Childish Gambino reveals his song ‘This is America’ originally started as a Drake diss track

Childish Gambino reveals his song ‘This is America’ originally started as a Drake diss track. 

“But then I was like, this shit sounds kind of hard.” The accompanying music video gave the song even more weight. Directed by Hiro Murai, the video is one long continuous shot that follows Glover around as he shoots a man in the head with a pistol and mows down a gospel choir with an AR, all while keeping a blithe attitude toward the whole thing. Glover is backed up by a horde of young dancers hitting viral moves like Gwara Gwara and Shoot, popularized by BlocBoy JB.

Glover told GQ that he and Murai studied Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as a reference for his own music video. Check it out below.

The song was dropped at the same time Glover was hosting Saturday Night Live. Glover thought the song would make a bigger impact if they “created a moment in real-time.”

“I was like ‘How do you make people care about anything anymore?’ There’s so much shit,” Glover said. “Well, you have to have a moment in real-time, which was SNL. Also the feeling of what was happening at the time. It formed because of all the uprisings that were happening.”

In a new interview with GQ, Glover sat down in an orange grove to unpack the stories behind some of his most iconic characters. In addition to the story behind his actual origins in music – which involved “love at first sight” with renowned composer Ludwig Göransson, who worked on Community and every one of Glover’s records as Childish Gambino – the multi-hyphenate talked through the hectic process he went through to make his biggest hit.

“Time is the oven that makes something special,” Glover said, noting that he and Göransson “did a lot of work” to make the track work. “I had that idea like three years before,” he continued, “and I told Hiro [Murai, a frequent collaborator of Glover’s who directed the song’s equally iconic music video] the idea [and] he was like, ‘I want to do that.’ He was like, ‘I really want to do that.’ And I was like, ‘Cool.’ And I had the song. I swear to God, the idea for the song started as a joke – to be completely honest, [the line] ‘this is America’, that was all we had.”

Glover went on to reveal that the song “started as a Drake diss”, implying that the central lyric was originally a jab at the fellow rapper’s stomping grounds in Canada. “[It] was a funny way of like doing [a Drake diss],” he explained, “but then I was like, ‘This shit sounds kind of hard, though.’ So I was like, ‘Let me play with it.’ So we just had that for a long time, I told Hiro the idea, and he was like, ‘Oh, let’s do it.’”