Michael Mead

Prof. Marek Muller

COMM 310

28 April 2019

The Democratic Effectiveness of “This is America”

When Donald Glover, better known as Childish Gambino, released the music video for

his hit song, “This is America,” he became the center of attention for days and weeks afterwards.

“This is America” reached audiences that had never heard of Childish Gambino to spark a global

discussion about American racial issues, injustice, the age of technology, and a host of other

points of debate. Gambino is clearly upset by the current state of affairs in America, and his song

is a clear example of protest music, the same genre of music that made greats like Bob Dylan and

Joan Baez popular in the 1960s. On the whole, popular protest music is, in itself, an effective

means of creating significant and lasting social change, corroborated by Frank Zappa when he

explained that young people are loyal neither to “flag, country or doctrine, but only to music”

(Rodnitzky 1999). This essay will seek to parse the attributes of those effective protest songs to

prove that “This is America” is also an example of effective protest music that has sparked

significant and lasting social change. In the style of Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals, the

criteria with which “This is America” will be evaluated for its effectiveness has been broken

down into four overarching “rules” that effective protest music should follow: It must attract a

large audience, it must deliver a clear message, it must meet a standard of longevity, and it must

enact change. If “This is America” follows those four rules, it will show itself to be an example

of effective protest music.

RULE NUMBER ONE: Protest music must attract a large audience.

 In the age of what Kevin DeLuca calls the “public screen,” it is not as tough as one might

think for a popular artist to have his or her work reach a large audience (DeLuca & Peeples

2002). Everybody that has a smartphone has access to any and all content posted online and can

see that content in mere seconds. On social media, a user can repost content for their friends and

followers to see who can then repost that post for their own friends and followers, and the pattern

continues until the post runs out of steam and stops spreading. This idea of “hypermediation,” or

the spreading of content through many forms of media, allows for the most popular content on

the internet to become drastically more popular as it makes its way through all the forms of

media that it can (DeLuca & Peeples 2002). The combination of a public screen where global

discourse takes place with the hypermediation of popular content was able to make “This is

America” a nearly instant success all over the world.

According to Adrienne Gibbs from Forbes, “This is America” tied for the fifth fastest

music video to reach 100 million views on YouTube (Gibbs 2018). It only took nine days for

Gambino’s video to achieve that milestone. As this essay is being written, the music video has

533 million views on YouTube and over 300 million streams on Spotify. From these numbers

alone, one should be able to conclude that “This is America” has had no problem attracting a

large audience, and those numbers do not capture the number of people who saw the song

performed in concert, who have listened to it on Apple Music or other streaming services, and

who engage with the song in other ways day to day. In short, “This is America” has an audience

that grows every day and will continue to grow as younger generations find themselves ready to

engage with the song’s content.

The reason for its success was Gambino’s desire to make “This is America” a message

that Americans, especially white Americans, couldn’t turn away from when they got
uncomfortable. Tre Johnson of Rolling Stone explained, “‘This is America’ reflects the desire to

use every one of our available platforms to punch at America’s conscience,” and those living in

the public screen helped to deliver that punch through constant retweets and reposts of the video

(Johnson 2018). It became a talking point in high school and college classrooms, among work

friends and casual acquaintances alike. For a long while, it seemed like everybody wanted to

pick apart the video’s symbolism, its messages, and its hidden Easter eggs. This constant

engagement with the song gives weight to the possibility of it being an effective means to

instigate lasting social change as was the case with songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob

Dylan, a song that is still listened to and analyzed today.

It does not hurt that, detached from the music video, “This is America” can still stand

alone and attract an audience as a song and nothing else. Max Quinn of ABC (the Australian

Broadcast Corporation) said of the music, “Examining the song as a standalone piece of music

yields equal reward. This is a jarring listen punctuated by sweeping structural and sonic

dissonance: beautiful, choral folk melodies are carefully gestated and then cut abruptly,

substituted for surgical, sonic boom bass pulses and Gambino’s harsh verse” (Quinn 2018).

Because the song is still beautiful and fun to listen to as it is, people who might not agree with

Gambino’s philosophies could still listen to the song and be subconsciously affected by its

messages. This is yet another example of the effectiveness of “This is America” as a work of

protest music.

RULE NUMBER TWO: Protest music must deliver a clear message

Attracting a large audience was the first step towards being effective for both Childish

Gambino and Bob Dylan, but neither artist would have been remembered for his work had the

song not carried a clear and heavy message. Luckily for Gambino, his music video was full of so
many themes and references to police brutality and mass shootings that it would have been hard

for a viewer to come away from watching the video without having engaged with a topic on a

deeper level. Because there is so much happening in “This is America,” it is difficult to pin one

overarching message to the song, but every message deals with the plight of black people in

America. That much is made abundantly clear. Reverend Sharon Risher claims, “For the millions

of people, especially young people, who will watch it, it makes you pause and think, ‘how are

you going to survive being black in America?’” which is a question that many white people have

never had to engage (Rao 2018). The second rule of the Alinskian Rules for Radicals is that

means are judged as ethical or unethical by the dominant political power, so because the police

are a somewhat dominant power in America, and because “This is America” almost directly calls

out the police for allowing black children and adults to be murdered unjustly, it stands to reason

that many would see Gambino’s work as being unfair or unethical (Alinsky 1971). This is what

makes Gambino’s message so beautifully effective. It poses questions to white people that they

might not normally ask themselves. It puts police brutality at the forefront of popular culture and

spreads it across any and all forms of media that support video. The message is inescapable, just

like an Alinskian radical would want it to be.

Aside from depicting the nature of injustices committed against black people in America,

“This is America” does well to capture the feeling of being marginalized and having to live with

daily trauma. Writer and producer Ibra Ake explained the intention behind making “This is

America” the way that he and his team did: “With this video, we reduced it to a feeling. If you’re

at the club and there’s a shooting outside, you still have to go get food afterwards and you still

have to compartmentalize it. Being marginalized is compartmentalizing trauma” (Gibbs 2018).

This is an almost impossible concept for majority groups like straight people and white people to
understand about marginalized groups. Marginalized groups can experience severe trauma and

have to move on with their lives moments later, because there is nothing they can do about it. It

is reality for those groups. This is best captured in “This is America” in a shot where the music

cuts out and Childish Gambino is left posed with his arm outstretched, holding the silhouette of a

handgun. In silence, he drops his hand and reaches into his pocket to pull out a joint which he

then proceeds to light and smoke. After depicting scenes of a church choir being gunned down,

black children running away from police officers, and a man being shot point-blank in the head,

Gambino moves on in the video like it is just another day.

Even the act of lighting up a joint is symbolic of black people having to cope with a

certain amount of PTSD. In an article in the New Yorker about his television series, Atlanta,

Gambino says of the use of marijuana in his show, “… the characters aren’t smoking weed all

the time because it’s cool but because they have PTSD – every black person does. It’s scary to be

at the bottom, yelling up out of the hole and all they shout down is ‘Keep digging! We’ll reach

God soon,’” (Friend 2018). With such a simple action that could easily go unnoticed, Gambino

brings so much more weight to his video, highlighting parts of black culture that might normally

make white people uncomfortable but refusing to censor it in any way. How could he censor

something that is so integral to the healing of a community constantly being torn apart by grief

and oppression?

Yet, enough nuance is hidden in the upbeat rhythms and melodies of the song to soften

the blow for people who might normally reject its messages. Protest music since its inception has

been using this technique to make messages stick with audiences. For example, the World War II

era song, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” is a rather jaunty tune with an upbeat

tempo and a jovial chord structure, but its lyrics speak quite literally about the necessity of
killing opposing countries in order to keep America free: “Praise the Lord, we’re on a mighty

mission / All aboard! We aren’t goin’ fishin’ / Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition / And

we’ll all stay free” (Mohrmann & Scott 1976). The song would have been listened to on the radio

like any other popular tune of the day, and people would have enjoyed listening to it because of

the pleasant melodic structure, but it was also giving subliminal messages to Americans at home

that the “enemy” had to be killed in order to preserve their own freedom. It was making

Americans prejudiced without them even knowing it. A more popular example is Bruce

Springsteen’s song, “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song that is ironically used as a popular Fourth of

July anthem while also being a scathing critique of America’s involvement in Vietnam: “Got in a

little hometown jam / So they put a rifle in my hand / Sent me off to a foreign land / To go and

kill the yellow man.” People can drink themselves under a table screaming the song’s chorus,

“Born in the U.S.A.,” and find out later that it isn’t a patriotic battle cry at all. Protest music that

is able to carry this nuance well is able to thrive and live on in the public fascination. Only the

effective protest music is appreciated for both its tune and its message, and “This is America”

has proven itself to be widely acclaimed for both parts.

RULE NUMBER THREE: Protest music must meet a standard of longevity.

It goes without saying that a protest song would not be worth much if it was nothing

more than a flash in the pan. Effective messages need to be perpetuated for a significant amount

of time, especially if the goal being fought for has not been achieved yet. Effective protest

musicians have had to meet this standard of longevity, and it is because of this longevity that

musicians such as Bob Dylan have the opportunity to win a Nobel Prize fifty years after they

first started writing music (Sheffield 2016). Obviously, because “This is America” has not yet

been around for one whole year, it is a tough challenge to establish whether or not it will be able
to meet that standard of longevity. However, certain clues in the development and reception of

the song so far lend themselves to an educated guess about its relevance to future generations.

An obvious clue was the success of “This is America” at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards where

the song took home awards for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Rap Performance of the

Year, and Best Music Video (Cirisano 2019). Normally, a forgettable song does not go to the

Grammys and come back with four awards to its name.

In addition, “This is America” shares similarities with other historical protest songs that

have shown themselves to stand the test of time. For example, Billie Holiday’s song, “Strange

Fruit,” has a unique and silky melody that people can listen to while also featuring imagery that

compares the fruit on a tree to lynched black bodies swinging from trees in the South. In a Vox

article from 2017, Bridgett Henwood points out that “Strange Fruit” was one of the first

examples of protest music that could stand alone as art instead of only being viewed as

propaganda, and “This is America” falls into the same category due to the aesthetically pleasing

nature of both the music video and the melody of the song (Henwood 2017). “Strange Fruit” was

brought back into the public fascination when Kanye West sampled the song for his own track,

“Blood on the Leaves,” in 2013. The same pattern of events could happen with “This is

America,” in that it could lay dormant beneath the public consciousness until an artist

reintroduces listeners to its message, and then it could see a resurgence. Because it has already

established its importance in a world where black people are oppressed and treated unjustly on a

daily basis, and because this reality has been a constant since the first slaves were brought from

Africa, it could be assumed that the pattern will continue and the song will maintain its relevance

far into the future.

 Noriko Manabe unknowingly provides another reason in support of the projected

longevity of “This is America” in her essay, “The Unending History of Protest Music,” when she

examines the differences between modern protest music and protest music from the 1960s and

70s. A key difference for her is that protest music today is focused more on the “timeliness of the

reaction rather than originality, however defined,” (Manabe 2017). In other words, she believes

that with the popularization of SoundCloud rappers and the use of media like YouTube where

viewers aren’t interested in watching or listening to long, drawn-out content, protest artists rely

on quick and memorable melodies to make a message stick. Originality is sacrificed for the

memorability of the melody so that it can heighten the effectiveness of the lyrics. “This is

America” is, conversely, an example of a modern protest song that is both original and timely.

Everything about the video was unique and creative which combats the stereotype that hip-hop

videos are too focused on drugs, alcohol, and the sexualization of women. The song was also

undoubtedly timely as America finds itself in a reality where police brutality and racial injustice

occur nearly every day. As “This is America” stands out in the midst of what Manabe would call

“modern protest music,” it lends itself to being more memorable than any other protest songs

being created today, showing its potential longevity and its effectiveness as a protest song.

RULE NUMBER FOUR: Protest music must enact change.

Naturally, protest music would not be able to be considered effective if it did not create

some sort of change as a result of its efforts. Luckily, history has shown that protest music can

indeed be effective in one way or another. As female singers from the 1960s like Joan Baez,

Judy Collins, and Malvina Reynolds gained prominence, bourgeoning feminists grasped onto

their lyrics that detailed an independent life for woman, a life where it was okay to be aggressive

and to directly challenge the status of men (Rodnitzky 1999). Then, the generation that came
after those songwriters felt more empowered to write their own songs about the liberation of

women which inspired a new generation, and so on and so forth (Rodnitzky 1999). In this way, it

should be noted that protest music’s greatest accomplishment may be the passing on of new and

radical ideas from generation to generation to help create positive change years after a songwriter

has passed away or after a song has lost some of its relevance. With that said, “This is America”

has not been around for all of those years to determine its influence on the next generation.

If it was tough to prove that “This is America” has met some standard of longevity, it

should be even harder to prove that it has enacted change in America. The change that Childish

Gambino is hoping for is fair and ethical treatment of black people in America, and the status

quo has been opposed to that change since America’s inception and even before that. Although

the ultimate change may lie years ahead in the unforeseeable future, “This is America” has

created change in its own right. If nothing else, the song and video in tandem gave other protest

artists a standard to strive for with their art. It has been established that Gambino was able to pair

creativity and serious criticism in a way that made the pill of systemic American racism easier to

swallow, and that is a tricky balance for people with confrontational ideas to find. Professor

James R. Andrews takes issue with the coercive nature of confrontation because he believes it to

be nondemocratic, to force a group of people to believe in one uniform idea without choice

(Andrews 1969). If the goal is to avoid coercion with an intended message, a good way to ensure

the goal is met is to soften the delivery enough to make it accessible to those who might be

guarded or wary about buying into it. “This is America” followed that structure to a T. It is both

highly confrontational and enjoyable to watch or listen to. Not only that, but “This is America”

worked with listeners on multiple levels to give a different meaning and experience to each

person who listened to it. In a Wired article from 2018, Jason Parham noted that, “‘This is
America’ is successful in the way all art should be: Its meaning wraps around each listener

differently, a beautiful, nebulous showpiece with a thousand implications,” and those thousands

of implications are what make “This is America” accessible to large groups of people while also

calling out those people for allowing racism to persist (Parham 2018). There is so much to enjoy,

unpack, and revel in in “This is America” that its biggest change might just be the potential

multilevel functionality of popular and protestant hip-hop music in the future. Gambino might

have changed the game for the time being, but with time, the song could change the culture as a

whole.

Some have criticized “This is America” for not doing enough to work for the people it

claims to be working for: black people. Rapper Jase Harley claims that Childish Gambino

borrowed from his own protest track, “American Pharaoh,” and used it to further his own success

instead of giving back to the black community. In his own words, “It’s almost like the house

slave heard the chants from the field … And he took that song back with him, and sung it back to

the house. And instead of trying to liberate the people in the field, he got a bigger room in the

house” (Stidhum 2019). Without Childish Gambino’s own thoughts about Harley’s criticism, it is

tough to know whether or not “This is America” is a stolen concept. However, stolen or not,

Gambino’s social pull and influence is much greater than Jase Harley’s. Harley only has a little

over 60 thousand monthly listeners on Spotify as compared to Gambino’s more than 12 million.

It could be that Gambino saw Harley’s song and changed the wording and music a bit, made a

video, and produced it as his own idea, but at least the message got out. Perhaps Jase Harley is a

prophet of social justice and change, but he simply does not have the audience to create as much

of an impact as Childish Gambino does. Gambino had the opportunity to make and sustain

change with his release of “This is America” while Harley is still struggling to make a name for
himself. Judging by the swift response to and consistent engagement with “This is America,” it is

apparent that Gambino’s song has the opportunity to do something with American society that

Jase Harley couldn’t fathom doing with his music, and this is evidence of the song’s

effectiveness as a democratic means of rhetorical criticism.

Protest music is one of the greatest rhetorical tools at the disposal of the human race. It is

no secret that music can communicate much more than words alone. Buffy Sainte-Marie boasted

in an article from American Indian, “A great three-minute protest song can be more effective

than a 400-page textbook: immediate and replicable, portable and efficient, wrapped in music,

easy to understand by ordinary people” (Sainte-Marie 2013). “This is America” is immediate and

replicable, portable and efficient, wrapped in music, and easy to understand, so it is at the very

least effective by Buffy Sainte-Marie’s standards, but it has also been shown to attract a large

audience, deliver a clear message, meet a standard of longevity, and actually create change.

Protest music is effective at creating and sustaining social change, and understanding that it is a

great tool at humanity’s disposal, “This is America” is a shining example of how to use that tool

to enact the creation and sustention of social change. It has shown itself to be an effective means

of democratic communication that will continue to make waves in American discourse for years

to come.
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