Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) shook up pop culture in 2018 with “This Is America.” The rapper/actor didn’t pull any punches when it came to calling out injustices he saw in the country, namely police brutality, gun violence, and the treatment of immigrants. Though the song is a staunch protest song now, it actually started its life as a Drake diss track, according to Glover in a new interview with GQ.
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The interview saw Glover break down his most iconic characters. On the docket of conversation were his roles in Community, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Atlanta, and perhaps his most important character, Childish Gambino. Glover established his rap alter ego in 2008. Since then, he’s secured a number of hits, including “This Is America,” which went No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for two weeks.
“Time is the oven that makes something special,” he said of the 2018 hit. “I had that idea like three years before. The idea for the song started as a joke. To be completely honest, ‘This Is America’ – that was all we had. It started as a Drake diss, but then I was like, ‘This shit sounds kind of hard.'”
The idea evolved from, presumably, being about Drake’s Canadian nationality to a timely commentary on American life: This is America / Don’t catch you slippin’ now / Look at how I’m livin’ now / Police be trippin’ now / Yeah, this is America / Guns in my area / I got the strap / I gotta carry ’em / I’ma go into this / this is guerilla, woo.
The accompanying music video gave the song even more weight. Directed by Hiro Murai, the video is one long continuous shot that follows Glover around as he shoots a man in the head with a pistol and mows down a gospel choir with an AR, all while keeping a blithe attitude toward the whole thing. Glover is backed up by a horde of young dancers hitting viral moves like Gwara Gwara and Shoot, popularized by BlocBoy JB.
Glover told GQ that he and Murai studied Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as a reference for his own music video. Check it out below.
The song was dropped at the same time Glover was hosting Saturday Night Live. Glover thought the song would make a bigger impact if they “created a moment in real-time.”
“I was like ‘How do you make people care about anything anymore?’ There’s so much shit,” Glover said. “Well, you have to have a moment in real-time, which was SNL. Also the feeling of what was happening at the time. It formed because of all the uprisings that were happening.”
(Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images)
