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Blog 8, Jain

The song Then I decided to talk about is “This is America” by a very known artist, Childish Gambino. the song was brought out in 2018. songs purpose is to show that there is a lot of black violence in the United States and it also talks about racial discrimination against African-Americans. In an interview Gambino was asked about his song but he totally ignored the question and didn’t answer it the correct way as to what the purpose of the song really was. Throughout the song Gambino speaks a lot about police brutality, he doesn’t say it straight up but he says it in a way to make people understand what he’s really talking about without really having to say it.  Some listeners listen to this song just for the fun of it and some listen to it because of deep meaning that actually has behind it. I think that Gambino definitely did have his own political purpose to the piece of music but didn’t accept it when he was asked about it. 

A musical characteristic or a musical genre of the piece is Repetition because throughout the song he repeats a lot of the words that he is staying. Some of these phrases are, “This is America,” and “Yeah Yeah.” The song itself has a lot of singing and ends up becoming polyphonic. Polyphony is a style of musical composition which has two or more concurrent but relatively independent melodic lines.


1 Comment

  1. Nice analysis of the importance of repetition, it does help get the listeners attention. I agree with the fact that even though Gambino doesn’t straight up say that the song is about police brutality, his actions and the actions of others and the sounds do lead to that thought.

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