Black America: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Childish Gambino’s “This is America”

Abstract

A song can manifest itself as a critical instrument in the vast socio-political atmosphere. Often times a song conceals its real meaning within layers of linguistic elements and through visual communication. Upon the release of Childish Gambino’s This is America (2018), the music video has been assumed widely assumed to contain semiotic elements that criticize the injustice politics of race in America. To dig deeper into this assertion, we use Machin’s Lyrics Analysis (2010) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar approach (2006) to analyze the illustrated semiotic elements. Both frameworks are two Multimodal Discourse Analysis approaches that explore interdisciplinary analysis in the discourse-oriented research. This article finds that Gambino does question the practice of black discrimination through gun and police violence in present America by utilizing distant words and excessive gestures in his visual communication as a diversion. They are purposefully placed to gain a profound observation from the audience, and thus able to spark a conversation regarding the issue in a greater scale. Furthermore, it is found that This is America applies comical aspects in the visual elements as a layering device. Through humorous semiotic elements, Gambino is discovered to highlight the commodification of black art in his music video.

Black Struggles in I Can’t Breathe by H.E.R.: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

“…The results demonstrated that I Can't Breathe is an anti-racist discourse that challenges racist people in non-violent ways. In line with previous studies by Acosta (2018), Rastas &Seye (2019), andMargaretha &Panjaitan (2020), this study found that the song speaks up about the issue of racism from the perspective of black people. The ideological structures of the song depict racism towards black people by defining the social gap between the two races; the white race as the dominant group is represented as violent and ignorant, while the black race is the victim that has to fight against this issue through social movements.…”

“…The study found that black artists need to put a lot of effort to speak up about racism, but their music videos depict the normal, daily lives of black people in Finland, with the hope that white people can see that black people are no different than them. In addition, Acosta (2018) and Margaretha & Panjaitan (2020) studied a more recent song This is America by Childish Gambino using multimodal discourse analysis. Acosta (2018) argued that This is America focuses on the issue of gun control and African-American stereotypes by using Halliday's systemic functional linguistics to analyze the song lyrics and Machin's visual semiotics to analyze the music video.…”

“…Acosta (2018) argued that This is America focuses on the issue of gun control and African-American stereotypes by using Halliday's systemic functional linguistics to analyze the song lyrics and Machin's visual semiotics to analyze the music video. On the other hand, Margaretha & Panjaitan (2020), using Manchin's adaptation of critical discourse analysis and Kress & Leeuwen's visual grammar analysis approach, argued that the song brings up the issue of black commodification.…”

“…Among the previous studies by Mathew (2018), Williams (2020), Rastas & Seye (2019), Margaretha &Panjaitan (2020), andAcosta (2018), only one study by Williams (2020), related to the issue of black racism in a song to the Black Lives Matter movement. However, there is still a lack of explanation on to what extent the song relates to the movement.…”

Face Maintenance Rituals and Communication Strategies Used in Puja Astawa’s YouTube Videos

“…As part of discourse, there are some approaches that can be utilized to analyse utterances found in YouTube interaction, such as Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) which is widely used to analyse texts, including spoken and written text, for their underlying meanings (Margaretha, et al, 2020). However, concerning that three levels of communication in YouTube interaction typically involves people from different social and cultural background, interactional sociolinguistics approach to discourse analysis is considered to be one of the most effective approaches to analyse discourse interaction in YouTube.…”