Don't catch you slippin' now. It's the icy warning that reverberates throughout Childish Gambino's internet-breaking, zeitgeist-capturing 2018 single "This Is America," but Donald Glover has revealed that the song actually slipped wayward from its initial genesis as a Drake diss track.
In a new interview with Mark Anthony Green for GQ's latest cover story, Glover — who recently returned as Childish Gambino on the EP that was released alongside Swarm, the new Prime Video series he executive-produced — opened up about his most recent purchase: a farm in Ojai, CA, that he intends to make the headquarters of Gilga, his new "production company/incubator/cultural library." Apparently it grows wonderful tangelos as well.
An accompanying video sees Glover break down his most iconic onscreen roles (Earn in Atlanta, Troy Barnes in Community and the like), which includes rapping shirtless in the "This Is America" video. "Time is the oven that makes something special," he explained, "but we did a lot of work. I had the idea three years before. I told [director] Hiro [Murai] the idea, and he's like, 'I really want to do that.'"
Glover continued, "The idea for the song started as a joke. To be completely honest, 'This is America' — that was all we had was that line. It started as a Drake diss, to be honest, as like a funny way of doing it. But then I was like, this shit sounds kind of hard though. So I was like, let me play with it."
While it may not have been such a poignant political commentary had the line instead been used to emphasize the fact that Drake is Canadian and doesn't understand how America works, it sounds like it would have been funny.
"To me, culture is just compression of information," Glover added of the track, "so what was happening needed to feel like it could only be happening right now."
Given the Ticketmaster price-gouging accusations for tickets to Drake's upcoming North American tour and the long-fabled "Drake curse" still wreaking havoc on the Toronto rapper's sports betting, maybe the cyclical nature of time has brought the diss-track moment back around?
In a new interview with Mark Anthony Green for GQ's latest cover story, Glover — who recently returned as Childish Gambino on the EP that was released alongside Swarm, the new Prime Video series he executive-produced — opened up about his most recent purchase: a farm in Ojai, CA, that he intends to make the headquarters of Gilga, his new "production company/incubator/cultural library." Apparently it grows wonderful tangelos as well.
An accompanying video sees Glover break down his most iconic onscreen roles (Earn in Atlanta, Troy Barnes in Community and the like), which includes rapping shirtless in the "This Is America" video. "Time is the oven that makes something special," he explained, "but we did a lot of work. I had the idea three years before. I told [director] Hiro [Murai] the idea, and he's like, 'I really want to do that.'"
Glover continued, "The idea for the song started as a joke. To be completely honest, 'This is America' — that was all we had was that line. It started as a Drake diss, to be honest, as like a funny way of doing it. But then I was like, this shit sounds kind of hard though. So I was like, let me play with it."
While it may not have been such a poignant political commentary had the line instead been used to emphasize the fact that Drake is Canadian and doesn't understand how America works, it sounds like it would have been funny.
"To me, culture is just compression of information," Glover added of the track, "so what was happening needed to feel like it could only be happening right now."
Given the Ticketmaster price-gouging accusations for tickets to Drake's upcoming North American tour and the long-fabled "Drake curse" still wreaking havoc on the Toronto rapper's sports betting, maybe the cyclical nature of time has brought the diss-track moment back around?
