I think this is legitimately a more powerful statement than the song itself

That's pretty special.

Both the song and video are awesome. Not "amazing," but dude is hitting a new creative peak. I'm excited to see where he goes.

That's the first thing that's made me laugh out loud today, thanks Burt.

I love the song a lot. I love how it goes from this uplifting vocal feel, to that filthy, paranoid bass track. There’s not much there for lyrics, which has never been his strong point anyway. He gets the point across with minimal lines. The production is stellar. And the video brings it all together perrfectly.

i'm not familiar with his stuff much, but this is america is fantastic.

Yeah, that's fair. I think that's right. I still haven't heard the song outside of the video so I don't have fully formed thoughts about it yet.

It's so flat

you hear flat, I hear hypnotic. It tickles the same ganglia as Flying Lotus, Sleep, Lee Perry, Dub Trio, and other repetitive, vaguely dubby, bottom-heavy music.

And I like that in theory -- one of my favorite "alternative" hip hop songs in recent memory is exactly that, Zebra Katz's "Ima Read"-- but it's punctuated by all these garish touches like the acoustic fingerpicking and that awful choir that makes this an ugly mess that resolves in nothing. I really dislike this song.

i'd say it's reasonable this song be lost on a wealthy foreigner

Thanks for the Zebra Katz tip, I dig that song. I do like those flourishes/changes in style in the Gambino song, but I get why you might hate it.

those flourishes/changes are big part of what makes the song work and makes it so great.

The song is just like the video - lots of gimmicky flash with no real meat. It sells the illusion of meaning without actually saying anything.

I really like Childish Gambino. I think Because The Internet and Kauai are wonderful and Awaken My Love! is his greatest album. This song is good, i like it, i appreciate the video well enough, hell im a big big fan of Murai´s work...But the praise is getting..mmm not that much.

I think that while the lyrics aren't especially deep -- even given the allusions to the Charleston massacre, constant suspicion by police, etc -- the overall approach of the song is intended to be more impressionistic, particularly in how it juxtaposes the joy of the church chorus part with the doom of the darker rap part. Again, not super deep, but as a radio-friendly commentary on the polar extremes of the black experience I think it says something. Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" has some of the simplest lyrics ever, and that song has stood the test of time. The message in this one is simple and direct enough that I suspect it will get through to some listeners who aren't about to visit genius.com to dig any deeper.

It just seems like a lot of really basic juxtapositions and evocations that are not new or insightful at all. “Impressionistic” is a convenient way of saying “incoherent.” He just runs through the greatest hits of American black imagery in a way that is totally safe and comforting, trying to look superficially confrontational while ultimately pandering to easy liberal ideology. It’s meaningless. It’s tired. It accomplishes nothing except attracting attention from easily impressed liberals who lavish this kind of eye-rollingly overblown praise on some variation of this same thing seemingly every few months. We get a new “genius,” everyone looks woke, nothing moves, repeat.

I agree.

Totally fair, all true. But just because it'd old hat to us doesn't mean it's not a gateway to someone else. Nuthin' But a G Thang blew my mind when I was 13, you know?

So what? Anything can be insightful or new if you don’t know anything that came before it. Seems like the lowest form of praise we could give to any work of art.