What is the best modern hip-hop track?
Not since Public Enemy had pushed Black militancy and the topics of manufactured consent to the charts with 1989’s ‘Don’t Believe the Hype’ had a hip-hop single thrust scathing political critique to the fore of the pop mainstream.
Released simultaneously with Donald Glover’s artist moniker Childish Gambino‘s Saturday Night Live performance, 2018’s ‘This Is America’ shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, burnished by the racial trauma engulfing the nation and the first wave of Black Lives Matter still raw in the collective memory.
Initially, ‘This Is America’ was envisioned as merely a playful potshot at a certain megastar Canadian rapper. “To be completely honest, ‘This is America’—that was all we had was that line,” Glover confessed to GQ. “It started as a Drake diss, to be honest, as like a funny way of doing it. But then I was like, this shit sounds kind of hard though. So I was like, let me play with it”.
Seeing greater promise in its fraught wavering between lilting acoustic beats and acidic trap skulk, Glover sought to illustrate the hazardous navigations of a US cultural climate of racial economic disparities, gun violence, and the scourge of police brutality.
How ‘This Is America’ became a defining protest anthem
The sonic clash between stirring gospel and cavernous drone potently captures the Black experience of contemporary America, a hazardous terrain where joy is never too far away from the oppression of white authority.
‘This Is America’s production is kept anchored in a queasy realm of aural claustrophobia, a disorienting slap of dizzying urgency, be it the escapist need to party the troubles away, or the panicked alertness to the air’s violence. Nagging away at the moments of jubilation is the disquieting divorce between ‘entertainment’ and the burning reality on the ground.
The statement behind ‘This Is America’ is fully realised by its iconic video. Directed by routine collaborator Hiro Murai, Glover jumps into multiple characters, from a wiry Jim Crow caricature to the gunman on the street, corralling a hectic choreography of cars aflame and various acts of firearm violence.
At every moment, schoolchildren dance in the background and even handle the guns after shooting, the next generation soaking up the horror of a bloodstained America that today’s political class seem set on doing nothing to solve.
Success can often trigger complex feelings late in life. Famously, Pink Floyd had made millions and delivered some of the biggest-selling albums in rock, yet bassist and principal songwriter Roger Waters felt a sharp pang of guilt, faced with a material lifestyle at odds with his parents’ hardcore big state Labourist values. Glover subtly echoes such a crossroads, presenting a video where the dancing and mobility up the music business can come at a social cost, a distraction from the grim news cycle and a possible unmooring from systematic inequality that plagues the working-class experience of America.
‘This Is America’ is a complex and troubled unleashing of political turmoil and private soul-searching that will forever define Childish Gambino and undisputedly shine as hip-hop’s greatest modern track.
