Popular Music: Layers of Meaning
Welcome to Module 1. Please watch the following video, and then continue reading below.
We begin the course with “This is America” by Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover, because the track and video not only reference and critique our current social, political, economic, and technological climates, they also reference historical music genres that continue to inform the life and experiences of African Americans living in the United States and North America as a whole. We want you to not only learn the major names and genres in popular music history, but also understand how they came to be, why they matter, and how to use this knowledge to think critically about the music you listen to now.
The video and track of “This is America” have many layers and references, and we will not go into every single one. We will point out a few moments that connect directly to the history of popular music we will be discussing in our course. We encourage you to do more reading on the video if you have time, to better understand the many other ideas presented in the video.
- The video opens with a group (not shown) singing in unison “yeah yeah yeah, go go away”. The music is upbeat, celebratory, and along with the guitar playing (and the clothing of the guitar player), it suggests folk music from West Africa or South Africa. As you will read in your Module 2 materials, although US slave owners actively tried to suppress African cultural practices among their slaves, slaves who came to Cuba from Nigeria were given slightly more leeway, and thus a tiny part of their culture and music was allowed to survive. The lyrics add another layer – while the music is traditional and celebratory, they ask the listener to “go away”. But who is being asked to go away? The viewer? The white people who originally captured African people to turn them into slaves? It’s unclear, but open to interpretation in the context of the video/track.
(1)- Some of Glover’s dance moves and facial expressions reference minstrelsy. Minstrelsy is discussed in your Module 2 materials, and is a significant moment in the history of late 19th and early 20th century popular music as well as black/white relations in America. Your textbook does not present an entirely clear picture of minstrelsy – we will provide more in-depth readings on the topic. Briefly: minstrelsy was a musical theatre-style of performance built on grotesque white racist interpretations of black people and black culture. The genre flourished mainly in the 19th century, but continued to influence early 20th century culture. It was so central to America life in the mid 1800s that the name of one of the characters in minstrel shows, Jim Crow, became a euphemism for all black people. When laws were passed enforcing segregation in the late 19th century, they were actually known as Jim Crow Laws.
(2)
(3)The stance Glover takes when he shoots the guitar player is the most noticeable reference to minstrelsy and Jim Crow.
(4) (5)The inclusion of minstrel-related visual cues feeds directly into Glover’s overall critique of how black people are expected to perform in spite of the ongoing violence and inequality they face in the US. It also underscores how relevant this very old form of racist entertainment continues to be – many people caught the minstrelsy references as soon as the video was released. Clearly they know their history; or perhaps there has not been enough change to warrant forgetting this history.
- The gospel choir is an almost ubiquitous symbol of black cultural and musical communities. On the surface, the inclusion of the choir and their gospel singing suggests joy and the role of these choirs to lift up people spiritually regardless of the pain of their lives. However, in keeping with the overall theme of the video and track, it also suggests stereotypes of black performance, and “safe” black performance (for example, as opposed to hip-hop which can be more challenging). But the lyrics “Grandma told me, black boy get your money” present another layer. These lyrics can be read as the pressure Glover feels to embody stereotypical black performance tropes (Jim Crow, black gospel, or modern roles like rapper or soul singer) to “get his money.” When he guns them down, we can read it at least two ways – as Glover being done with this pressure to perform stereotypes to be successful, but also as a visual reminder of the 2015 Charleston church massacre, where a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans in one of South Carolina’s oldest black churches.
(6)- Glover’s call to “watch me move” draws even more of our attention to the dancing throughout by him and the group of school children. Their moves again reference minstrelsy, but they also reference current dance styles in popular/Youtube culture: the South African Gwara Gwara (note the uniforms), the Roy Purdy dance, and the “Shoot” originated by southern hip-hop artist BlocBoy JB, who can also be heard in some of the responses in the track. The dancing is obviously intended to draw our attention away from the horrors in the background – again, suggesting that entertainment (or specifically black entertainment) is constantly consumed and celebrated while we dismiss or ignore the daily violence and inequality faced by black people in America.
(7)- The penultimate scene with Glover dancing on an old car is a nod to Michael Jackson.
(8)In an epic dance scene, part of his 1991 Black or White video, Jackson smashes windows with racist graffiti, then dances some of his most signature moves on top of a car. The racist graffiti was added digitally after the video was made, to make it more palatable for viewers.
(9)Though they dance in different styles – Glover continuing in the mix of minstrelsy and current popular culture dances, Jackson in his signature Fosse-influenced style, Glover’s visual, like everything else in the video, is not chosen at random. Jackson was arguably the most famous black performer of all time, but also a man destroyed by his own fame and pressure to perform. The other notable time he danced on a car was during the media circus during his 2005 trial. References to Jackson, particularly these two moments, make sense in a video criticising the expectations placed on black performers in America today.
- Finally, the style of rap in “This is America” is intentional as the lyrics and visual cues of the video. Glover raps in trap style, a genre of rap emerging from the Atlanta area, tied directly to the inequality, violence and crime experienced by the black Atlanta community. “Trap” literally refers to the place where a drug deal happens. A few notable trap artists are heard responding to Glover throughout the track, including Young Thug, Quavo (of Migos), and 21 Savage. As Frank Guan of Vulture so eloquently notes, Glover’s track is “a tribute to the cultural dominance of trap music and a reflection on the ludicrous social logic that made the environment from which trap emerges, the logic where money makes the man, and every black man is a criminal.” It’s debatable whether the track is actually trap music, or created in trap style to make a point.
These are just a few of more music-history-related aspects of Glover’s This is America video. There are many more things to look closely at – everything from the pants he wears in the video, to other lyrics, the white horse, etc, – everything has a deeper meaning here. Every visual and lyric in this video and track are carefully chosen – none of this is by accident, though interpretations may vary.
As you move through the course materials, you will begin to see how the development of popular music in America is deeply tied to racial relations, primarily those between black Americans and white Americans. Latino culture plays a large role as well, and near the end of the course we will look more closely at how Indigenous artists, particularly those from Canada, are being heard in popular music culture as well.
While our textbook presents a fairly straightforward recounting of major genres of popular music, including key artists and their development, your online learning materials will ask you to approach music in a more critical light. Using the musical terminology you pick up along the way, we want you to work at viewing popular music through various lenses, considering issues of race, gender, historical context, social, economic, political, and technological contexts. Not every popular music song is heavily layered like This is America. But a more thorough understanding of how to read and interpret popular music may make you both a better critical thinker, and a better consumer.
Further reading on ‘This is America’.
Image sources:
1. Glover, Donald. “This is America.” Youtube video, 04:04. Published May 5, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY
2. Emmett, Dan. Emmit’s Celebrated Negro Melodies. Date unknown. From Sammond, Nicholas. “Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation.” http://scalar.usc.edu/works/birthofanindustry/nineteenth-century-minstrelsy
3. Glover, “This is America.”
4. Riley, E. T. Rice: The Original Jim Crow. Date unknown. Found at: https://www.streetswing.com/histmai2/d2minstrel1.htm.
5. Glover, “This is America.”
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Jackson, Michael. “Black or White.” Youtube video, 11:01. Filmed circa 1991. Published November 14, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTFE8cirkdQ
BLOGGING WEEK ONE:
When notified in your Blackboard Course Tools, follow the instructions to set up your blog. Once you have done this, please submit your URL via the Assignment Submission area in Blackboard. This should be completed by the end of the first Friday of classes (June 29). This step is required for all students in MUS 111, Summer term. Please review the Blogging assignment page and your syllabus for details.