Donald Glover has proved he is the ultimate a purveyor of culture

No one enjoys a gushing review. It can be easily skimmed past, with the simple assumption of ‘worth seeing/watching/eating’ whilst a terrible summation can be savoured and enjoyed. I’ll make no apology on this occasion. It isn’t often that one call a music video a work of art. Bob Dylan, Eminem, Kendrick Lemar, most ‘artists’ in fact, would purport to have their fingers quite firmly on the zeitgeist, enabling meanings through their music that can be shared collectively. None however have managed it with the aplomb and nuance that Childish Gambino has done on his latest track ‘This is America’.

The single release could not be more timely. Whilst Kanye West’s has been running riot with a series of troublesome tweets, (he has voiced his support for Trump, moronically labelled slavery as a ‘choice’ and shown himself to be a narcissist on a par with the president himself), here we have Childish Gambino, showing the two faces of America, the difficulty of being a black actor and entertainer in Hollywood, gyrating, then gunning down a choir, then singing: ‘you just a Black man in this world’. This is so much more than the ‘virtue signaling of millionaires,’ parroting the sentiment of ‘black lives matter.’ This is powerful stuff.

With over 120 million hits on Youtube since its’ release ten days ago and hundreds of thousands of comments on Twitter. The videos’ conceptual nature has generated the kind of catatonic enthusiasm and discussion usually reserved for feature length films and novels: alternative political and cultural readings abound. Glover’s Jim Crow mimicry is disturbingly evocative of America’s problematic past, the shootings emblematic of America’s violent present. The critics have been unanimous: ‘the most elegant translator of his generation’s ID’ deftly depicting America as a place where ‘violence and celebration come together.’