Being vital or being viral — is it possible to be both?
‘This is America’, the artist, the meme as interpretation, and the age of fleeting resonance
Do you remember what you were doing roughly a month ago? Without resorting to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or anything else contained on your phone? I know for myself time is all out of whack for me, or vast swathes have been completely removed from my conscious mind. Rarely does my memory work photographically or with confident chronological detail. I know things happened. I just don’t quite know all the specifics.
The internet has become an extention, or more likely a reflection, of how memory is approached, constructed and removed from our consciousness. It’s so instantaneous that it barely keeps up with itself. There’s billions of memories coalescing around the internet. The nature of the internet and the online world where pretty much all news and releases appear first is all about what’s happening next. The beast never stops feeding. It has the potential to come across as cheapening the work, or corralling it into the same due that we give a funny reaction gif or some random moment on a reality tv show that trends on instagram or twitter.
That is all to say that do you recall that a month ago Childish Gambino dropped his new song ‘This is America’ and its accompanying video which caused a biblical flood of reactions and hyperbole (pretty much all of it which was earned ’cause goddamn)? Don’t run away just yet! It certainly stuck with me to compel me to write something weeks after the fact. Not that we were lacking in think pieces and breakdowns at the time. Everyone chimed in — retweeting, regramming, posting and commenting reaction videos, videos of reaction videos, podcasts and debates. We get hot takes, cold takes, essays and think pieces — written, audio, and video breakdown. It utterly consumed the internet for a week and then -
It was stored in the limitless archives. Not so much forgotten by the online community but it’s picking apart had been exhausted by them. In the rush to get a take on something out there instantaneously there’s a risk that the piece being taken is being stripped away and suffocated. We don’t want to be left behind, to look like we’re playing catch up with what’s trending, which threatens to make so many great pieces of artistic expression anchored to a moment, instead of being able to transcend that space and time, allowed to float through the cultural landscape, unencumbered by the masses clawing after it.
What happens next?
Stay with me here please, just for a moment. There’s is something to be said about taking a step back from that first response to consider the meaning, the connotations and impact of an artistic piece that crashed into the social media landscape on the level that ‘This Is America’ did a month ago. Take a deep breath on this one, maybe? We might be able to have a better memory when we not just consume but reflect.
How do you really feel about it now?
There is A LOT happening in the video for ‘This Is America’. It’s a scathing evisceration of the mangled world that intersects between pop culture, social media, police violence, what and who America is right now, being black, and being successful and black. It offers up the existential duality that lies at the strange heart of America with every contortion Childish Gambino makes with his face and body. Everyone’s decided to dissect it down to a molecular level so there’s no need to rehash what Glover and his regular director on Atlanta Hiro Murai accomplished. It’s here, here, here, here, and over here. But what I will say is that it pulls you in with the density of a neutron star collapsing that when Mr. Gambino pauses to smoke a blunt it’s been not even three minutes.
From this relatively long view, it looks like an analogy of the relentless forward progression of internet and the instant gratification of this consumption culture. We often lose sight of the depth something can have because so much of what we have is flimsy, all surface and merely something to occupy ourselves until we tire of it for something else. The music video and the song are almost a challenge to the state of the online culture — you want to be taken seriously but how can you be when you’re stuck having to promote yourself and retweet a meme while another act of brutality occurs on the sidebar of the screen?
Guess how my first contact with the song and the video came about? A meme popped up on my Instagram feed. And then another. And then another, before I discovered the song and video entire. The moment the song exploded, the memes and gifs and image grabs were all anyone could post and repost. It was EVERYWHERE. A song of such searing intensity, a multi-layered and brilliantly crafted film to compliment it being reduced into these easy to digest packages. Something that was instantly recognised as profound and meaningful distorted into gross and broad attachments, yet without it I may have strayed from it even longer. It’s like the internet’s version of a preview clip. Is the meaning of the song diluted or lessened? Listening to the song and watching the video it’s easy to see how it would be considered a banger, straight fire, 100, that it would be memed into oblivion as what could be seen as the new way we interpret and come to terms with artistic works. Especially ones with the cultural zeitgeist that ‘This Is America’ so brutally tore apart and put back together. Childish would have known as well. However, acknowledging it doesn’t mean that one has to be beholden to it.
The artist offers up their manifestation of creativity in whatever form that may be. And to the world it is exposed. Churned up and dismembered to a granular level — especially if it is received with blinding positivity. Of course the artist has little to no power in how their work is perceived, consumed and interpreted. But how can they reconcile that idea — knowing as they must of how the work exists in the online environment that most everyone resides in a permanent state?
Maybe this particular way of online consumption, including all the memes has become a cultural barometer? A system designed to sift through the things that last barely longer than photons that are entangled, to give us the ones that seep into the bedrock of cultural relevance. A sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Donald Glover is operating on a plane that is giving birth profound, compelling and abstract works — from his series Atlanta to ‘This Is America’, his previous album ‘Awaken, My Love’ and even his silky and singular portrayal of Lando Calrissian in Solo. All of these works — yes even Lando — show Glover’s prescient ability to tap into the vast, overlapping array of various cultural elements and conveying them in ways that seem like they’ve been beamed in from a level of reality that’s just close enough to reek of our own.
The incessant march of time and the internet’s perpetual ingesting and regurgitation of old and new, warping, transforming what an artist bleeds out for the masses to see hasn’t dimmed the power of Childish Gambino’s track, even if it’s online footprint has lessened somewhat. But that’s what comes with the territory. It becomes an unintentional game of oneupmanship, necessitated by the rabid culture of the now, of the extreme. Artists are exploited participants in this though they aren’t entirely unaware. May has been a big month for Glover. In addition to dropping the track and video, Atlanta’s second season finished it’s run, he hosted Saturday Night Live, and of course had Solo opening. This wasn’t random, he knew what he was doing, he knew what he was tapping into. But would the audience tap back? Instead of reducing it to something memeable which must surely be deflating at times for an artist.
Coincidentally Kanye West’s new album also dropped, almost like an afterthought after his bizarre behaviour online. The tweets (my god the tweets). The praise for Trump. The fake song release. I’m probably missing a few thousand more moments that got lost in the shuffle. In a lot of ways, it’s the most highly volatile example of what ‘This Is America’ seems to have alluded to. Loud, brash, inventive, mercurial, innovative, confounding, threatening, forgetful, enraged and dynamic. The desperate desire to remain relevant in a world that wants to shake you off the first chance it gets — at least in the online realm. A running stream of contradictions that perfectly encapsulate what the world is currently, whether we want to put a filter over it or not.
And yes I do realise in unfolding this argument I’ve ended up brooking my interpretation of the song and video as well. It seems there are no exits from this building.
