Childish Gambino: The Hero from America

Childish Gambino covered many aspects of what is really going on nowadays and issues that worry Americans in 2018. He showed the problems American society is facing and paying special attention to the role of black people in it. Glover touched on a lot of issues modern America has such as: racism, suicide, obsession with social networks and others. The video raises issues of violence, discrimination, racism, free circulation of weapons and other relevant issues for the USA.

Glover is trying to say that black people are still facing many problems due to their race, and the picture of beautiful American life is often deceptive and distracting from what the real picture looks like. Other meanings were less obvious, but they can be reached after watching video for multiple times as there are so many things that are distracting from little details happening in the background of the video. In this spectacular scene Glover makes strange moves and then he shoots the guy in the head. The pose of the rapper reminds the movements of the famous comic character of the XIX century Jim Crow, who was invented and popularized by the American actor Thomas D. Rice. This character was played by a white person but he was painted in black color to entertain white people. The weapons in the clips are valued more than human life which is very sad to realize but it is what it is. Every time Gambino finishes shooting, a man runs up to Glover, who carefully takes the weapon and wraps it in a red handkerchief, while the bodies of the dead people remain on the ground.

The scene where Gambino starts shooting the choir refers to a shooting that happened in the USA in Charleston church in 2015 by a white guy named Dylann Roof who killed 9 black people. There is no need for a long analysis to understand that this shooting was racially motivated. Gambino briefly touches on the topic of how any tragedy instantly is uploaded into social networks, often in the form of live broadcasts: a few children shoot everything that happens on their phones. People prefer to record instead of actually helping the person because they just do not care. This a celly (ha) / That’s a tool (yeah), — and these words have a double meaning. Celly is translated from English as phone, and the tool in slang means "weapon". Fans believe that this is related to the murder of Stefan Clarke — unarmed African-American, which the police shot. Police thought that the guy had a gun in his hand but actually it was just a phone.

Words can be interpreted as the fact that in the modern world the phone has really become a weapon and a tool that allows to document different events. If we pay attention to this scene we can see a hooded man riding a white horse. This is a symbol that means death and apocalypse. As we can see the video contains a lot of choreography, and it is easy to guess that most of the dance moves we see are viral movements from Youtube, for example, from the video by the rapper Blockboy Evi and the video of Drake and BlockBoy JB. Glover also performs the traditional South African dance called gvar-gvar, which was popularized by Rihanna. Unlike modern rappers, who usually demonstrate posh expensive cars Gambino is showing old cars. In fact, most Americans use this type of cars, where cassette recorders are still installed instead of modern audio systems. At the end of the video, Donald Glover runs away terrified from the crowd of white people. By running he is trying to escape the reality that he lives in. Many people in this scene saw a reference to the film "Get Out", in the soundtrack of which there is a track by Childish Gambino.