The Press Box - Dissecting the Response to Childish Gambino's "This Is America" | Damage Control (Ep. 465)

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

The Ringer's Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs discuss Childish Gambino's new song, "This Is America," and its controversial music video (0:29), what the qualifications are for handing out the "black genius" title (11:03), and R. Kelly potentially beginning to face consequences for his actions (19:31). More from The Ringer: When a Culture’s Fed Up Donald Glover’s Next Phase Is Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Have we finally reached the long, delayed end of R. Kelly? The mute R. Kelly campaign, backed by the Hollywood Times Up movement,

has launched a series of protests against the singer and his business partners. We're going to talk about it. But first, we're going to talk about Donald Glover. The rapper says, actor, director, also known as Childish Gambino, who released a controversial music video for his new song, This is America. Donald Glover had quite a weekend. He hosted SNL, I think he was in every single sketch, and performed as his own musical guest. And at the same time, he was performing, he released a music video for his new song, This is America.

It's already racked up like 50 million views on YouTube. A lot of people are talking about it. There's many opinions to be had because the music video is deliberately unsettling. It depicts Glover executing a man with a gunshot to the back of the head. It also depicts him shooting a chorus of people and it's sort of obviously meant to invoke the Charleston massacre. So there's a lot going on there. Some critics regard the video as thorny satire. Others see it as a crude misapprehension of black culture and racialized violence against black people.

So there have been a lot of different opinions about the video as meaning and quality. One thing is very clear. People are watching Donald Glover more closely than ever before. I've seen a lot of chatter about how Donald has sort of replaced Kanye as the important black artist of the moment. And this is definitely sort of being seen as a patching of the passing of the torch by some people. I'm wondering what you think about that. Yeah, I think they're, especially after the release of this video, this is America, which I should explain is when we say it's unsettling because there's violence in it, it's not just that there's a, like there are music videos that have violence in them all the time. That's not a new thing.

but it's the fact that the nature of the song is very bright and Afro beats inflected. And it's just, it's clearly designed to be a crossover sort of pop single as a song. And you juxtapose and it has the music video has great dancing in it. And that's all juxtaposed to the footage of Gambino turning a semi-automatic rifle onto a singing choir or shooting a man in the back of the head. So that's what's distressing. And it's like a provocateur. Definitely. I mean, calling it This Is America was clearly meant to provoke.

Yeah. Well, if anything, calling it This Is America is the sort of elbow to the ribs of like, do you get it? This is a skating satire. It's sort of telegraphing the whole outlook of the video. So I think people look at this music video and the thing that sort of got them thinking, oh, right, Kanye is becoming a right-wing nut job. Meanwhile, Donald Glover is making provocative art. Is the nature of that sort of provocation?

It's a black guy with very sort of alter core metal brow sensibilities doing very heavily, arguably heavy-handed provocation art. That still works as pop music. Does that sound right? That sounds like the basic beats that he and Kanye share in common. Definitely. But isn't any good. But is it art? Is it art?

But is it art? Ooh. I don't know. I don't know. I have different reactions I'd say to the song and to the video. What are the differences between your reactions? I think the song is cool. I think the song is, again, it's something you can imagine charting really well.

It seems like it's designed to be. It seems like a post-wrapping successful, like, child. Like, Childish Gimino's summer record. Now I don't think I'll be able to listen to it without thinking of the music video, though, because I saw the music video first. Right. I like the music video. It just sort of changes the way that I listen to the music. And I can't really see myself, like, happily bopping around to it anymore.

Yeah. What's interesting is that the song itself is not maybe, maybe from a production standpoint, the song is bright. but the song itself lyrically has undertones that are about the commercial relation between black people and white people and black artists

and white consumers. So the song itself from a songwriting perspective is also, I wouldn't say dark, but it's thoughtful and it's pessimistic in ways that do mirror the music video. But because of how pop music works, right?

It's sort of production can obscure a lot of things. It can obscure a lot of qualities of songwriting. And so it is weird to think, though, that people could, if the music video didn't exist, people could kind of happily bop around to This is America, despite the undertones of the song. But the music video makes it prohibitively impossible to do that. Do you think that this is one of the more successful things that Donald Glover has done? It's really like the most immediately successful.

Because even if you take, Glover's last big song is Red, Bone, right? Mm-hmm. Which is like his, I mean, that's the first Donald Glover song that really, he has a lot of songs that among Donald Glover fans are hits, you know, and also music videos, frankly, among Donald Glover fans that are hits. But Redbone is his crossover. That's his crossover record.

That was the first song I listened to, and I was like, maybe I am a Childish Gambino fan. Not even just the Donald Glover fan, a childish Gambino fan. That's his first big song. song, Redbone, but even Redbone, I think Redbone took a, it took a decent amount of time to take off. Yeah, it was a slow burn. Yeah. Whereas the difference between Redbone and This Is America is like, This is America is, is streaming heavily out of the gate. Like you said, it's a multi-million streamed record at this point.

It's already a hit. It was basically already a hit by the end of the weekend after he released it. And he released it on a Sunday, on a Saturday night, you know, and it's already hit by the end of the weekend. I would say that definitely it has more traction as an ubiquitous cultural product more immediately than either Redbone or basically any episode of Atlanta. You know what I mean? Like, it's the sort of, it's almost, if Redbone is pre-peak Donald Glover and Atlanta season one is pre-peak Donald Glover, then. And this is America is peak Donald Glover. At least that's how I'm calling it now.

Maybe three, you know, maybe a year from now he'll do something else. And I'm like, no, that's the actual peak Donald Glover. That was just a little stop on the way to the summit. Right. Maybe we'll solo be peak. Oh, God. Honestly, maybe.

I feel like because in our, I mean, in the ringer offices, among the people that I know in New York, like everyone watches Atlanta. He was already pretty popular, but I sometimes don't always think about the fact that Atlanta is a hit show, but it's not huge. It's not like Game of Thrones big. It's not Roseanne big.

It's definitely not Rosam Big. And so I think that this is going to be more of a breakthrough moment with like super mainstream America than maybe a lot of people realize. Well, this weekend, like him showing up on SNL was too. Right. And so, yeah, I think that's why people have started talking about him as the heir to Kanye in this way now as well. And I really don't like that line of thinking, but I think it's worth discussing because I think the idea of slotting artists onto pedestals, as we were talking about this before, that it's so bizarre because it sort of suggests that there are a finite amount of spots for artists to exist in like American. discourse and it also sort of sets people up for failure like donald glover has just done made some

really interesting art but if we sort of anoint him as the next guy we're inevitably going to be disappointed with him at some point down the line and we're also going to we're like ascribing him this position that's unfair to ascribe to anyone like he doesn't he did these good things that doesn't necessarily mean that everything he's going to say from here on out will be perfect or everything that he does will be perfect. Yeah, there's a sense in which we, there's a sense that, I don't want to say we, but there's a sense in which people have promoted celebrities to this pedestal of thought leader in particular.

Like thought leader is a specific sort of, where would you say that term originates from? It's like the consultant class invented this term, right? Thought leader to brand people who are not necessarily from areas. of expertise. They're mostly just people who are in positions of celebrity prominence or maybe commercial prominence in an industry and rebrand them as a brain genius. Right. And so we do this to rappers and singers now where it's just everyone is a thought leader if they make something that is lit like an episode of Mad Men. Yeah, it's such a messed up position to put someone in. It's like Atlanta can be good. That doesn't mean we have to assume that Donald Glover is a representative

of like all black artists now. Right. It also seems to be people fundamentally misunderstanding the lesson that I thought everyone was currently learning from the downfall of Kanye West. No, I don't think anyone's learned anything. It's like, oh man, we placed all, we placed this overdetermined political confidence in Kanye West and he totally blew it. I know what we should do. We'll get a new guy. New Kanye bless.

It's like, no, the whole point is. But what are the quality, the thing I haven't figured out yet is what exactly, I don't know, when mainstream slash white culture is looking for the one black guy who gets to be this sort of crossover black genius, yeah, the brain genius. What are the qualities exactly that people are looking for? Because there are qualities that Kanye and Donald Glover have in common. But I haven't isolated which. of those qualities are the thing that allows them to code to people, to black audiences,

simultaneously with white audiences, as insightful in a way that's not just about music, but that's about almost, that's about everything, basically. You know, I don't, I don't know what it is. I think it has to do with fawning celebrity profiles, perhaps. It's interesting because I remember when Kanye was new. And I think a lot of he was popular because of his music. Amongst the white people that I knew who were like boomers, they were like a little like thrown off by the George W. Bush doesn't care about black people comment.

Like Kanye's like forays into politics weren't. things that necessarily appeal to them. And it's different now because I feel like a lot of like mainstream, like old white people will watch this is America and be like, damn, this is America. He's right. So I don't necessarily know that they're being like embraced in the same way. But yeah, I'm not sure what the qualifications are. But I honestly think everyone would be better off if we just get.

rid of the idea that we have to have a brain genius altogether. Or if it's going to be like an exclusive, because one thing, here's the thing that frustrates me about the Kanye Glover comparisons, Glover picking up the mantle, is that it seems to be, it doesn't even seem to be about a conversation that's necessarily happening between those two artists, although they have been in conversation lately, right? Yeah, didn't Kanye do a happy tweet? He called Donald Glover a genius on Twitter about a week ago. And then I think he did like smiley faces when and tweeted out that skit that Donald Glover did about Kanye's tweets just to make things even more of like a snake eating its own tail than it already is.

Right. S&L on SNL when Gambino hosted or Glover hosted they did a, who is a quiet place and Kanye tweets mashup sketch? Yes, I liked it. It was funny. It's like Kanye tweets out a video of that. He tweets out the music video. He tweets out that This is America music video shortly after it's released. So in a way, it's like Kanye is proactively passing this mantle off to Gabel.

Not even passing it off. He's trying to. It's his how do you do fellow kids. Like he knows Donald Glover is hot right now. Because I'm sure. Okay. If I know one thing, it's that Kanye watched the This is America video and was like, this is America. I'm rethinking this whole Trump shit.

Yeah. Oh, man, if one good thing could come out of this, I would actually perhaps call Donald Glover a genius if he managed to unread pill Kanye. Oh, my God. I'd be very happy. But I do think the narrative thread that both of them have in common, especially Gambino most recently, is that they both perform this. Kanye and Donald Glover both perform this sense of. like being a difficult man, like a brilliant, difficult man. Yeah.

Kanye has performed it in a much more spectacular fashion for a longer period of time. And he's gone a little off the rails with it. Whereas I would say Glover, especially in the New Yorker profile, we talked about on a previous episode of damage control with Cam. RIP. RIP, Cam. In that profile with Tad Friend and the New Yorker, Glover's acting sort of different. cantankerous and he's doing this weird, affected, anti-social genius stick that seems kind of goofy and fake to me in the profile.

But it's like he's performing. Donald Glover in a way seems to be performing how he thinks a capital B, capital G, black genius man is supposed to act. I think he's a lot more self-aware in that performance. In what ways? Then Kanye. I think he's doing it on purpose. whereas Kiney is just doing it.

He's just an asshole. I think it's weird because it's, I think Donald Glover has picked precisely the wrong moment in American history to lean into the difficult male artist archetype. Definitely. You know what I mean? I hope he leans away. I hope he leans away too,

but I'm also surprised that a lot of people seem to be into it as much as they are. Yeah. I think people sort of love assholes a little more than they let on. Yeah. But I think for his own benefit, he should lean away from that and lean away from any Kanye comparisons because they're different. And what Donald Glover is doing right now is more interesting than everything that Connie is doing right now.

For sure. Yeah. He doesn't need to be in conversation with Kanye West. He should be in conversation with people who are smarter than Kanye West. Right. Or also just people who are closer to like this moment. Kanye seems just totally detached from the moment. He's almost throwing a tip or tantrum at the moment. The one thing I worry about though is that in the process of taking Donald Glover seriously,

which feels like that's a real critical past time of the past year and a half has been taking Donald Glover seriously. Like putting on the... Oh, the spectacles. Yes. Real spectacle hours. It seems like there is a, there's an attitude toward his music. And I think that this is America video definitely counts here, where there is almost an over-eager impulse to approach Donald Glover's art

or any given episode of Atlanta or any given song now, as if it's this academic riddle that we must all immediately. decode. My friend Charnay had the most withering tweet the other day. She put it like this about Atlanta in particular. She was like, I love it how writers after episodes

of Atlanta write about episodes of Atlanta like they're writing for their personal pan pizza from the school. I on the one hand want to celebrate or at least appreciate or grapple with Donald Glover's art, but I also think that

there's a weird humorlessness or sort of competitive over eagerness to how we talk about Donald Glover already. Definitely. That feels very much like how like posties is Kanye. Yeah, I feel like Donald Glover's art is certainly deserving of dissection. And it, I mean, it's good. It deserves to be taken seriously. But taking something seriously doesn't mean you have to like pretend to be an academic.

It's just not always that deep. And this is America is, I'm not dissing it. I don't know. It weirds me out when people see something that they like and then immediately assume that someone's a genius for doing it. I'm like, can we just have a little fun while we're talking about this? I think the pace of online life is such that the critics, we're all working overtime, man. They are. We are. Just want to relax, too. Just want to enjoy some dancing.

Just want to dance, Kate. I want to dance on a car. So for nearly 20 years now, R. Kelly has... been a very difficult subject. He's a very popular, very influential R&B singer. He's also reportedly a sexual abuser who has preyed on countless underage women, which say mostly black women, dating back to his brief marriage to the late singer Aliyah when she was only 15 years old.

We've known about R. Kelly's sexual misconduct for a very long time I want to stress. We should also stress that R. Kelly has been on trial before for child pornography. A jury acquitted R. Kelly on child pornography charges in 2008. In the decades since, his acquittal, journalists have repeatedly covered victims who attest to Kelly's sexual misconduct in July. Busfeed published a report about several women whom Kelly has allegedly recruited into a sex cult, which he runs out of his homes in Chicago and Atlanta. I suggest people read the report.

It's pretty grim stuff. So this has all been playing out for a couple decades now. All the while, Kelly's record label, RCA, has mostly avoided addressing the many outstanding R. Kelly controversies. They haven't dropped him from his recording contract. They mostly just let Kelly speak for himself, you know, and his publicist and his lawyers speak for him. But the label, the label itself has never really sort of gotten dragged into the R. Kelly discourse. But for the past year, the Mute R. Kelly campaign in Atlanta has launched a series of protests against Kelly. But also, crucially, the Mute R. Kelly campaign has targeted Kelly's business partners in the music industry.

So this includes RCA. They're also targeting radio stations who play R. Kelly music. They're also targeting venues at which R. Kelly is performing. And that's particularly important because R. Kelly Tours a lie. He's on tour in North America every other year. So basically they're really putting the squeeze Darkelly and making life difficult for him and the people who are keeping his music career float. And it seems to be working because last month Kelly's publicist quit, his lawyer quit and his assistant quit. And they all did so seemingly on the same day.

So let's talk about what's going on here. Why, why after again, like two decades of Arkelley being a creep? Yeah. It is only now sort of all coming down for him. What's going on? I mean, I think the mute Archali movement is doing something important and really, really, really long overdue. Yeah. But I also don't think that this would happen if Archali was still making bangers all the time.

Like he's, as you mentioned in the piece that you wrote about our Kelly, which I encourage everyone to read, he's not at the apex of his career right now. He's been on a down swing for a while. And so he's a little more vulnerable. And that combined with the wider Me Too movement, I think has sort of primed the pump for a reckoning. it's insane to me that this has taken this long. It's so horrifying. Yeah. You know, one thing I think about a lot was the original stories in the Times and the New Yorker about Harvey Weinstein and how those stories and a lot of other people who worked in media for a long time were all sort of ruminating on the idea that Harvey Weinstein's predatory behavior was an open secret, right?

that there had been anecdotes, there had been blind items, there had been hints in gossip reports and other reports about Weinstein's behavior. But you really had to be, you really had to be reading between the lines to put the story together. Art Kelly is not that. Arkelly, there's a videotape. There's a leaked sex tape with him with a minor. There is nothing about, I mean,

Arkellie's behavior is the opposite of an open secret. It's literally been headline news for most of my life. Yes. And that is one of the things that it's distressing about a lot of this because even if you look at the Me Too movement, how the Me Too movement has, at least for now, sort of fouled a lot of bad men in TV and in film, you look at the music industry and it's just it doesn't seem to have had the same effect yet. And that's kind of why Arkellie is this big target.

It's, you know, they're not, because otherwise the Me Too movement just does not seem to have wrecked the music industry in the way that it has wrecked Hollywood or, you know, spooked Hollywood. No. And I think the other reason Arkellie is a big target is because he is, it's not comedic because it's. horrible, but he's cartoonishly depraved. The crimes he's been accused of are so incredibly horrible that it really boggles the mind that he is facing no, or I guess he's facing some repercussions now, but it boggles the mind that he's been able to go on for as long as he has. Like I remember even back, I think it was probably like 2010 or something, pitchfork

had him as a headliner. and Pitchfork is based in Chicago, so it really should have, like, they should have known better. Right. I think it was just a few years after his child porn child. It would have been a few years after the acquittal. And it's like accusations against him have just gotten worse and worse to the point. He's accused of running a sex cult. Like, he's accused of so many things.

And he is still out there doing his. Well, the distressing thing is that when we say he's accused. What we really mean is that there are reports, right? The journalists have written features. Journalists have talked to victims. Yes. But these are things that at this point are being revealed outside of the context of the criminal justice system. And the stressful thing about R. Kelly still being a touring, big touring musical act,

is that RCA records standard for whether they want to be associated with R. Kelly. is not the standard of a jury trial, right? Like RCA, there is enough stuff out about R. Kelly to suggest that he is a deeply unsavory character, let's say, that RCA shouldn't, like, RCA should have its own judgment about a lot of this stuff. And in that, and the same goes for Live Nation, which is, you know, part of his touring infrastructure. The same goes for Chance the rapper and Lady Gaga. and Chris Brown who are all singers who have worked with him worked with R. Kelly in recent years.

You know what I mean? That's what's frustrating is that there is personal judgment that people could be exercising that they're not exercising. I wonder if there's any criteria at RCA that draws a line, a moral line between which artists they'll host

and which artists they won't. Right. Like what else could he do? Right, right. What would get a line? him kicked off. Right, exactly. Outside of a criminal conviction, and even then a lot of record labels have artists who are, you know, wrapped up in a lot of legal trouble. I am encouraged by one thing about the M. R. Kelly campaign, and I think it's the genius of the M. R. Kelly campaign. So I would say,

until now, a lot of the, let's call it the R. Kelly discourse, which is music critics and other of people who over the years have really, really tried to stress to their audiences and to R. Kelly's audience that, hey, R. Kelly's a bad guy. You got to stop listening to his music. You have to stop being a part of this, right? And in a certain level, that's uncomplicated, right? If this guy is a monster, it doesn't really matter how much you love the Fiesta remix or happy people or step in the name of love. You know, if you're, it's, you know, you're an adult, you grow older, you sort of rethink these things, and those things are so genuinely distressing to me that I don't really feel like I'm losing a lot.

No, I mean, I used to love remix to Ignition, like every other 31-year-old gal from Chicago. But I can't listen to it anymore because it makes me feel bad because I think of all the people that this man has hurt. Right. I do think that consumers, I think people should feel bad about listening to R. Kelly. I do. But I also don't think, I don't think that we're going to be able to convince everyone to stop listening to R. Kelly. Like, it would be easier to convince RCA to stop.

Right. Yeah. Well, it's easier. It's not even just that it's easier. It's just the R. Kelly discourse in town now used to. at least seem to me to be limited to consumers. It used to be limited to saying the real problem here is all of the people who still love his music. And I just don't think that that was ever true.

Because, I mean, as recently, again, as last year, this sort of critical line on Arcali was, yeah, he's still touring. He's still a lucrative music act. Even though he's a flagging artist, right? He does not sell nearly as many albums. His last album flopped. He is definitely a post-post-peak legacy artist. But people were definitely convinced that, oh, all we need to do is shame enough people out of listening to R. Kelly, and that'll solve everything.

That never works. Right. But I think you're right. People should feel bad or feel more bad than they do. Yeah. But I also, like, if you are listening and you just can't give up your R. Kelly, like, whatever. it's fine. You're not...

Well, I think it's more so that those people aren't the actual problem. The actual problem and the problem that the Mew-R-Kelly campaign is serving as a corrective to is it's turning people's attention to the record label and being like, wait, the problem, the fact that people are streaming the Fiesta remix on Spotify, that realistically generates, what, like $12 in revenue per year? The real problem is that RCA pays this guy a salary or pays this guy advances. The real problem is that he works with the tour management company that's like, well, this guy is going to make money for us. Those people have actual power.

Unlike any individual consumer. Yes. The people that the Mute R. Kelly campaign is targeting, those are people with actual power and those are people with the actual financial stakes in R. Kelly's career. Yeah. And I think, you know, someone who just guilty pleasure listens to R. Kelly, I mean, they're not. They're not really propping up his career as an individual who's just pressing play on the trap in the closet part 9 billion music video. They're not the real problem. The real problem, as you said, is the industry just keeping him on board.

Yeah. And I definitely sort of circling back to my earlier point, it's the music, I think the music industry feels a certain exceptional. impunity, even in light of all of the TV and film industry angst in the week of Me Too, the music industry just seems like it is more arrogant and thinks that its artists and its executives can slide with behavior. Why do you think that there's this gulf in the way that Hollywood has reacted to Me Too stories in the way that the music industry is? I don't know.

I mean, one of the editors here I was talking to about it suggested that maybe there's a sense, there's a popular sense that, you know, the music industry and rock, you know, rock stars, debauchery, et cetera, et cetera. But I think people assume that about Hollywood directors and actors too. And we decided or lots of us decided that that may have been the case or may be the case, but that's bad and we have to correct that. I don't think it's totally a matter of culture. It might have to do with record labels being more beholden to youth culture. Yeah. And youth audiences who aren't going to hold there. Because like the average, yeah, R. Kelly is a weird case because he's old.

Yeah, he's old and his fan base is aging, let's say. But I think in general, a lot of the music industry, like if we look at, we look at our, Our Kelly's label mate Chris Brown, right? Like, the average Chris Brown fan. I prefer not to look at Chris Brown. Yeah, that's true. It's just so many of the big musical acts have fan bases that are not adults who are really invested in these concerns. Takashi.

Yeah, if you look at Kevin Gates or Takashi 6-9, right, or Kodak Black, you know, these are artists who are significantly younger than. And you can look to indie music. You can look to pop music. Like, I don't, it's certainly not any one genre that any of these problems are localized to. I just think the music industry in general thinks that its target audiences are more forgiving for certain things and less invested in criticism, frankly, in journalism. And I think that explains why, I think that general attitude applies to super young artists who are bad actors and maybe monstrous people. people, but it also reaches to somebody who is a legacy act with an adult fan base like R. Kelly. I think there's just a sort of hedonism to how the music industry and how music executives maybe

think about their relationship, the popular culture, and to journalistic interrogation. I also think music criticism does not produce a lot of hard journalism in the same way that TV criticism or TV reporting and Hollywood film reporting do. And so the music industry probably from the journalistic perspective, again, in a broad sense, isn't feeling the heat. But R. Kelly is definitely the exception to that. R. Kelly, there has been a lot of serious journalism done to bring R. Kelly even to this point. And at this point, even R. Kelly is not done. Yeah.

But you know what? Ideally, this will be like a watershed moment for the music industry. All right. That's it for this week. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. We'll be back soon. two weeks, count on it.

Yeah. Tell us some good musical artists to dance to who are good people. Tweet at us. Yes. My handle's just my name. My handle also is just my name.