Sophie Poritzky - Prompt 5

This is America and Look What You Made Me Do: Using Aesthetics to Entertain and Educate

Donald Glover, also known as Childish Gambino, is a writer, actor, comedian, and musician. He is especially well-known for his song, “This is America,” a chart-topping description of the racism and brutality faced by the Black community in the United States (Bauer, 2022). Taylor Swift is a commercially successful female singer-songwriter who has also experienced large amounts of scrutiny mainly based upon her gender (Ray, 2022).

In Childish Gambino’s music video for “This is America,” he happily dances in the spotlight while the background gets increasingly hectic, including scenes of crowds of people being chased by the police. The only interruptions to this happy facade come when Gambino suddenly guns down various individuals. 

Taylor Swift’s music video for her song, “Look What You Made Me Do,” includes portrayals of Swift singing and dancing directly to the camera, as well as constant switches between ornate sets, all of which represent different aspects of her background and her more recent attempt to return to the music industry. The song has a specific purpose; it is a retaliation against the industry that cast Swift out and destroyed her reputation.

A significant similarity between these videos is embodied by the presence of two levels of meaning in each narrative. Both videos deploy a similar balance of surface-level aesthetic entertainment and a deeper element of symbolism. In Gambino’s video, his dancing to the seemingly upbeat music distracts from both the somber lyrics and other visual elements in the scene’s background. In Swift’s case, her constant exaggerated movements and the well-adorned sets capture the viewer’s eye instead of the lyrics and the visual clues about her mistreatment by the music industry.

According to Schudson, “as long as a person reads passively, it matters little if the reading matter is Shakespeare or subway graffiti” (1987 p. 531). Schudson’s point holds true in this case, as both of these videos are well-produced and visually pleasing. In order to grasp the full meaning of these videos, however, both Taylor Swift and Childish Gambino require their watchers to become actively involved in the creation of art by engaging in further analysis. As Schudson offers, art is “something that is produced by… critic or interpreter as much as by author” (1987 p. 531). It becomes the audience’s prerogative to decode and develop the meaning of the artists’ works. This serves to lessen the distance between the artists and spectators, who Swift and Gambino have tasked with building their intended message.

In both examples, a portion of the viewers’ meaning-building process also includes intertextuality, which Hall defines as the accumulation of meaning across assorted texts (Hall, 1997, p. 232). The videos have embedded references to what has occurred in the individual artists’ lives, as well as broader struggles experienced by members of their race or gender. One such example is evident in Swift’s video when she is in a bathtub filled with various jewels, as well as a single (and somewhat subtle) one-dollar bill. Just weeks prior to the video’s release, Swift was involved in a sexual assault lawsuit against a man who groped her during a fan meet-and-greet. She sued him for one dollar, as her motivation for the suit stemmed purely from a desire to empower other women to speak out against assaulters, even if the entertainment community was built to shut powerful women down (BBC, 2017). As Lisa Robinson describes in her book “Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls,” there have been innumerable incidents of sexual assault or abuse in the music industry, usually committed by men who are more powerful than the women they target (Robinson, 2020). In her video, Taylor Swift is taking a large step to combat this trend, but this message only becomes accessible when connecting the dollar-bill placement in the aforementioned bathtub to the broader context of Swift’s life. 

Another example of intertextuality is within Gambino’s music video, as he makes a specific political statement about gun control and the treatment of people in minority communities. Gambino shoots people on two occasions during the video as a brief interruption to his upbeat and distracting dancing. After he uses the guns for these horrific acts, someone takes the firearm away from Gambino and wraps it up thoughtfully, while the people who were shot, who are all Black, are dragged away with little care. This mirrors the political atmosphere in the United States, as conservatives are often described as placing a higher value on guns and their right to be used freely, as opposed to the human lives impacted by gun violence (Pengelly, 2022). Moreover, a disproportionately large amount of these victims are members of the Black community (Trotta, 2022). Gambino is only able to successfully convey this meaning if his audience first notices the treatment of the guns, and then takes another step to connect it to the context of the political world.

When Lisa Robinson, an accomplished music journalist, describes her career, she emphasizes the fact that she did not report any of the appalling behavior (such as rock stars taking advantage of young women) that she witnessed firsthand. She knew that if she were to expose anyone, she would lose all access and credibility and thus would not progress in her career (Robinson, 2020). That task was therefore left to individuals such as Taylor Swift and Childish Gambino, who have been able to use their immense followings to educate others on their own struggles as well as those of the community around them. Swift, as a woman, and Gambino, as a member of the Black community, both display clear messages about the struggles of their respective groups inside and outside of the music industry. By doing so, these two prominent musical artists have been able to develop and integrate their important messages into entertainment that will be viewed by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

References:

Bauer, P. (2022). Donald Glover. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved December 2, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Glover 

BBC. (2017, August 15). Taylor Swift Sexual Assault Case: Why is it significant? BBC News. Retrieved December 2, 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-40937429 

Childish Gambino (2018, May 6). This is America [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY

Hall. (1997). The Spectacle of the "Other". In Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 225–249). Sage.

Pengelly, M. (2022, June 6). Nearly half of Republicans think us has to live with mass shootings, poll finds. The Guardian. Retrieved December 2, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/us-mass-shootings-republicans-poll 

Ray, M. (2022). Taylor Swift. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved December 2, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Taylor-Swift 

Robinson, L. (2020). Abuse. In Nobody ever asked me about the girls: Women, music, and fame (pp. 60–78). essay, Henry Holt and Company. 

Schudson, M. (1987). The New Validation of Popular Culture: Sense and Sentimentality in Academia. In Cultural theory and popular culture (pp. 495–503). essay, University of Georgia Press. 

Taylor Swift. (2017, August 27). Look What You Made Me Do [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tmd-ClpJxA

Trotta, D. (2022, May 10). U.S. gun deaths surged 35% in 2020, higher for Black People - CDC. Reuters. Retrieved December 2, 2022, from https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-gun-deaths-surged-35-2020-higher-black-people-cdc-2022-05-10/