Long-AF: Mondo In America

JT
JT
Sep 3, 2018 · 19 min read

The ‘This Is America’ Take You Didn’t Know You Needed. Happy Labor Day.

We Need To Talk About ‘Mondo’ Real Quick

Season 1 of Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Who Is America?” just wrapped up, and I have thoughts. Thoughts, baby. T👏🏾H👏🏾O👏🏾U👏🏾G👏🏾H👏🏾T👏🏾S👏🏾 (LIKE: HOW IS EVERYONE NOT IMPEACHED & RECALLED? EVERYDAMNONE?!)

This piece is long enough, so I won’t get into too many more here, except to say I’m kind of shocked how few folks are talking about its mondo influence, and the lineage of OG reality-TV predecessors that the work seems drawn from.

I don’t think he’s the only creative invoking the genre right now either, which is the subject of this long-AF read.

So…

What is “mondo?”

Den of Geek is the safest, most succinct place to go to begin to define “mondo” films as a genre. I nearly puked (no bullshit) trying to adequately define and source this. So, y’know…you’re welcome:

“‘Mondo’ is, aptly, Italian for ‘world’. It is widely used these days to describe all sorts of outside-the-norm cinema. Anything which can be described as ‘wild’, ‘shocking’, ‘exploitation’ or ‘taboo’ often falls under its umbrella. (…) Mondo film was not originally designed to be a catch-all term for ‘weird and wild’ flicks. It is, in fact, a sub-genre of the wider exploitation film, but one that has effectively become the father. In its early days, mondo was a form of documentary (often called shockumentary) which heavily featured sex and death, although increasingly this leaned towards death.”

Mark Goodall, author of “Sweet and Savage: The World Through the Mondo Film Lens” gives a longer explanation. Goodall calls these films perversely political, and traces their origin past “Mondo Cane”, one of the best known films of the genre (made in 1962) to more…problematic (AF) beginnings.

“Films like Africa Speaks (Walter Futter, 1930), Goona Goona (Armand Denis and Andre Roosevelt, 1932), Karamoja (William B. Treutle, 1954) and Elwood Price’s Mau Mau (1954) provided Western audiences with a feast of ethnographic spectacle.

And when Goodall says spectacle he means spectacle:

“The techniques used in Mau Mau (originally an account of anti-colonial ‘terrorist’ uprising in Kenya), for example, of combining field material with studio-staged sequences to increase the sex and violence quota was widespread….Pornography and ethnology share a discourse of domination over the subject who is presented as a primitive subservient.”

In other words, the first mondo films were altogether beyond anything I can find words to describe. They were racist, dripping in (scripted) sex, and clearly produced for a white, imperial, colonial, Anglo-AF gaze.

These racist propaganda pictures helped crystallize wholesale lies about nonwhite people throughout the world while building the case for white supremacy globally. What’s more, they were presented as fact by people who were in the business of making meaning and translating the world to the world. People who anchored the evening news helped give these incredibly troubling “documentaries” credibility.

All of this is important context for where — I think — Childish Gambino is taking us in “This Is America.”

Making Music “Mondo”

I think — Donald won’t tell us if I’m right — ’This Is America’ has a predecessor.

It’s…“This Is America” (also released as “Jabberwalk”), which is a 1977 “mondo” film or “shockumentary” by a Dutch dude named Romano Vanderbes. Romano released a second “This Is America” in 1980, “This Is America, Part 2”. Then a third one called “America Exposed” in 1990. These VHS tapes are hard AF to find. In fact, even Amazon.com, the deepest black hole of a one-stop shop ever known, requires a full $150 for one of two used copies of this film. A poster of the film goes for whole $60 a pop.

Even in 2018, the deeper, darker recesses of the Internet are insufficient locations to find this bizarre trilogy. But, lo, I found over three hours of something from the second and third films. And calling it a mindfuck hardly begins to explain what the fuck is going on here.

Vanderbes’ “This Is America” trilogy consistently tips its hat to Americana. A rock rendition of America the Beautiful accompanies every trailer. The Statue of Liberty and the US flag are plastered everywhere in the promotional vignettes.

Meanwhile, here in the present, Gambino won’t comment or read our hot takes, but he has suggested that he meant to provide a 4th of July bop. That feels like a good enough clue that this particular mondo influence — and all its affection for U.S. patriotism — put us on the right track.

One scene from Vanderbes’s take on America seems particularly referential as we read Childish Gambino’s namesake work.

[READ: I really do implore you not to watch this “trilogy”. There’s a reason I didn’t link to it. You don’t need to do it. So I’ll give you a “spoiler alert” but, really, why? Why would you do this to yourself? I can’t be sure why I did…so if you do, go on. *Drake shrug* You do, however, as in Childish Gambino’s piece, deserve a trigger warning. So, here it is: TRIGGER WARNING for brutalization of Black bodies.]

Norman Rose, or the “voice of God”, narrates the film, which functions as a sort of Encyclopedia Britannica of American debauchery and hedonism (love it or leave it) for a, presumably, global audience. It’s pretty heavy-handed on creative license. So, for example, the “re-enactment” of a ritualistic set of wealthy necromancers — girl, yes 😓 — gathered in a cemetery comes with fog and long, adoring glances for dramatic effect.

But in one of the final scenes of the film, Rose’s booming PBS-meets-National Geographic tone translates an otherwise chaotic track.

One of the most striking features about the whole piece is how inarticulate any of the obviously (hopefully?) fake native soundtrack is. Whether in the midst of describing Americans’ particularly confounding love affair with guns — and, oh, how deep they dive into our unnatural affection for firearms — our penchant for panhandling, or the sale of sex, there are only a cacophony of voices, yells, screams, or barely discernible spurts of dialogue throughout the whole film, leaving Rose’s narration to truly serve as the voice of God.

In a particular segment of one film, Rose’s voice explains that poor communities across the U.S. are flooded with guns and violence, but!, he notes almost triumphantly, there are “good people” who are forming — wait for it–neighborhood watch groups to counter the rise of violence in these urban corners of America.

In this clip (which couldn’t possibly be anything other than fiction in its rendering) a melaninless woman is accosted by a gang of unruly men of color in her apartment complex. They are, apparently, attempting to sexually assault her. “Thankfully”, another group of young men are watching via surveillance camera and are able to intervene, but not without a fight. The men who are supposed to represent the neighborhood watch engage these ne’er-well-doers and go so far as to catapult one of the men off a multi-story building to his death.

While the scene holds on his inert body on the sidewalk, the “voice of God” re-enters to call this death an “accident.” He seems to cast it as a necessary evil.

“Most of America’s largest cities record a frightening murder rate, counted officially in multiples of thousands annually. Unofficially, the rates may be much higher. As in many cases, such as the one here, deaths are recorded as an accident. A simple casualty in the crossfire of urban war.”

And immediately, the opening scene of Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ — and Calvin the II’s uncanny resemblance to Trayvon Martin’s dad — begin to make perfect sense.

Recall, 17-year-old Trayvon was murdered in cold blood by George Zimmerman who anointed himself a neighborhood watchman. The press repeatedly accepted Zimmerman’s flimsy claim to the title, and in doing so, allowed Zimmerman to get away with the illusion that he had some “right” to violence and some “right” to assert the community as his territory to defend and protect. Never mind the fact that Trayvon’s dad, and Trayvon by extension, also had that right.

If Calvin the Second is indeed a proxy for Trayvon Martin’s dad, Gambino seems to be rewiring the narrative. The guitarist isn’t simply a guitarist at play, but he is Black Boy Joy and Black Men Smile and Black expression in public space personified.

And he is an act of revenge.

The music seems to be the weapon — and if that’s so, this commentary absolutely is not local or domestic, but, like all mondo works: global.

Music is the weapon

Fela Kuti

Gambino has been compared to a lot of tropes and figures, but the likeness I want to invest all my money in is Fela Kuti.

Fela is regarded as the penultimate Afrobeat artist. It’s virtually impossible to talk about Afrobeat without talking about Fela. And this music is a critical component of pan-African resistance through art.

Born in Nigeria, Fela Kuti was arrested over 200 times, and he was strongly, strongly opposed to creating simply for the sake of consumerism or to appease global white audiences. The Guardian recounts Paul McCartney’s cavalier AF attempt to compel a few radio-friendly hits out of Fela, or at least give his blessing for McCartney to riff off of this truly African sound on his own. Fela, basically, told him, Girl, bye.

Fela intentionally wrote in Pidgin English — basically, our AAVE — so that he could reach a critical mass.

What feels even more right about this possible link is the regard Fela had for himself compared to how we regard Childish Gambino. Fela, reportedly, called himself ‘Abami Edo’, or the strange, or weird one. Meanwhile, we, the people of the Internet, have not missed an opportunity to acknowledge how unique Donald really is. (Just Twitter-search it.)

Fela’s late 1980s “Beast of No Nation” and cover art, and his late 1970s record, “Zombie,” are the works I really feel find resonance in “This Is America.”

Let’s start with “Zombie,” which is the whole shit. It’s Fela’s commentary on the soldiers and law enforcement bodies who seemed to mindlessly execute the will and brutality of the state with little regard for human life. *looks straight to camera*

Look:

Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go (Zombie)

Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop (Zombie)

Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn (Zombie)

Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think (Zombie)

Zombie, by Fela Kuti

While there are stories about how Fela and James Brown had creative beef, or how he low-key (high-key?) played the mess out of Motown, Fela wasn’t simply out here spinning hits. He wasn’t benignly making music. To be sure, no one on the continent was. (Shout out to “Mama Africa” a.k.a. Miriam Makeba, and shout out to the heroes lifted up in Amandla! A Revolution In Four Part Harmony.)

“Zombie” wasn’t just a song. “Zombie” got Fela beaten, his compound, The Kalakuta Republic, raided by a thousand soldiers, and got his elderly mom thrown from an upstairs window. His mother died from her injuries.

All this — and Fela still dared to drop “Beast of No Nation.”

Talk about mondo. This violence wasn’t simply a heightened experience projected upon a people, it was real-ass life.

Like the atmosphere of Gambino’s “This Is America”, the cover art for “Beast of No Nation” is chaotic. But most importantly, it projects global uprising against an “Axis of Repression”, as the artist, Ghariokwu Lemi, calls them. Then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and then-PM P.W. Botha of apartheid South Africa are most prominently depicted as beasts with horns and fangs. Mobutu Sese Seko is one of the smaller beasts featured on the cover. According to Bob White, author of Rumba Rules, the then-Congolese president was fond of saying, “Happy are those who sing and dance.” So sing and dance — and resist — Fela and his contemporaries did.

Lemi says he made these artistic choices because, “[O]n the global scene they [Thatcher, Reagan, and Botha] were responsible for the state of affairs of the world. At that point in time, they represented the axis of repression as they supported and helped to prop up the apartheid regime in South Africa and its beastly human policies.”

Fela’s record inspired a book by the same name, written by Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala, and the book inspired the film, which stars Idris Elba as a truly fucked up commander (a Zombie, if you will) alongside Abraham Attah who plays child soldier Agu in a rootless civil war.

If you haven’t seen the film, hooboy… it requires therapy and a friend by the end.

Still from “Beast of No Nation

But this is really important.

Because if Childish Gambino really is invoking Fela and “Zombie” and “Beast of No Nation”, he isn’t just talking about violence framed within an “inner-city” context or even in the context of America’s gun problem.

This rises to the level of an anthem for the Global South.

He’s talking about a global project of first world complicity in turning our children into zombies, destabilizing our local economies and capacity for upward mobility, and then reframing the narrative as if we were all an insurmountable problem because of our migration patterns, our refugee status, or our dependence on aid backed by both foreign governments and philanthropic foundations. All this without ever once minding the state’s role in manufacturing desperation, localized violence or the myth of “Black-on-Black crime” wherever it exists in the world (read: please feel free to fill in the blank with a religious affiliation or alternate complexion). Such violence is recast as inconsequential or unavoidable or symptomatic of our nature — the very “nature” “they” tried to codify as fact in encyclopedic entries at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries — while the systemic violence leveled against our respective communities is disregarded, in the same fashion as the “accidental” death that Vanderbes uses in his This Is America to explain the unquenchable, fact-of-life violence in the ghettos of America.

Donald Glover seems to be taking “urban violence” and “civil war” — terms we freely use to write off phenomena that would otherwise be classified as mass murder or genocide — and recasting them as acts of global terror, committed with the full consent and, even, bidding of the State.

The dances, the enjoyment of the music, the schoolyard play, then, aren’t necessarily a distraction. Instead, they can become a vehicle for returning joy to our babies in spite of Empire. From Agu, a fictional child representative of every child soldier carrying heat in an anonymous U.S. ‘hood or in the streets of an anonymous African nation in Beasts of No Nation, to Trayvon Martin to Tamir Rice to Aiyana Jones to Jordan Davis to Claudia Patricia Gómez to the babies in Syria calmly articulating the terror thrust upon them to the First Nations children disappearing with little outrage to babies being kidnapped and drugged by a gestapo deportation force — the carefree youth our babies deserve is restored, globally. The dances can also rise to the level of code. The Gwara Gwara, then, isn’t just a dance. The Blocboy JB kick step isn’t just a dance. It’s a wink, a nod, and an “I got you, because I know these fools is wildin’ — Aye! AH! Oh don’t do it…” across every Diaspora. The music becomes an inextinguishable terror to Empire and a balm to the oppressed.

So you can’t possibly imagine how amped it makes me to view Nigerian artist (and lawyer) Falz’s nod back to Childish Gambino with “This Is Nigeria.”

Fam. I. AM. LOSING-IT{DOT}COM.

Still from “This Is Nigeria”

Now, here’s why I get even more geeked out about the possibility of this transnational read.

Seeing each other through torture

While many have focused on the stance Gambino takes when he assassinates the music man, I’ll take this opportunity to focus on the hooding technique employed to execute him. (AND, DAMMIT DONALD, THIS IS WHY WE NEEDED A TRIGGER WARNING.) According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, “hooding” — and I’m going to assume, point blank execution while hooding — rises to the level of torture. And such acts of torture, in a U.S. context, are most notoriously associated with Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba.

The hooded musician is being rendered as a terrorist. And Glover, I’d argue, represents not only Jim Crow, but an imperial and colonial force that is threatened by that music man’s subversion.

In 2003, under the Bush Administration, The Atlantic, dug into “The Dark Art of Interrogation” at the height of the so-called War on Terror. I won’t attempt to litigate any of that Administration’s war crimes here, except to say, “Oh, look. He paints and passes Werther’s Originals at memorial services, therefore he is…absolved of all war crimes nationally and internationally? Cool cool cool…” However, the piece aptly describes the disorientation hooding creates. It’s a sort of mobile solitary confinement. One could be anywhere in the world, at any time of day, at any time of year. Which makes the warehouse feel that much more appropriate a setting for this work. We don’t quite know where we are in this video. We don’t know when we are. The cars seem old but the deadly shooting of a church choir seem new.

But that disorientation can also function in an affirmative way, allowing us the room to see each other across borders that have been arbitrarily imposed, and giving us permission to fully feel one another’s shared struggle and will to dismantle Empire.

Once we lift up the role of music and dance as a longstanding tradition of resistance, we should reconsider our investment in reads that attempt to make the dancing and celebratory themes of “This Is America” trite.

Here’s why.

Afrobeat was/is a unifying thread from the continent of Africa to the U.S. as a direct result of Fela Kuti and James Brown’s love/hate relationship with one another as fans and foes. The similarities in their sound became a source of creative competition, even as the music itself functioned as a soundtrack for global Black pride and affirmation in the face of Empire. Their rivalry is unpacked in Make It Funky: Fela Kuti, James Brown and the Invention of Afrobeat, and in interviews with folks like Bootsy Collins, who once played bass for James Brown and Funkadelic (and very clearly influenced Glover’s “Awaken, My Love!”)

But the U.S. and Nigeria and South Africa and Ghana and elsewhere across the African continent aren’t the only places where this funk-soul sound create an anchor and space for expression and joy and resistance in the midst of disorientation throughout the Diaspora.

South America and the Caribbean are loaded with this performative resistance, hennnnny! *Nae-naes in Tiffany*

In Cuba — where Gitmo is — Cuban son was certainly influencing the likes of Fela Kuti and James Brown, whether they realized it or not. This blogger-with-the-keen-ear points out the similarity between Cuban legend Beny Moré’sBabarabatiri” and Fela Kuti’s “Shakara”, produced years apart, but from the same sonic cloth.

Babarabatiri by Beny Moré
Shakara by Fela Kuti

Cuban son and rumba were already influencing artists in the Congo as early as the 1930s and 40s. In fact, one scholar notes that Afro-Cuban music wasn’t simply imported to the Belgian Congo, but further indigenized across sub-Saharan Africa, making it “an important marker of Congolese national identity.

To me, this is so crazily cool. I am continually in awe of the persistence of our Africanness, our collective memory, and the miracle of our survival despite global repression, but this deliberate exchange we’ve continuously engaged in from the Middle Passage forward is just rejuvenating.

In her lecture, “Dance Practices of Latin America: Salsa as Social Resistance” Ana Maria Alvarez at UCLA says Cuban son music is at the root of what we recognize as salsa. She talks about the global impact of salsa, and clarifies that she doesn’t simply mean Tito Puente is bumping in the Motherland. Alvarez says, “In Senegal, people are singing their own Senegalese salsa.”

Richard Shain writes about the global impact of Afro-Cuban music on the African continent in the book, Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters. Shain’s focus is Senegambian Afro-Cuban singer Laba Sosseh who worked outside of established channels to forge a space for creative exchange across the Atlantic. But in the notes to the text, the authors demonstrate just how often major Afro-Latinx acts were traveling to and within the African continent:

“The Aragón Orchestra toured Africa in 1971, 1972, 1973, 1977 and 1979, including Benin, Cabo, Verde, Congo Brazzaville, Egypt, Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Zaire (Marrero 2001). Similarly, U.S.-based salsa bands, including Johnny Pacheco, the Orchestra Broadway, and Fania All Stars (with Celia Cruz) toured Africa during the 1960s and 1970s to massive and devoted audiences.”

And who is the undisputed “Queen of Salsa” but Celia Cruz?

Sak pase: The roots of our liberation

Not only was Cruz born in Cuba, but it’s her cover of “Guantanamera” — and her performance of the same on Wyclef Jean’s 1997 album “The Carnival” — that throws us right back in the midst of “This Is America.”

Wyclef Jean, unofficial official Ambassador of Haiti — the shining capital of Black Diasporic resistance to slavery — hosted Celia Cruz on his 1997 album “The Carnival.” In the video for “Guantanamera”, one of the tracks from the record, Celia Cruz opens the song in her usual iconic way. But it’s not just this fusion of Cuban and Haitian sauce that matters — it’s the visual demonstration that music is the weapon.

Wyclef raps: “Yo, I wrote this in Haiti, overlooking Cuba,” and just like that we’re whisked away into a Carnaval parade that could be in Haiti, Cuba, or Labor Day weekend in New York City. Wyclef casts himself as the guitar-playing love interest to Guantanamera. In the video, a mysterious, double guitar-case-carrying music man, literally, uses the music as a weapon. The cases become firearms that lay suppressing fire while Wyclef and Guantanamera escape into the beautiful, joyous chaos of the Carnaval celebration. Once again, instead of the celebration being a mindless distraction, it actually becomes a shield and literal escape route — read it as a literal or financial escape, if you will. “Get your money, Black man.”

Here’s the other intriguing thing about Wyclef Jean serving as a sort of Haitian Ambassador in this pan-African resistance read of “This Is America.”

The first single release from Jean’s 2017 album, “Carnival III: The Fall and Rise of a Refugee” was called “Fela Kuti”. Wyclef told XXL Magazine:

“”I decided to name it Fela Kuti because for me, I feel like we be thinking of [Bob] Marley, we give a lot of people from our past props, so when the kids hear Fela Kuti, I really want them to Google it,’ Jean tells XXL. ‘Fela Kuti studied jazz in England. Wyclef studied jazz at Vailsburg High School. Fela Kuti then went back to his country and tried to help his country by running for president. Wyclef, you know, did the same thing. Then, Fela, through all his obstacles and all that, his music is what pillared him right back to the top. He understood the strongest way to help politically was to make sure the music was bangin.’ So for me, the same way kids can have songs called ‘Wyclef Jean’ who are influenced by me, I want kids to know who Fela is and what he means.’”

The “Fela Kuti” track even feels a little referential after a few listens alongside “This Is America”.

Where Childish Gambino starts “We just want to party…”, I can imagine a rather solid mashup where Wyclef answers with his own hook, “She came to party…”

But wait. There’s more.

The album also features Young Thug. Yes. The same Jeffery providing ad libs on the “This Is America” track, is part of Wyclef’s “The Carnival III.” But he’s not just a feature. He’s a Stan. Not simply for Wyclef, but for Haiti.

You know. The same Haiti that is home to the best-known uprising of enslaved people, but then they had to pay an “independence debt” to France and, hooooboy, don’t it put you in a place when you think about the 2010 earthquake and NGOs and climate change and mango mussolini running his damn mouth and all the damn things… *looks directly to camera again*

Young Thug put out a mixtape with a track named after Wyclef Jean. In an interview with NPR, Jean describes how young Jeffery did everything he could to find the artist:

“He just was trying to track me down. He drove everybody crazy when we got together — he was like, ‘Look Wyclef — my tattoo says Haiti, my daughter’s named Haiti, my project’s named Haiti. Man, I just wanna be from Haiti — I love you so much and everything you do.’ So we just naturally connected.”

Young Thug (BET)

Bruh.

This little brother, who has come of age in a generation that’s redefining rap for a younger crowd — much to the discombobulation of we, the eldest Millennials and youngest Gen X-ers — appears to be very aware of the creative lineage he’s furthering — whether you and I “get it” or not, whether you or I got that from the lyrics or not...

So yes. Yes, America, you owe these young and old conduits of popular culture who are producing a look and sound that appears to be removed from any “conscious” resistance-building, but in fact is resistant by design.

For that reason, I support (the only Donald we acknowledge) Donald’s insistence that he won’t be confirming or denying any theories floating around about this work.

It feels transgressive to even suggest this read because of who may, well…read it.

The reality is, I could simply be auditioning to rewrite the next generation’s theories and musings on the Illuminati. “It gotta be Illuminati if a nigga shine,” right? These words may not mean a thing. These examples could be completely incidental. Hell, I might be Gambino’s publicist. (I’m not, but…I’m just saying, I could be.)

Nevertheless, the read is worth considering. If there’s joy to be gotten from this well, I implore every Diaspora to take it while we can. Wherever we sit, our global uprising is more necessary than it has ever been, and to think that this artist may have employed mondo techniques — a form that has often been used to depict us as savages and to render us as less than human — is absolutely the read I need. So I’m sticking to it.

Read. Rage.

Headlines with catharsis.

JT

Written by

JT

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Read. Rage.

Headlines with catharsis.

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