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Thursday, May 10, 2018

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

For a title as open-ended as 

“This is America,” one would 
assume Childish Gambino’s latest 
single would poignantly capture 
the racial tensions of the nation, 
using the Black experience as a 
vessel for artistic expression. For a 
listener completely unaware of the 
clandestinely corny wunderkind 
that is Donald Glover, they would 
perceive him to be a yet another 
(admittedly more melodic) tough-
guy rapper singing self praises 
while lyrically waving the barrel 
of an AK in their faces.

While the artist known as 

Childish Gambino, a masquerade 
slowly thinning to reveal a bristly 
Donald Glover wise beyond his 
years, is far from being a garden-
variety trap rapper, with “This 
is 
America,” 
he 
purposefully 

assumes that costume for the sake 
of flashiness. “I got the plug in 
Oaxaca / they gonna find you like 
blocka” boasts Bino, an NYU grad 
raised middle-class whose stand-
up routines often cycle back to his 
love for nerdy, traditionally white 
interests. Yet his boasting isn’t 
hollow flexing; his claims flow 
naturally because they’ve become 
the 
accepted 
social 
rhetoric. 

It’s the talk of the trap music 
scene, an environment ironically 

glorified by society where a 
violent background is seemingly 
essential, where every Black man 
is a gun-toting gangbanger.

Throughout the song, Donald 

recruits a veritable team of trap 
maestros to bolster this irony. 
BlocBoy JB, 21 Savage and Young 
Thug 
pop 
up 
erratically 
for 

the occasional woo, blaow and 
skrrt, with the latter lending a 
whimsically haunting outro as 
well. These varied ad libs are 
woven frequently into the lyrical 
content, as if Childish Gambino 
aims to elevate something which 
ends up being critically associated 
with lazy, repetitive rapping. 
“This is America” is deceptively 

simple, but through the dichotomy 
of the music (which quivers from 
spirited sing-alongs to booming, 
sparsely instrumented snares), 
a bigoted dichotomy of Black art 
is revealed: If it’s not deemed by 
our predominantly white artistic 
world to be culturally important, 
it’s ignorant. Black artists are 
seldom described as within the 
intermediary space of the critical 
spectrum which white artists can 
freely populate, a place where 
one can be corny or innovative or 
plain without their race labeled as 
a defining characteristic of their 
art.

This titular “America” is one 

where to be Black is to be trending, 
be it for the latest dance craze or 
the latest kid to be shot. The music 
video for the song is a microcosm 
of the world Glover 
lives in. He cavorts 
around a warehouse 
followed 
by 
a 

legion 
of 
school-

aged 
dancers, 

his 
movements 

combining 
elements 
of 
viral 

dances 
like 
the 
Shoot 
with 

the 
Gwara 
Gwara, 
Alkayida 

and 
other 
popular 
dances 

from Africa. While Gambino’s 
expressiveness has warranted a 
mountain of lighthearted GIFs 

and Twitter memes, every shot 
in the video is backdropped by 
playful pandemonium — hordes 
of sprinting bystanders, burning 
cars, even a possible manifestation 
of Death riding by on a pale white 
horse.

While not making sweeping 

statements 
about 
racism, 
the 

oppression 
in 
the 
“America” 

according to Donald Glover is 
built on choice. We choose to 
parse Black culture only for 
its shining success stories and 
remain ignorant of the chaotic 
backgrounds from which Black 
artists came, which systematically 
fight to keep them down. We 
choose to handle guns with care 
and disregard the bodies of the 
people they slayed (as represented 
by the gleefully jarring murder 

that 
kicks 
off 

the 
video). 
Race, 

however, is not a 
choice. The chorus, 
where 
Gambino 

implores the “Black 
man” to “get your 

money,” echoes the implicitly 
acknowledged 
values 
of 
our 

society. The illusion of choice 
bestowed upon people of color 
is one-strike-and-you’re-out: To 
be caught “slippin’ up” is to be 
engulfed by America herself.

‘This is America’ challenges

MUSIC REVIEW

RCA

BOOK REVIEW

NATALIE ZAK
Daily Arts Writer

ROBERT MANSUETTI
Summer Senior Arts Editor

“This is 
America”

Childish Gambino

RCA

“Twilight of the 

Gods”

Steven Hyden

Harper Collins

May 8

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

Billy Joel’s and Elton John’s Face 

to Face tour came to Buffalo, New 
York, in March of 2010, and it was 
the first concert I ever attended. 
Sitting eagerly in the stands of the 
massive, sold-out HSBC Arena, I was 
12 years old and knew the majority 
of the men’s discographies by heart. 
My parents started playing their 
Greatest Hits albums for my sisters 
and I when we were too young to 
understand the lyrics, but old enough 
to commit them to memory. Years 
later, we would learn their songs 
on the piano, each of us assuming 
a different anthem. For Mimi and 
Elizabeth, it was Joel’s “Piano Man” 
and “Miami 2017,” and for myself it 
was John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

The performance itself operated 

around the premise of these two 
legends playing individually and 
then in tandem. Their pianos, which 

would rise out from under the stage, 
faced each other from opposite ends 
where they would banter and play 
duets in response to the adoring 
screams from the audience. As it 
turned out, this would be the final 
rendition of the Face to Face tour, 
which had been recurring since 
1994. Rumors of discontent between 
the artists circulated, but nothing 
was ever confirmed. Joel would later 
sign a contract with Madison Square 
Garden to become their resident 
artist and pretty much stop touring, 
while John, who recently announced 
his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, 
is heading towards retirement, but 
not without playing 300 stadiums 
across the world first.

Here are two gods, both of classic 

rock fame, who are careening 
towards the end of their careers 
in the way typical of our surviving 
rock legends — performing at large 
stadiums to fans who grew up 
treasuring their music, be them Baby 

Boomers or Gen-Xers. It is a popular 
progression of classic rock legends 
these days. Live albums, stadium 
tours and residencies seem to be the 
three distinguishing elements of the 
rock star in the 2000s. Steven Hyden 
points this out in his new book 
“Twilight of the Gods: A Journey 
to the End of Classic Rock,” but also 
adds a caveat to these characteristics: 
Soon, tours like these will no longer 
exist because the legends will all be 
gone. Stadium concerts are unique 
to our rock gods, the ones draped in 
nostalgia for the beat-up leather of 
Cadillacs and drug-addled parties in 
a stranger’s basement. Once men like 
Billy Joel and Bruce 
Springsteen 
and 

Mick Jagger finally 
kick it, what will 
become of classic 
rock?

It is easy to tell 

that “Twilight of the 
Gods” is a response 
to the recent loss of musicians who 
seemed incapable of ever dying 
because, in truth, they never seemed 
human. David Bowie, Prince, Tom 
Petty, Gord Downie and Greg 
Allman — none of these stars ever 
seemed subject to mortality, but 

in the last two years alone, this is a 
reality the music world has had to 
face. But while the subtitle for this 
book suggests that Hyden reaches 
the end of classic rock, whatever 
this may look like, he instead acts 
as a catalyst for what the discussion 
of classic rock will look like once 
all of its icons are gone. For years, 
cultural critics have written and 
reflected on the effect these bands 
and musicians have had, but most of 
these conversations have occurred 
while the members are still alive. 
Now, we face the strange task of 
retrospectively 
considering 
the 

careers of all these artists in a time 

when young listeners 
are 
further 
and 

further 
removed 

from the tenets of 
classic 
rock. 
The 

admiration 
and 

recognition for stars 
like Bowie and Petty 
are there, but it’s 

difficult to truly reckon with their 
deaths when we are so far removed 
from their heyday.

At the start of the book, Hyden 

takes care to differentiate between 
classic rock and classic rock. “Classic 
is a value judgement, whereas classic 

rock denotes a particular era of 
music signified by bands that may 
or may not be shitty.” This sentence 
serves as a foreshadowing for both 
the structure and tone of the book. 
Stylized like a double album, the 
book has four sides which are split 
into songs — or chapters — and 
which follow the trajectory of a 
concept album like The Who’s 
Tommy or Genesis’s The Lamb Lies 
Down on Broadway. A “hero” makes 
his way from birth to death while 
attempting to uncover the meaning 
of life along the way, be this through 
drugs, God or both. Except the hero 
here seems to be Hyden himself, and 
Hyden is just a placeholder for the 
larger category of classic rock fiends 
who were captivated by classic rock 
mythology at a young age with its 
tortured artists and romantic visions 
and who now face its impending end. 
Hyden traces the arcs of our most 
beloved rockstars from Bob Dylan 
to Bruce Springsteen alongside the 
overarching decline of classic rock as 
we move into an increasingly digital 
age. 

‘Twilight of the 
Gods’ looks back

