"This is America" and the Hegemony of Important Art

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Donald Glover is awesome. He’s brilliant, talented, down-to-earth: a prolific polymath who can apparently do everything from comedy to poignant social commentary to serious acting (or at least as “serious” as is required by a Star Wars movie, and a canon fan-fiction [can-fiction?] Star Wars movie at that) without any of it seeming forced or calculated. And he’s one of two cultural figures (along with Lin-Manuel Miranda) who makes me, personally, feel the way that Virginia Woolf felt after reading Proust for the first time (though I’d argue that she ultimately surpassed him) - or the way that Phoebe felt after hearing Ross’s music: so impressed by the other’s talent and virtuosity that my own creative ideas seem worthless in comparison. And yet at the same time, he is also incredibly inspiring, so that when I do summon the energy to actually create something, it is almost always by pretending I’m him (or LMM.)

Finally, he offers much-needed proof (as does LMM) that greatness doesn’t have to be antithetical to goodness, that you can be a creative genius without having to be an abusive asshole or even a “temperamental eccentric” like Kanye West. (Though I still love Kanye.)

Plus as we all know, he's incredibly handsome.

All that said, there has definitely a tendency lately for coverage of DG to veer into fawning, celebrity-worship territory, which worries me no matter how worthy the object. He’s the male Beyonce; our Justin Bieber circa 2010. The New Yorker profile on him from February read almost like hagiography (brilliantly satirized by this parody) and the praise has not let up since. We’re currently in the middle of a Don Glover “bubble” - a period of overspeculation which is inevitably going to lead to a crash. Just wait - pretty soon there will be a whole slew of “Actually, Donald Glover is Bad” articles. [Maybe they’ve started already. This tweet might be the first drop in a rainstorm.] And as long as these aren’t the result of a heartbreaking #MeToo, I expect the backlash will be an overcorrection, will go too far in the direction of maligning Glover. So it goes.

But nowhere is the current pattern of reverential awe more apparent than in the response to his most recent release, “This is America.” It has received near-universal praise, at least within the progressive internet bubble that I frequent. And to my knowledge Fox News (and by extension, President Trump) has not gotten its hands on it yet, though I’m sure that will make for some great entertainment.

Ask this guy what it's like to be hated, then loved, then hated again
for reasons that no one quite understands.

Now, it’s not that I disliked “This is America” by any means. And I fully recognize that there are aspects of it which speak more powerfully to a black audience than a white one and were intended to. I do think, though, that the video’s message is not nearly as original or groundbreaking as it is generally taken to be. My (admittedly reductive) interpretation of the video’s message is essentially: American culture tends to be distracted by dancing and pop culture instead of paying attention to serious issues like police brutality, mass shootings, and racism. We react to each tragedy when it happens with “thoughts and prayers,” but then move on so quickly to the “next thing” that we never actually address root causes of the problem. We are perpetually distracted by aesthetics, by entertainment, by superficial pleasures.

He’s not wrong. But it’s the oldest criticism of American culture in the book, going back at least to Adorno and the Frankfurt School, who decried the “culture industry” for keeping people complacent, willing to accept their lives as alienated workers and consumers, blind to the forces that control their lives. Or we can go all the way back to the Roman idea of “bread and circus.” What is “This is America” saying that is not just a 2018 update of the claim that people are kept down by the spectacles of popular entertainment? “Open your eyes, man” from a long-haired hippie has become a stylish activist shouting, “Get woke!” The metaphor has not even changed.

And then people have theorized that our reaction to “This is America” is itself supposed to prove this point, that it is all so meta. Ostensibly, we focus all of our attention on the dancing in the foreground that we miss (or ignore) the violence, destruction, and tragedy in the background.

But that has not been the actual reaction to the video. (Okay - it has been a little bit.) But largely it’s been the opposite. Instead of meme-ing “This is America” the way we did with “Hotline Bling” (perhaps because there’s not all that much else you can do with “Hotline Bling” and so turning it into a series of memes is actually enriching it) - we have instead been obsessed with decoding and interpreting the images and signs present in the video and the song. The white horse is a Biblical allusion; the shocking moment where Glover shoots the choir a reference to the Charleston church massacre. Even his pants in the first scene have been analyzed and imbued with meaning.

There’s nothing wrong with applying this level of analysis to the video - and the English major inside of me is thrilled to see it - but it does give the lie to the message of the video, or at least the universality of that message. Americans are not all distracted by superficial spectacles. In fact, I’d argue that we have become hyper-political, inclined to make everything about social issues. We’ve overlearned the lessons of critical theory and lost sight of aesthetics - exalted Karl Marx and forgotten Oscar Wilde.

We spend so much time and energy searching for details in the background that we forget that we can also just watch Childish Gambino dance.

* 

White people who like hip-hop have always defended it to other white people by saying it is “socially conscious.” (Or by reframing it as “a kind of poetry.”) It has never been something that you can defend on purely aesthetic terms; it has always been taken for granted that hip-hop is aesthetically impoverished. But I don’t think that’s true. I listen to hip-hop (including Childish Gambino) primarily because I enjoy it as music - as well as because I find its lyrics interesting and thought-provoking. It’s not any different than the way I listen to, say, The Wonder Years. But there has always been this weird tendency to reduce hip-hop (and black art in general) to its “message” - to its “importance” rather than accepting it on aesthetic terms. (This is why progressive white people love Kendrick Lamar so much: he’s the apotheosis of the “socially conscious” rapper.) 

Good thing Wilde didn't believe stories had to
have morals, because the closest thing The
Picture of Dorian Gray has is "Go ahead, Be a bad
person; it probably won't affect you at all."

And it seems to me that this same inclination has spread to all media. Reading this article last week really opened my eyes to how ubiquitous it has become. Every TV show, every piece of music, every book is now described as being “important” or “crucial.” And as the author points out, this is often nothing more than an advertising technique, a way of getting us to consume the product. (I imagine Adorno, were he alive today, would interpret it similarly.) The effect it has upon the average person (upon me, certainly) is to inspire guilt. We feel compelled to read that book, to watch that TV show. If we do not do so, it’s not that that we are missing out on something enjoyable; it’s that we are being bad people. There’s a moral implication to everything we engage with. If I choose to read a book written by a white man rather than a black woman, I am implicitly being sexist and racist, or at least supporting a system that is. And while I do think it is important for us to recognize the unjust nature of hierarchical systems - and the degree to which things like gender and race do color our perception of any work, so that as a white man I may be more inclined to see a book by Jonathan Safran Foer as “great” and “insightful” than a similar book by a black author (and the fact that I can’t name-drop a prominent black author quite as easily does prove both of these points) - ultimately, don’t think that preying upon people’s guilt is a way to inspire legitimate reflection.

One problem with this is that it’s impossible to read, watch, and listen to all the things that are labelled as “important” or “crucial,” so that you’re left perpetually feeling guilty for not being “up-to-date.” It also leads us to frame engagement with media as a “productive” activity, which appeals to our very American (spiritual descendants of the Puritans that we are) fear of idleness, but also represents the total conquest of leisure by the ethic of “productivity.” (Damn it, I thought we could at least have TV as the last bastion of pure hedonism.)

By watching an “important” TV show, it’s implied, you are working on making yourself the right kind of person: less racist, less sexist, less homophobic. (And the corollary: if you watch the wrong TV shows, you are proving that you’re content to remain the same amount of bigoted that you currently are.) And certainly it’s true that the media we engage with has the potential to change us, but it’s not through osmosis. There is value in empathizing with those who have different experiences than you have had, trying to understand the stories and struggles of others. But that doesn’t necessarily happen just because you assume it’s going to happen. I suspect legitimate transformation can only come when you approach a work with an open mind, rather than deciding beforehand what you are going to “get” from it. If you’ve already decided that watching “This is America” is an act of anti-racism, then you are spared the difficulty of grappling with it for what it is. It’s a bit like believing that reading A Tale of Two Cities will make you smarter and more refined, even if all you do is stare at the words without processing them. What matters is the experience you actually have with the work, and as I’ve written (better) elsewhere, there are a multitude of different ways to engage the same piece.

Way too many old stories hinge
on the coincidence that two
guys look alike.

I see the same trend manifesting in progressive education circles: the literary canon of “dead white men” replaced not with diversity and inclusion, but with a new canon of “social justice authors.” Don’t assign A Separate Peace; assign The Hate U Give. And there’s definitely an element of “performative wokeness” to it - at least among white teachers, my tribe. It’s a way to make yourself feel like you’re “making a difference” without actually doing anything. Action through inaction.

The right, by the way, is very adept at perceiving this. (We’re all much better at being critical than we are at being constructive, after all. As John Dewey once wrote, concerning a debate in the education world: “The strong point in each argument lies not so much in what it says in its own behalf as in its attacks on the weak places of the opposite theory . . . each theory is strong in its negations rather than its position.” And I think that’s pretty much always true.) They call it “identity politics” or - if the speaker is less up-to-date on the latest lingo - “political correctness.” And while I disagree with their conclusion that we should return to “the way things were before,” the critique itself is spot-on.

We must not be so naive to delude ourselves to think that art will dismantle oppressive systems by itself. As Chidlish Gambino himself reminds us: “You’re not ‘not racist’ because The Wire's in your Netflix queue.” (Which is a great line but also serves to make me annoyed that The Wire isn’t actually on Netflix; I’ve been wanting to watch it for years now.) Watching “important” media as a form of activism is as silly as the idea that buying a certain type of lightbulb or turning the faucet off while you’re brushing your teeth is actually contributing to help the environment. (My inner-conspiracy theorist suspects that those sort of public-service announcements are probably bankrolled by the same corporations that are most responsible for harming the environment in the first place, a clever way of getting us to focus on the specks in our eyes while ignoring the plank in theirs.) It’s symbolic, sure, a way of making a statement about who you are (or want to be, or want to perceived to be, or want to be perceived to want to be) but not a great strategy for actual change.

Maybe we have bought too much into the idea (notably espoused by Andrew Breitbart) that “politics is downstream from culture.” Of course, culture and politics are interrelated, but the relationship is complicated and fraught; it is not a simple causal chain. All art is political, but it is not only political. And consuming the “right” media without actually working (in whatever way it makes sense for you as an individual) to achieve equity is just as problematic as supporting the “right” policies while not embodying them in your personal relationships. (Think of massive hypocrites like Eric Schneiderman.)

And just as there is more to politics than art, there is also more to art than politics. There is still such a thing as an aesthetic stance, a way of looking at art as something to enjoy and appreciate for its own sake. Not everything you do has to be “productive” or “important” or “make you a better person.” Maybe it will do that, but that’s something you won’t actually know until it happens. The truth is we never know exactly how we will experience something until we do - and sometimes not even then. I mean, after all of this, I’m really not even sure what I think of “This is America” or what effect it has had and will have on me. And maybe that’s okay.