Childish Gambino "This is America" video

[Ian Thumwood]

There has been an awful lot of publicity about this music video including coverage on This Morning on Radio 4 and serious analysis on YouTube to the extent that you would have thought this was something akin to a new Beethoven symphony or painting by Turner. I am quite staggered that something that has gone out of it's way to shock has not really been criticised nor really held to under scrutiny.

It is quite intriguing that something like this should get such analysis and media attention when so much superior art simply slips under the radar. This is an artist about whom I had never heard before and whose work, by this effort, is pretty unexceptional. Yet there is an amazing amount of analysis being done almost on a frame by frame basis of this video with the imagery being referenced back to sources as disparate at the Bible and contemporary cinema. Clearly this has been made for purely shot value, the music having little real value and the extreme violence of the video aimed at provoking a reaction.

I get the issue of Black rights and the proliferation of guns in America yet the whole exercise seems pretty clumsy and extremely blatant. Is this that black artists can do these days when, in the past, similar issues have been dealt with so much better by the likes of Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Nina Simone and a wealth of country blues artists ?
Does a piece of art become more significant simply by pushing back the boundaries of taste and violence?

[johncorrigan]

There has been an awful lot of publicity about this music video including coverage on This Morning on Radio 4 and serious analysis on YouTube to the extent that you would have thought this was something akin to a new Beethoven symphony or painting by Turner. I am quite staggered that something that has gone out of it's way to shock has not really been criticised nor really held to under scrutiny.

It is quite intriguing that something like this should get such analysis and media attention when so much superior art simply slips under the radar. This is an artist about whom I had never heard before and whose work, by this effort, is pretty unexceptional. Yet there is an amazing amount of analysis being done almost on a frame by frame basis of this video with the imagery being referenced back to sources as disparate at the Bible and contemporary cinema. Clearly this has been made for purely shot value, the music having little real value and the extreme violence of the video aimed at provoking a reaction.

I get the issue of Black rights and the proliferation of guns in America yet the whole exercise seems pretty clumsy and extremely blatant. Is this that black artists can do these days when, in the past, similar issues have been dealt with so much better by the likes of Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Nina Simone and a wealth of country blues artists ?
Does a piece of art become more significant simply by pushing back the boundaries of taste and violence?

Couldn't agree more, Ian. A friend whose opinions I value contacted me on Friday saying that I must see this. When I got home it was the first thing I did...all I could think on watching it was that someone had been watching a bit too much of 'The Bridge' or some other Scandi-noir. Musically it was bland at best; I thought the guy was a bit idiosyncratic in his movement but hardly original. The Vid was covered on the R4 World at One yesterday and the symbols that people talked about made me think, once again, that some people have too much time on their hands and I felt disappointed that I had been lured into becoming one of the hundred million viewers - but, hey, that's life for you!