What the song is about
The lyric alternates between two registers that never resolve into each other. One is celebratory and boastful in the ordinary idiom of a hit rap record — money, cars, getting paid. The other is the title phrase, repeated, plus a series of flat observations about guns, police and what happens to Black Americans who are not currently entertaining anyone.
Pitchfork's Stephen Kearse described the song as a representation of "the tightrope of being black", built on "the sharp contrast between jolly, syncretic melodies and menacing trap cadences". That is the mechanism. The song does not tell you the two things are connected; it makes them share a track and lets you notice that the party keeps resuming.
The line most often quoted from it — "this a celly, that's a tool" — carries the argument in miniature. A phone is the thing that films police killings and the thing that turns them into content, and "celly" is also a prison cell, which folds mass incarceration into the same three words. Mashable's Martha Tesema noted the first reading; the second circulates widely and is consistent with the rest of the writing, though Glover has not confirmed it himself.
Guthrie Ramsey, professor of music history at the University of Pennsylvania, put the structural point plainly to Time: "He's talking about the contradictions of trying to get money, the idea of being a black man in America. It comes out of two different sound worlds. Part of the brilliance of the presentation is that you go from this happy major mode of choral singing that we associate with South African choral singing, and then after the first gunshot it moves right into the trap sound."
The two songs inside it
Glover produced it with Ludwig Göransson, and the arrangement is the argument.
It opens with a gospel-style choir and a warm, folk-inflected melody over acoustic guitar. Fifty-three seconds in, a gunshot in the video coincides with the music dropping into dark, pulsing trap. From then on the track keeps flipping between the two modes, and it never blends them. Every return to the bright music is a return to the thing that was playing before the violence, as though the violence had not happened.
The ad-libs are doing something similar. Young Thug, Slim Jxmmi of Rae Sremmurd, BlocBoy JB, 21 Savage and Quavo all appear, and their contributions are largely the shouted affirmations that punctuate a certain kind of rap record — the sound of a good time being had just off-microphone, continuing regardless. Young Thug returns for the outro, which is why he holds a writing credit.
Reading the video
Directed by Hiro Murai, Glover's regular collaborator on Atlanta, and released on YouTube at the same moment Glover performed the song on Saturday Night Live. Murai has cited Mother! and City of God as reference points, and described the video and that season of Atlanta as sharing "a world-weariness … They're both reactions to what's happening in the world."
It is shot to look continuous, in a warehouse, with Glover shirtless in the foreground and chaos accumulating behind him. The elements people ask about most:
The pose. Before the first shooting, Glover contorts into an exaggerated stance closely resembling the Jim Crow caricature — the nineteenth-century minstrel figure that gave the segregation laws their name. He assumes a comic posture and then commits an execution, which is the whole thesis compressed into one second of film.
The guitarist. The first person shot, at fifty-three seconds, is the man who has been accompanying Glover on guitar — the musician Calvin the Second. The video kills the music-making first.
The choir. Later Glover mows down a church choir with an automatic weapon. The scene is widely read as referring to the 2015 Charleston church shooting, and it was the most controversial image in the video.
The red cloth. After each shooting a child appears and holds out a red cloth; Glover lays the weapon on it carefully. The bodies are dragged away without ceremony. The gun is handled with reverence, the victims are not — the contrast is the point, and it is made without a word.
The dancing. Choreographed by Sherrie Silver, the dances are real and current — the South African gwara gwara, the "Shoot" popularised by BlocBoy JB, who is also on the record. Glover and a group of uniformed schoolchildren perform them in the foreground while the background fills with riot. The dancing is not comic relief; it is the mechanism the song is describing, and it works on the viewer in real time.
The phones. Other schoolchildren stand on a catwalk above, filming the chaos rather than intervening — on the "this a celly" line.
The video took about 12.9 million views in its first 24 hours and has since passed 980 million.
Directed by Hiro Murai, released 6 May 2018. Contains depictions of gun violence.
It started as a joke
The least expected fact about the most analysed music video of the decade is where it began. Glover told GQ:
To be completely honest, "This is America" — that was all we had was that line. It started as a Drake diss, to be honest, as like a funny way of doing it. But then I was like, this s—t sounds kind of hard though. So I was like, let me play with it.
Glover had a largely one-sided feud with Drake dating to 2014, which he has since played down as bravado that came with the job. The phrase "this is America" survived; the diss did not.
This is a useful corrective to the way the song is usually discussed. It is routinely described as though it were designed backwards from a thesis, every frame planned as symbol. The account from the person who made it is that a throwaway line sounded good, and the meaning was built afterwards.
The plagiarism claim
Shortly after release, listeners pointed out similarities between "This Is America" and "American Pharaoh" by the rapper Jase Harley — CBS News noted that the tracks "have a similar sound, and share similar themes in the lyrics."
Harley's position changed over time. He initially said he felt his song had influenced Gambino's and took no issue with it. After Glover did not acknowledge him at the Grammys, Harley was publicly critical. Glover's manager, Fam Rothstein, denied any plagiarism. No legal finding was made either way, and the page leaves it there rather than picking a side.
What it won, and why
It became the 31st song ever to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 — Glover's first number one and first top ten — and also topped the charts in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, reaching number six in the UK.
At the 61st Grammy Awards it won all four categories it was nominated in: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Rap/Sung Performance and Best Music Video. That made Glover the first hip-hop artist to win Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and "This Is America" the first rap song to take either. He did not attend.
The BBC's arts editor Will Gompertz called it "a powerful and poignant allegorical portrait of 21st Century America, which warrants a place among the canonical depictions of the USA from Grant Wood's American Gothic to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks". Billboard's critics ranked the video tenth among the greatest of the 21st century, and it won Best Cinematography in a Music Video at Camerimage.
It is worth ending on the thing the song predicts about itself. A record about how spectacle absorbs outrage was received as a spectacle — parsed frame by frame, turned into explainer videos and thinkpieces within days, and then largely absorbed. The song is not naive about that. The last image is Glover running.