‘Childish Gambino’s Video Grabs You by the Throat’ [CNN]

“What Gambino put together is a true picture of America, where so many of us get to dance and sing and laugh and create,” writes Isaac Bailey. “All the while others are largely ignored and trapped in the background, struggling and sometimes dying in a sea of ugliness that many of us would rather not acknowledge, knowing it would ruin the pretty pictures we’d rather focus on.”

‘The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” Video’ [The New Yorker]

Doreen St. Félix notes that “The video has already been rapturously described as a powerful rally cry against gun violence, a powerful portrait of black-American existentialism, a powerful indictment of a culture that circulates videos of black children dying as easily as it does videos of black children dancing in parking lots.”

She continues: “It is those things, but it also a fundamentally ambiguous document. The truth is that this video, and what it suggests about its artist, is very difficult. A lot of black people hate it. Glover forces us to relive public traumas and barely gives us a second to breathe before he forces us to dance.”

Justin Simien Breaks Down ‘This Is America’ on Twitter

In an appreciative Twitter thread Sunday night, Justin Simien, the creator of Netflix’s “Dear White People,” analyzed the imagery of “This Is America” and concluded that the video asked black viewers, “How can those of us granted a moment in the proverbial spotlight just use it to entertain ourselves to death?” He continued: “It’s a challenge and a series of questions. Like art should be.”

‘What It Means When Childish Gambino Says “This Is America”’ [Vulture]

Frank Guan analyzes the lyrics of “This Is America,” which draw heavily on trap music, a gritty rap subgenre with its origins in Atlanta. “The incongruousness of Glover, raised middle-class and a NYU graduate, bragging about his Mexican drug supplier and threatening to have you gunned down, is intentional,” he writes. “It’s a tribute to the cultural dominance of trap music and a reflection on the ludicrous social logic that made the environment from which trap emerges, the logic where money makes the man, and every black man is a criminal.”