Music Video Analysis Of Donald Glover’s "This Is America"
Donald Glover’s music video for his song “This is America” uses very intricately arranged dance to satirize the various aspects of the American society’s culture and perception of people of color, specifically the black folk. This is America sows the seeds of critical thinking about the society we live in through the use of popular culture; to help watchers unpack and address the long standing and deeply ingrained issues regarding race and minority culture.
It manages to do so at the same time criticizing pop culture for hoodwinking audiences as well. As seen in the video as chaos ensues in the background, the foreground is often a much more pleasant picture to easily focus on which is a visual metaphor of placating behavior pop culture has on the masses. Donald employs such hard-hitting cynicism towards the nature of our society’s perception while many other artists like Pharrell Williams have songs like “happy” that momentarily enables the masses to escape the ugly truth of the dark underbelly of the society they live in.
Glover’s video, hence, is a breath of fresh air that exposes the underbelly for what it truly is. In the first few minutes of the video, the pose Glover takes before shooting a man sitting with a white shroud over his head, seems to be a way for Glover to question the entertainment industry’s support for old fashioned “minstrelsy” which was a popular “blackface” tradition employed by the majority white people that heavily drew from racist stereotypes to bolster the image of white supremacy over the “salve black people”. This was unpacked and analyzed Suraj Raveendran by many who made parallels with the pose Glover struck to that of Jim Crow who was a slave archetype often seen in minstrel performances.
He uses various dance routines throughout the video to visually locate the origins and the current position of the black folk in the current society and media. Glover’s performance appears to also emphasize on the need for movements like Black Lives Matter. At various points in the video we see heavy violent acts being committed against the black folk either in the form of police brutality or mass shootings in churches like that of Charleston, South Carolina where Dylan Roof killed nine black people during a prayer service. This brings many political failures into light as well as basic human rights are being violated without any form of steps being taken to avoid such needless violence and hatred from spreading like uncontrolled wildfire within the masses.
Donald Glover also uses his choreography to the full extent to further comment on the perceptions of the black folk in pop culture and media; throughout the video popular dance moves such as Gwara Gwara and the shoot dance are emphasized to seems to be a comment made on how only the mainstream culture is all that is seen when it comes to the black community. This along with the many facial expressions points further towards the image that has been made popular by images of Jim Crow and other stereotypes.
The video ends with Glover running in a very poorly lit corridor by what seems to be a group of non-colored folk. This could be Glover’s take on how even he has constructed this video as Suraj Raveendran a voice to ongoing troubles the black community faces in America, he will still have to keep running as the darkness and constraining corridor will suppress and silence the freedom of colored folk; if left unchecked, will spark a revolution that will not be in the favor of white supremacists.
Through his choreography and visual metaphors, in four plus minutes, has represented everything above and even more; has left us with a strong cynic political statement in the mainstream pop culture that will leave watchers and listeners unpacking the truth behind such a video, its necessity in today’s world and hopefully will help expose the true dark underbelly of our society that we are so happy to stay ignorant about if it does not affect us directly.
