This week Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover: rapper, singer, songwriter, producer, director, etc. released his “This Is America” single with a mind-blowing visual to accompany it. Literally. The video, complete with all sorts of demise and chaos rampant throughout, is one of the most important artistic works of the past decade and is important for one reason. This is about the first sign of the power to which media, celebrity, and their accompanying riches have become enough of a means for wielding credible authority. 

Authority, if not the absolute and undulating command of attention, is what Glover has forced upon us by his art. Much like our celebrity president, he’s used that jawbreaking audacity afforded by his status to ensure we discuss every single little detail. To this day he has not come out with a concise explanation of the video. If he’s smart, he won’t because it’s only the work of brilliant minds to use madness as a tool to achieve what needs to be done. 

In terms of visual culture there are events that are to be remembered, and then there are those to be studied. Rather than delve into the many meanings (or none of all) that could arise from the video, everybody should recall that there are no better indications of a time’s state of mind than the work of its artists. After being told “This Is America,” I’m left wondering, what do our artists say about ours? 

Gambino’s message appears to be one of a typical sort, akin to the archetypal old man warning of the end of the world in all the disaster movies to whom nobody listens to. We dance our way out of tragedies no sooner than we’ve ended up in them. We’re absolutely disconnected and desensitized though our children aren’t, but end up so nonetheless as they upon birth are a part of this system all the same. Much like a warehouse industrial setting, fear resulting from chaos this day, is being manufactured. But never mind all that. 

As a human being present in history’s latest offering of madness, you can’t do anything but applaud the work of Mr. Glover this time around because he’s saying something much “realer” than most. 

With all his genius, Donald Glover might be telling us “Invisible Man,” woman, or child of America whose logic and wishes are often ignored all the same, to “Get Out” of America because the revolution is starting to look mightily televised.

If Donald Glover is that old man in the disaster movies, then we as a public obsessing over Kardashians, jewels, degrees, and our trinkets, are the white girls in a scary movie. Trippin, more often than not, headfirst into a downward spiral of debauchery and decadence. Humanity, as a species with its priorities by no means in check and on its current trajectory appears to be as short-lived as Kanye’s loyalty to anybody but himself.