Textual Analysis of Music Video 2

Childish Gambino - This is America

I’m analysing a music video ‘This is America’ by Childish Gambino and directed by Hiro Murai and produced by Jason Cole of Doomsday. The genre that this music video fits in is Urban, Rap.

The pace of the lyrics is slow at the start of the music video and the body movement is also slow until the moment of the guy with a bag on his head gets shot the pace of video and music becomes faster and Childish Gambino says ‘This is America’ as soon as he kills a black man in white clothing who has a bag over his head, this could argue that black people get killed more often in America compared to white people and possibly it was an innocent death of their meaning they didn’t commit a crime before they die. At the choir part after he kills them, he puts the gun into a red cloth and it is taken away, this represents the people in America care more about their guns then the lives of other individuals.  As they dance through the music video the pace of their dance and the music is fast until it cuts to the choir when the pace slows down of their movement and of the song. When he says ‘they gonna find you like waka’ the music stops and all the black people dancing around him run away in different directions as Childish Gambino mimics holding a gun in his hands and someone screams in the background. At the end of the video when he runs in the dark the music has a slow beat like a heart beat effect and its in slow motion as he runs for the light and then as we see him in the light the speed is restored to normal and we could see that he is being chased by a white policeman in uniform which might be compared to police brutality against black people in America this moment relates to the film Get Out (2017) which was also about white people taking control of black people by hypnotising them and making them their slaves, in the film Chris the main protagonist kills all the white supremacies who tried to hypnotise and kill him, this film was one of the most profitable film ever made by a black man and in the film the ‘sinking place’ was where the black man was terrified in the dark which is similar with the music video when Gambino runs from the white people at the end in the dark. There is also something I noticed which is that all the cars are burning which are used by civilians and the police cars are polished and look very new this represents the government taking care of the resistance force against humans’ rights which are the police and not taking care of normal civilians. The Old cars might represent that this has been a on-going issue for many years which hasn't been dealt with yet.

Video does cut to the beat specifically in these areas: when the guitar starts to play and the vocal part begins, next cut to the beat is when the black man with a bag on his head gets shot in the head and the pace goes from slow to fast pace, the movement also follows the music with the hand and shoulder movements, then it cuts to the choir to a slow pace and a happy theme and then when they get shot it returns to its original pace also this could represent about being a black man in America from a happy choir singers with dark skin coloured people and the music during this time is peaceful and sang by a choir and then after the first diegetic gunshot we can hear trap music this moment could showing us what happened in America when Dylan Roof killed 9 black people in a church and it was reported as a shooting not a racist attack and the cuts also present us that we as people are not doing nothing about the violence around us this moment also criticises America for not valuing black lives, even when those lives are innocent and righteous, then it slows down and the pan of the camera is as slow as the song from the ground towards the car of a close-up and then a zoom-out from the car to show the surrounding area of the other cars in the scene. The editing is continuous with no angles, no camera movements and no cuts until the choir is shown. Solo instruments that are shown is when the black man plays the guitar at the start of the video. The background of the video gets more violent throughout the video which also represents the government not dealing with the issues America faces. Mid/end part of the video we see a white man committing suicide in the background, this part is distracted to the viewers eye due to the violence happening so we do not notice it happening. Also when he runs in the dark hallway the pace is slow of him running at speed and of the music in the background this part represents a long tradition of black Americans having to run to save their lives so it represents slavery from the 19^th century. When he points a unreal gun and everyone runs away the music stops and the video becomes silent this represents the 17 seconds for the Parkland shooting in a Florida school shooting in which 17 victims died within 17 seconds. In the video also when he raps ‘This is a celly, that’s a tool, on my Kodak’ this line could be referring to when a black man Stephon Clark died in 2018 because the police thought his iPhone was a gun so they fatally shot him. Also when he raps ‘You just a black man in this world, you just a barcode’ this refers to the political culture which he is criticising meaning black people are just ‘things’ which the American government is criticising them for and not giving them any support or trying to ignore them completely from society. A man riding a white horse is a symbolic of death because he had black clothing and the horse is white and this refers to the Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation from the Bible. 

There is a close-up of him dancing weirdly. The artist is mostly always in the centre of the screen to be in the point of interest. The record company is trying to sell this track through the on-going violence within the American system of gun violence, police brutality and that there is nowhere to run from these problems because the location is a warehouse. The artist is dressed in grey trousers and no shirt this could be showing us what slaves used to wear and that coloured slaves were treated worse than white slaves.

The Artists ethnicity is being a black man by him being in the video and that it is said in the lyrics ‘You just a black man in this world’ which might mean that black people aren’t being looked out for by the government and other skin coloured people also. The black people in the video who dance in the background at the start wear the same coloured clothing, white/yellowy shirt and blue jeans by 2 men and blue skirts by 2 women this uniform type clothing might be compared to prisoners wearing the same coloured uniform meaning the video represents them as being prisoners of America while not in prison. Also through-out the video everyone except Gambino, the uniformed people, the choir and the person playing the guitar are all running around in fear and distress which might indicate to the high rates of crime America has and that the government isn’t doing anything to get rid of different crimes such as gun/knife crimes because America still continues to allow the second amendment which is the allowance of buying guns and the usage of guns. 




Overall I think this music video represents problems America has been facing for at least 10,15 years and that it is trying to show us that the politicians aren't doing nothing to solve this problem of gun violence and just how easy it is to buy a gun in America and the way America is fighting gun violence is wrong, by saying citizens should have more guns to protect themselves instead of going into every gun owners home and taking the guns back.