I was thinking  a lot about how much on an influence music has on my day-to-day life. It’s always in the background in my room, playing through my headphones on my daily train rides, or blasting at a party. The lyrics and vocals are what draw one’s attention to a song, but the video production behind it is its own form of artistry.

A music video that stood out to me is “This is America” by Childish Gambino. Gambino is a dual identity for actor, Donald Glover, who is known for movies including Spiderman, Lion King, The Martian, and more. This particular video of his addresses issues such as gun violence in society. It also takes on controversial problems such as police brutality and the ignorance of our generations. In the video, Glover nails historical and pop cultural references to depict the timelessness of his topics. For example, he takes an iconic stance before he fires a shot that is associated with a poster for the Jim Crow laws. However, the children dancing with him in multiple scenes were hitting current moves seen in music videos of 2018. Another example is how Gambino chose to reference hate-based shootings such as the Charleston church massacre from a few years ago and contrasted that with including SZA, a current/trending artist, to portray the Statue of Liberty in his car scene. The video only “snaps back to reality” with the police chase at the end, and viewers can see the change in Glover’s facial expression because the fear in his eyes is the only one in the whole piece that actually seems to make sense.

There are a lot of clues that are easy to miss in the video. As a generation, we are so socially media inclined that he felt the need to choose to speak out on a platform he knew we wouldn’t ignore. It left you with more questions than answers, but most importantly, it created a feeling. In the words of Maya Angelou, “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” The artistic choices were thought out to the position of an arm or a twitch of the eye, and it really stirred conversation within my peer group and generation. I hope it makes people who are just now being allowed to vote, actually educate themselves and think about politics.