This is America at its best – a rapper, a dancer, an explosion of energy
It is hard to think of a moment in recent popular culture that has been more discussed and deconstructed than rapper Childish Gambino’s music video This Is
America. The film, at once horrifying and stunning, is an allegory for 21st-century America, visceral in its interrogation of gun violence and racial politics.
That was the first many here had heard of Gambino, the alias of 34-yearold Donald Glover, who is one of America’s most prodigious polymaths. Aside from his three albums as Gambino, Glover has also worked widely in US television, recently creating Atlanta, an acclaimed comedy-drama about black life in the city. In film, meanwhile, he played the young Lando Calrissian in May’s Star Wars spin-off Solo. Headlining an otherwise lacklustre weekend at Lovebox festival in London’s Finsbury Park on Saturday night, the question was: would he live up to the hype? Thankfully, he managed it.
Gambino is a feverish presence: emerging before the crowd in a burst of piercing white light, he screeched his first notes on Me and Your Mama, the opening song from 2016’s Awaken, My Love!, with his band swelling around him in an explosion of energy. He remained this breathless for the next hour. Boogieman, a warning about violence towards unarmed black men in America, sounded deceptively uplifting, with Gambino providing demonic comedy-horror cackles to an elastic funk beat. He skipped, tripped, jumped, and spun around the stage. As a dancer, he is fluid; as a rapper, languid, wry and inventive. But it’s the sense of near-madness in him that makes him so captivating to watch.
It is impossible to separate America, and Gambino’s Americanness, from his work, but this audience of impassioned young British devotees still hung on his every word as if they were written for them. At one bracing moment, he told the crowd he thought London was different to the USA – without guns – “but then you came out with the acid”.
Psychedelic disco number Riot was a celebration, the lovelorn Sober was a singalong, and he crooned in perfect falsetto for Prince pastiche Redbone before This Is America inevitably closed the show. It seems Glover executes all he attempts with vim and ingenuity; it is a thrill to imagine what he might try next.
Childish Gambino plays London’s 02 Arena on Nov 4; ticketmaster.co.uk or telephone 0333 3219999