Childish Gambino - This is America

The day was May 6th, 2018 (although, since I was in Japan, it might have been May 7th for me). Out of nowhere, singer Childish Gambino released a new song on YouTube that took the United States and a big chunk of the Western world by storm. To give you an idea, the song received 13 million views in 24 hours. It will probably reach one billion views this year.

The song is "This is America" and it's one of the most powerful and important songs of the 21st century so far.

But first, you may not be familiar with this Childish Gambino guy. Hopefully, tough, you have heard of Donald Glover. Well, they're the same person. And that person is one of the most creative and talented artists/entertainers in the United States today. He's an actor, screenwriter, director, stand-up comedian, and singer (performing under the stage name Childish Gambino as you have figured out). I'm not even going to try to tell you more about him, just check his Wikipedia page. The list of awards he has received in each of these fields, and at only 42 years old as I'm typing these lines, is beyond impressive and has its own Wikipedia entry.

And, so, on May 6th, 2018, this showed up on YouTube:

It instantly became a cultural phenomenon, and eight years later, every time I listen to it, I'm taken over by its power.

As I hope some of the people reading this are my students, and as I don't expect Japanese people in their 20s to understand much about what the song and the video – both are quite inseparable from each other – are about, let me try to help you understand.

Well. It's in the title. "This is America," that the song and the video depict. More precisely, they address the situation and the lives of Black people in a country that was founded on their exploitation and the violence imposed on them. "This is America," a country where not much has changed in this regard. "This is America," a country that needs this violence and this oppression to sustain itself, in many ways.

A lot has been said and written about the song in the past eight years.
I think these two videos and this news article can help you understand it better.