The dancing reminded me a lot of the dance fight in Legion this season, but that’s probably as much a function of how unfamiliar I am with dance styles as anything.
The video is pretty overt about that message. Gambino’s dancing switching from viral move to viral move, the happy schoolchildren, the exhortations to “make your money black man” and mindless partying, the callouts to Gucci, social media, and the self-medicating with drugs juxtaposed with gun violence, rioting, BLM scenes and suicide. It’s a condemnation of the distractions black Americans give themselves while chaos erupts around them.
I’m curious why “black” appears in your last sentence. I wouldn’t put it there.
You could maybe generalize it to all Americans if the video were different, but going by the imagery and slang used I’d be hard-pressed to agree that Gambino means for it to apply to anyone but black America.
My take on that was a little different: In the other two instances of gun-violence, he (“America”) was perpetrating the violence on other black people. No one takes any action against him. The guns were then venerated and cared for, the cops come in, and the people around (all black) get oppressed while he turns his back on it and walks off.
But the third verse has him holding nothing, simply looking like he’s holding a weapon, and everyone freaks out and starts screaming/running.
I took that as a commentary on the shooting of unarmed black men holding nothing or something utterly non-gunlike. I’m sure him looking exhausted and then lighting up a joint right afterwards has some meaning too.
Yeah, pretty good for me. I relish any chance I get to talk about politics with my kids as a willing audience. An hour spent jointly researching the term “Jim Crow” and the history of institutionalized racism was honestly the high point of an already pleasant weekend. Parenting is a long-term activity; it’s not often that you get a positive indication that your kid is going to end up being a better human being than you are.
@Nesrie might be amused that I cited her definition of white privilege in the later dinnertime conversation.
You may be right, but my personal guess is that he wasn’t aiming his video at any particular population – maybe Americans in general, but maybe not aiming at all.
@Tin_Wisdom: I appreciate your reading of that scene.
I am intrigued and intrigued by your dinner conversations! I feel like my family would go two sentences in before the fireworks began.
Well, as much as I would like to project the idea of our family dinners being Kennedy-esque discussions about the future of humanity… honestly, it is rare that we even eat at the table nowadays.
It actually worked! There’s the hooded guy on horseback trotting through the background at one point, I had watched the video twice and totally didn’t see this either time. (It was covered in the analysis videos)
I’ve rethought my position on this video and while I don’t like it artistically, I love that it’s provoking discussion. That’s what art should really do, that’s its power. This achieved that immensely.
By the way my “rapper won a pultizer” comment was more about a lot of hip art/rap artists being influenced by that decision, propelling videos like this in a “finally real respect for our music” way. It’s good if they are well done, which a lot of people seem to think about this one, so good for that environment. I guess I was calling this out as not deserving it’s fame, but that’s my singular opinion.
I kind of want to picture your family dinners like that SNL (it was them right) of Adele’s song. Please tell me you and yours randomly break out in song. ;-)
My 2 cents:
When you use something like dance to exorcice your demons, is kind of a happy/sad dance. The sandness can be see trough your dance, is still obvious why you dance, because something hurt you inside.
I think thats the dance we see in this video.
Such sandness.
It’s actually kind of an interesting parallel because the dancers in that scene were literally infected. The Atlantic article above talks about mirror neurons and how kinesthetic empathy transforms us from observers to participants. This, of course, immediately made me think of the other Legion set piece this season looking at how physical ticks and unhealthy ideas can be transmitted from person to person, community to community.
I thought a lot about why they run there and not the times before. I believe they run because Gambinos character gets shot when he actually doesn’t have a gun. We just don’t see the deadly shot. Just before that moment you see them dancing and there is a police car and death on a pale horse rides past them. Also red has been used as the color for death throughout the video. The guitar player sits on a red chair. The choir wears red and stands before a red wall. The cloth the guns are wrapped in are red. After everyone has scattered he lights up using a red lighter, seemingly “at peace”. He then proceeds to dance on a red car that is in pretty bad shape surrounded by cars propably symbolising the many black people shot and killed during routine traffic stops. The guitar player is also back, strongly suggesting that Gambino died too. SZA sitting there represents the statue of liberty, indicating that the values she represents have died too. I based the last bit on posts of her from the shoot referencing herself as lady liberty and the fact her hair is done up to imitate a crown.
The analysis reminds me of Pink Floyd’s the Wall. Articles have been written on its symbolism and debated by fans. Roger Waters would never talk about it, but then decades later he and the cartoonist did a voice over for the dvd. So much of it was “we just thought it looked cool.” I think this song and video are both great, but I am really struggling with how much symbolism it really has versus what people think it has.
That’s a really cool interpretation.
There are just too many known tropes and call backs in the video to think that most aren’t legitimate.
Sure, but you certainly CAN start inserting all sorts of weird and convoluted theories into the mix based on tiny, probably unintentional clues.
For example, while talking about the Gambino video, my daughter passed on one Internet theory about the guy on the horse. I think everyone agrees it’s supposed to be the personification of Death, but this one theory took it a bit further:
The King James translation of Revelations 6:8 says “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” The commentator cited by my daughter took that quote and pointed to the cop car that is behind the horse when it first appears. The police are following the horseman, so Police == Hell.
A neat idea, but probably not intentional. The cops aren’t actually following the white horse, from the glimpse you see of them they’re mostly pointed in the other direction… and it’s not even clear that they’re police at all. Really, all you have is a cop cruiser with its lights flashing.