Don't catch you slippin' up!

The modern world churns, creativity spurts and the culture pops. Memes, dreams and stars blaze and burst. Well, it did before, when I was young. And it does ever more, not that I am ever looking. 

I remember back when back during my Guangzhou days a new teacher from Minnesota came and at his welcome dinner was referencing some Korean song taking the world by storm, and even got up to whoops and cheers and danced that dance. Gangnam Style, at that time, was a sensation. Perhaps before I went to China I vaguely kept up with at least some of the latest froth. At that time in China though, I realised I didn't follow much at all. I had to go home and check out the video for myself and found myself several months too late. Since coming back to New Zealand, with my freedom of Internet again unchained I'm not much more in the know. I still don't know my "smh" from the Sydney Morning Herald. When my little brother talks of memes, or even our younger teachers, I make nothing more than mental notes on very disposable paper.

Now most of it is not worth the mental post-it note I scribble it on. They never stick anyway. Most things come and go. But like every age there are some things that are pretty worth seeing or, in the case I'm about to mention, experiencing. What I'm talking about is This is America. It's a song by Childish Gambino, a singer I only vaguely had heard of, and the song has been around for almost a year. Yet I didn't register then and 10 months and 500 million views from one specific upload alone on YouTube. And it's work of art that I'm disappointed to have missed. It might as well be the Beatles Tomorrow Never Knows, for its time has passed me by.

If you haven't seen This is America, experience it now, preferably with someone else you can talk to about it. And most preferably before you read any further. 

In fact accompanying the YouTube searches for this video, you'll find tonnes of videos of people being filmed watching the music video. The video is such an experience that observing people watching the video is enough to attract millions of views per upload. And with good reason. It's both a visual feast and a smack in the face (or two). I just watched my wife watch it and her responses matched the faces of most when they see the opening. Delight, curiosity and the shock.

The sensualist side of me finds the video compelling just in the visual sense. The choreography alone is enough but the theatricity of the dancing, from the expressiveness of the face, from the cheekiness of his movement when he enters from a sidedoor and scoots past a choir, to his eyeballing of the camera for the duration. This is the foreground though. In the foreground it's mostly pomp and energy and occasional atrocity.

But the song is lathered in symbolism in the details and the background. In fact the more you watch the more you sense that the song is a deliberate inversion. The background is the blurred focus and the foreground is just a distraction. Based on the videos of the people watching the video, most viewers are immediately pulled into unpicking the sense of what they're seeing. Everyone has their own conclusions and the singer doesn't provide any annotation to the song. The details are worth a bit of reading. His unique dressing is a pair of Confederate style pants. So, though the protagonist is acted by a black rapper, his This is America refrain identifies him as an embodiment of the larger American history and modern day with its historical racist baggage. His actions identify him the same. He can do slaughter with impunity, walking past police cars, because that is America. Police haven't been held responsible for the deaths of complete innocents. (And if you are unaware of a new trend in "stand your ground" laws, pretty much anyone can kill another if they feel threatened, not if they are actually threatened.)  

Lyrically it also leaves you to your own conclusions. There are some themes that are more apparent than others. Don't catch you slippin' up sounds like it talks about the margins of error. For a black man's experience of life in America, it's famously risky to do anything in the presence of the police no matter how benign. And humorous cases of the police being called on black people just being people.  

The closing scene of him running is a bit of an mystery. My only conclusion, if the protagonist is consistent with the earlier parts, is that that America is losing. It's fighting for its survival. In fact it could be lynched. The lyrics though go against that reading. 

You just a black man in this world
You just a barcode, ayy
You just a black man in this world
Drivin' expensive foreigns, ayy
You just a big dawg, yeah
I kenneled him in the backyard
No proper life to a dog
For a big dog

I'm compelled by this song and wish more songs and their videos approached the level of art. But of course they might have been but they might have all passed me by.... smh.