One is immediately struck by the Instagram colours; the palette is completely red-shifted, the contrast muted and the saturation downplayed compared to a conventional toon palette. This kind of Instagram-filter look has become increasingly common in animation over the past five or so years so that it has become easier to let it pass by unnoticed. But the colours here are used to appropriate effect; as mentioned they are red-shifted, literally rose-tinted, they are inspired by filters intended to imitate the effect of a faded Polaroid - the image has been washed over in nostalgia. The reason for this is not that we are meant to be literally viewing the past; the rest of the video makes clear that we are watching a contemporary Donald Glover on a stroll in contemporary America. Rather it reflects the general cultural condition in which we are unable to view even the present except through the lens of the past. We understand and interpret media in relation to past media, and the media we consume is itself increasingly simply recombinations of past media. The washed over image also serves another purpose: to give the animation a sense of timeless inertia, of being trapped in the present, which plays into the theme of the song.
In the lyrics Gambino sings about hoping for the world to change but it just staying the same and the feeling of oppression imposed by the heat:
I know,
Oh, I know you know that pain
I'm hopin' that this world will change
But it just seems the same
(It is not the same)
You can feel it in the streets
On a day like this, the heat
It feels like summer
Later on the song overtly references climate change and this has been pointed to by some as the theme of the song, that it is somehow about climate change, or a warning of it. Yet the statements made are common knowledge and more at risk of being accused of being banal than of shocking us into a new awareness or calling us to action:
Every day gets hotter than the one before
Running out of water, it's about to go down
Go down
Air that kills the bees that we depend upon
Birds were made for singing
Waking up to no sound
No sound
I
don’t read this as simply a reference to climate change, but to the
socio-political climate as well that has become increasingly volatile. Those
who are alert to this age have had for a long time the feeling that they are
being slowly roasted alive. It is the postmodern condition that the real and the virtual become indistinguishable, so that it is not surprising that we can no longer distinguish between the metaphoric and the literal. Such is the case when a technologically induced apocalypse becomes a realisable act. In our present condition we find that we are running precipitously low on whatever cultural life force is necessary to support the system while literal water crises loom threateningly on the peripheries.
Earlier in the song the lyrics have a less ecological bent, which I believe helps to make the case that this is not about climate change specifically:
Seven billion souls that move around the sun
Rolling faster, faster and not a chance to slow down
Slow down
Men who made machines that want what they decide
Parents tryna tell their children please slow down
Slow down
The refrain contains the seemingly contradictory desires for things to change and for people to slow down. The contrasting calls serve to highlight that it is not the superficial change that concerns young people and their culture, but deep structural change that needs to happen. Slowing down is necessary because we are racing toward a miserable outcome, and fail to recognise opportunities to get outside of the system. The desire for change and disappointment is felt acutely in a political climate. While Barack Obama ran on a platform of hope and change, he practiced one that heavily towed the line of the status quo. Coming out of eight years of structural economic failure, America sees the rise of old hatreds, of racism and bigotry of all kinds out in the open, undoing whatever legacy Obama might be thought to have.
The machines that want what they decide is perhaps a reference to the fact that our technology has taken on its own life. It is Baudrillard's claim that human beings ceased to be the reason of things and of things having taken on their own reasons.
Much has been made about the various cameos in the animation, the hip-hop artists who are depicted and what the meaning of their inclusions and portrayals is. I'm not steeped in pop or hip-hop culture, so this discussion has little concern for me. I think it is notable that the hip-hop community is depicted as such, in a neighbourhood, and yet this community has all the falsity and shallowness of every neighbourhood in our world. The community is both a truth and a fiction. Will Smith is shown happily washing his car, seemingly completely contended and absorbed by the mindless pursuit of material accumulation offered by the capitalist frame, while from above, sitting in a tree, is Azaelia Banks, who so removed seems apart from the community and yet offers Gambino a sort of knowing look; she is removed enough from the system to understand how it works, even as she is unable to escape it (and perhaps also paradoxically unable to truly enter it through a sort of alienating exclusion).
Gambino strolls through the neighbourhood, yet he does not wave, smile or exuberantly engage with the other members of the community. Such attitudes belong to a different era. Gambino maintains a distance of quiet scepticism, aurally isolated by his ear buds.
The animation was followed by a "sequel": an advertisement for Adidas.
In the short animation, Gambino continues from the previous animation and enters into his house. There he removes his shoes and puts on a new pair of clearly marked Adidas shoes. He looks directly at the viewer with what one imagines to be a kind of knowing resignation. Nothing changes. He is resigned because he too is confined within the walls of the capitalist frame, even as he strolled through the neighbourhood, seemingly somehow outside of it, it turns out he was inside all along, embedded in the consumption and commodification. Any doubts as to the relation of the first animation to capitalism I feel are evaporated by this follow-up, which feels like a disjointed adjunct if the earlier animation is taken to be some sort of activist ecological cry but which follows effortlessly when it is understood as a long sigh about the present age.
References
Boyz n the Hood (1991). Directed by John Singleton [Film]. Culver City, Calif: Columbia Pictures.
Feels Like Summer (2018). Directed by Donald Glover, Ivan Dixon, and Greg Sharp [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1B9Fk_SgI0 (Accessed: 7 September 2018).
adidas Originals | Donald Glover (2018). Directed by Donald Glover, Animation by Ivan Dixon and Greg Sharp, Written by Fam Rothstein [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgqdHud4-XA (Accessed: 12 October 2018)
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.
Feels Like Summer Lyrics (2018). Available at: https://genius.com/Childish-gambino-feels-like-summer-lyrics (Accessed: 12 October 2018)
