by some of the imagery at times, and by my response to the imagery - and to me that's part of why it works. It's a very recent idea that art should fit into a specific box and/or tick a certain number of criteria in order to be considered acceptable, and that art should seek first not to offend. But art doesn't exist to be liked - sometimes it exists more importantly to be disliked, as long as it provokes a reaction and makes you reflect on why it's provoking that reaction. It's just a shame that it's already become meme-ified, and I hope that doesn't cause people to lose sight of the weight of the whole piece.
I like the way it's filmed. I feel like most music videos cut around so much that you can't even tell what's going on.
I have zero problem calling this brilliant and i have zero problem praising him for what he has created here. It’s challenging and thought provoking and i like it.