"A day after pulling double-duty as both the host and musical guest on 'Saturday Night Live,' actor-writer-comedian-musician Donald Glover was garnering attention on Sunday for another reason."

Garnering.

Sorry. I had to get that out of the way.

Now: here's the video:



I watched it. Tell me what you think. My subjective impression is unavoidably affected by the Ta-Nehesi Coates essay — the subject of the previous post — which attacks Kanye West for wanting a kind of freedom Coates calls "white freedom." Presumably, Coates would approve of Glover. But how dare I, a white person, presume?

Here are the lyrics to "This Is America." I went to Urban Dictionary because I wanted to look up "celly" (cellphone?) and "hunid bands" (??) and I saw that that "caught slippin" is the featured word on the front page. That expression is in the song (repeatedly): "This is America/Don't catch you slippin' up." It was defined in '04 as "to be caught off guard, in a very bad way."

Actually, that lyrics page is full of annotations. No need to resort to Urban Dictionary. About "celly":

This line references the 18 March 2018 shooting of Stephon Clark, an African-American who was killed in Sacramento, California by police who presumed that he was responsible for local area robberies and was armed – only to be found with his iPhone....

"Chevy Chase, one of [Donald] Glover’s co-stars [in 'Community'], often tried to disrupt his scenes and made racial cracks between takes. ('People think you’re funnier because you’re black.')"

"[Dan Harmon, the show’s creator] said, 'Chevy was the first to realize how immensely gifted Donald was, and the way he expressed his jealousy was to try to throw Donald off. I remember apologizing to Donald after a particularly rough night of Chevy’s non-P.C. verbiage, and Donald said, "I don’t even worry about it."' Glover told me, 'I just saw Chevy as fighting time—a true artist has to be O.K. with his reign being over. I can’t help him if he’s thrashing in the water. But I know there’s a human in there somewhere—he’s almost too human.' (Chase said, 'I am saddened to hear that Donald perceived me in that light.'*) Glover quit in the fifth season, too bored to do it anymore."

From "Donald Glover Can’t Save You/The creator of 'Atlanta' wants TV to tell hard truths. Is the audience ready?" in The New Yorker.

I zeroed in on the Chevy Chase business (because we were just talking about his road rage problem), but there's also a man-in-shorts angle:

[Glover's character on "Atlanta"]... wasn’t a great manager or a great part-time boyfriend or, for that matter, a particularly promising human being. Curiously boyish in shorts and a backpack, he wasn’t even active, the minimal standard for television characters. He didn’t seem to do or want anything. He just watched and flinched and got yelled at to grow up....

Comedy didn’t allow him to express the sadness he’d begun to feel—about race, about fame, about simply being human—so he turned to music.... [As Childish Gambino, he] offered earnest tracks about being bullied as a child and about suicidal thoughts—a counterpoint to rap’s hypermasculine mainstream. Fam Udeorji told me, “People thought Donald was a whiny dude who wasn’t into his blackness. And the shorts he wore onstage were so short they made my friends uncomfortable.” 

Here's a picture of him in shorts.
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* The light was "human... almost too human." How sad is that?