On the Value of Donald Glover to the Contemporary American High School Student

Although Donald Glover wasn’t present to personally accept his historic Grammy awards, the impact of his wins is undeniable. As the first hip hop artist to win record- and song-of-the-year, he has shown that hip hop is more than just “popular.” Along with Kendrick Lamar recently winning a Pulitzer for his album “DAMN,” hip hop, as a genre, has officially risen to high art; however, its popularity and social impact is also one of its greatest challenges. Hip hop is ubiquitous: hip hop culture has pervaded American society so deeply that it is often difficult to define exactly what hip hop is anymore. But its popularity should not take away from the ground-breaking music being created by many hip hop artists, especially, in this case, Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino. Yes, Glover’s song is catchy, his video viral (currently sitting at 7.5 million likes), and its impact undeniable. It spawned copycats. However, it’s refreshing to remind my students that good art is good art, even if it’s popular.

I recently started a short unit on the American Dream with my junior English students, a classic unit that I’m sure many can remember from their high school years. We hit a couple classics: “I Hear America Singing,” by Whitman, and “I, Too,” by Langston Hughes. I enjoy teaching both these pieces: they’re powerful treatises by two gifted authors expressing alternate views of what it means to be an American. Whitman’s poem is a Romantic expression of American workers rejoicing in the power of their voices: everyone in America singing in one voice. Hughes points out, of course, that Whitman’s piece left out African-Americans; although minorities were long contributing to the vision of America, they were not given a seat at the table. Hughes points out to Whitman that he, too, sings America.

The natural challenge with teaching these pieces is that students’ eyes naturally glaze over. It’s a pattern they’ve all seen before: the teacher tells them that someone who lived long ago wrote something really good, although it’s hard to understand, and you should now study it for meaning. They’ve all seen this pattern repeated year after year. Good art is from a time long ago, and it’s good because they teacher said so.

So I added “This is America” to the unit — and it changed everything.

First, we analyzed the lyrics, just the lyrics. We treated it as a poem and broke it apart. What is Glover saying in this piece? What does he mean when he says, “This is America”? Is he critiquing my students, as young listeners supporting a genre that popularizes women as objects and material wealth? Is he commenting on the value of the black entertainer as a commodity? What is he saying about the black body? There are so many questions, and I pointed out that each of them could be their own essay. This helped to bring analysis out from the classroom: I hope they see it as a skill that can be applied to any artistic piece, not just old words from old authors.

Second, we broke down the video.

It’s fantastic. We had just finished a short film unit that allowed us to look at the shot composition: the long steady shots, the fade-in’s and fade-out’s, and the use of lighting. My students couldn’t stop commenting and asking questions; they were in it. They were learning.

Importantly, we ended with as many, or more, questions than we began. What is Glover saying about hip hop? What are we to take away from the final scene of him running away from a white mob? Are my students complicit in the treatment of African-American entertainers as commodities, not people?

I informed them that they have the privilege of growing up in the era of a gifted artist; his millions of views don’t take away from the impact of his voice and his art. And they saw it; they all knew the song, but few had really listened. They had seen the video, but they hadn’t really watched it. Yes, we still talked about Whitman and Hughes, but they also know that art is not something that was made long ago. It’s all around us, and the point of analysis is to separate the good from the bad, the deep from the shallow, and the noise from the music.