This Is America

If you’re the kind of person who reads my blog, then by now you’ve probably seen the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” If you haven’t seen it, watch now. Be warned that it’s upsetting.

Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, is best known as a comedian, a writer, and an actor. He’s an intelligent and creative guy, but he’s wasn’t a likely candidate to make the most political music video of the decade. I’m not going to write about the video, because plenty of other people who know more about it have done so already. Instead, I want to talk about the song itself, which is fascinating in its own right. It was produced by Glover and Ludwig Göransson, who, aside from his work with Childish Gambino, is mostly known for scoring films and TV shows (including Community, which is how he met Glover.)

The structure of a typical rap song goes: intro, verse one, chorus/hook, verse two, chorus/hook, verse three, chorus/hook, outtro. Maybe there’s a breakdown in there somewhere. “This Is America” doesn’t follow this standard template at all. Here’s the structure as visualized in Ableton Live:

In my visualization, the intro and outtro are yellow, the choruses are green, the verses are blue, and the choral interludes (the happy parts) are orange. The phrases are all four bars long, but the higher-level groupings are weird and asymmetrical. For example, the first chorus is twice as long as the second one, while the first verse is half as long as the second one.

Like many current rap songs, it’s not clear what the tempo of “This Is America” might be. Ableton guesses it to be 120 bpm, and that’s probably what the DAW session tempo is, but based on the placement of the snare backbeats, there’s also a strong case for 60 bpm. You could say that the happy parts are doubletime, or that the dark parts are halftime. I’ll go with 120 bpm throughout for the sake of simplicity.

The song begins with a 24 bar intro, which is very long for a rap song. The intro has a cheerful Afropop feel, with a capella choral harmonies that are joined after eight bars by fingerpicked acoustic guitar. The chord progression is a sunny I – I – V – IV in F major.  The “yeah yeah yeah” vocals are in triplets against the straight sixteenths in the guitar, a classic African polyrhythm. After 16 bars, the trap beat sneaks in underneath. The lead vocal here (“We just want to party”) is noticeably out of tune with the choral part. In the age of Auto-Tune, that may have been a deliberate choice.

At measure 25, where you expect the first verse, Glover instead goes straight to the hook. The mood shifts abruptly, with a terrifying bassline replacing the acoustic guitar. (In the video, this is the moment where Glover shoots the guy.) The drum machine beat is a complex and fragmented trap pattern, comprised mostly of empty space. There’s sampled African hand percussion on top. The bass here is an unbroken caterpillar of growling sound. It’s so low and detuned that it’s hard to make out what the pitches are, but my guess is that the bassline goes back and forth between E-flat and E, implying E-flat Phrygian mode. (Trap producers love Phrygian mode.) This is as harmonically distant from F major as it’s possible to get.

At verse one, a high-pitched synth string part enters. It’s playing B-flat detuned almost down to A, which clashes strongly with the bassline. The effect reminds me of a horror movie score. In the second half of verse two, the bassline gets rhythmically displaced, shifted later by a beat. It still makes musical sense, but it feels off-kilter. I would bet that Göransson was moving a clip in Ableton arrange view and accidentally dropped it on the wrong gridline, but then he liked the effect and kept it that way. In the last happy part, the bass comes in playing in F major, but it’s still aggressively detuned, which weakens the feeling of a key center. At 3:11, there’s a remarkable drum fill, a kick roll descending smoothly in pitch across an entire octave. This leads into the ending section, a stripped-down version of the beat with that horror-movie string part. This is the part of the video where Glover is running from the mob with a terrified expression.

I put the acapella into Melodyne so I could look at the vocal melody more closely. Here’s a line from the first chorus:

The line “This is America” has a clear melodic arch, starting on E with “this”, rising up to A-flat on “is,” falling to G on “Ameri-“, and landing on the A below with “-ca.” The other three phrases begin in more or less the same way, but they go up slightly at the end instead of falling. It feels like “This is America” is a confident, declarative statement, while the other three phrases are more like questions.

Here’s a line from verse two:

The melodic contour here is pretty obvious. The first two phrases are in a sing-song cadence, falling in pitch across an approximate tritone. “I got the plug in Oaxaca” is like a question, jumping back and forth between E and G-flat. “They gonna find you like Waka” is like an answer, falling from G-flat down to E (though the last word is whispered and doesn’t have a definite pitch.)

In all of this discussion, I’ve been talking solely about Donald Glover’s vocal, but he’s only the most prominent voice among many. It’s not uncommon in a rap song to have someone ad-libbing in the background, but on “This Is America” there are five people doing it: Young Thug, Slim Jxmmi, BlocBoy JB, 21 Savage, and Quavo. (Young Thug is also the one singing at the end.) The rap sections are almost choral in places, which might be a deliberate echo of the literal choral parts elsewhere.

If you want a more technical look at the production, this video reconstructs the beats and bassline in Ableton Live:

The instrumental is full of abrupt gaps, which are extremely harsh without the vocals (and still pretty harsh with them.) As in the video, there are strong contrasts here: the warmth and joy of the choral voices, acoustic guitar and African percussion, arrayed against the cold and brutal synths and drum machine and the icy slabs of digital silence. Glover and the other rappers are somewhere in between–their voices have warmth and humor to them, but they use them in short, gunfire-like bursts.

I’ve heard some people say that while they admire the video, they dislike the song on its own. I can understand that. I think it’s a remarkable piece of music, and there are aspects of it that are there to please your ears, but in its entirety it’s discomforting, deliberately clashing with itself. Much like America!

As a service to other musicologists and remixers, here are the acapella and the instrumental, enjoy.

See also my turntablist remix.