Tag Archives: Remixes

Episode 98: America’s Arrested Development Featuring Childish Gambino(‘s music video “This is America”)



Fams. It took 98 episodes, but we finally know how to address you now, fams. You are fams. Plain and simple. Isn’t that nice? Anyway, this week Henry and John kicks thing off by dusting off the time-honored discussion of what to do about creators remixing their creations into new creations altogether. On a scale of George Lucas’s infamous Star Wars edits to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Bladerunner final cut, where does the remix of Arrested Development’s 4th season fall? Who knows? Not Henry or John. They haven’t watched it yet. We then transition to one of the biggest music video moments in the past decade. I’ll be straight with you, music videos don’t typically get a lot of moments. Songs do, because they persist beyond video format, but Childish Gambino’s “This is America” absolutely needs to be experienced as a music video. Henry watches the video for the first time and we get his absolute gut reactions while John walks us through what exactly it is they watched. Everyone seems to be breaking this music video down into symbols and so the boys join in, cracking open those delicious authorial choices to get at the juicy, sweet meaning within. America’s in a tricky spot, and Donald Glover has captured the insanity in a nice, four minute and four second video. Props to the Dong Lover. Also, someone let me know if there’s some interference in the episode. There seemed to be some type of anomalous signal in the edit, but I couldn’t find anything. Oh well, it’s probably nothing.