We can’t have nice things. Just over a week after Childish Gambino gifted us with the stunning visual for “This is America”, someone has come along, stripped it of its core meaning and made it awful.
Nicole Arbour, who calls herself a comedian, remixed the track for a ‘Women’s Edit’. The “feminist” remake tackles subjects like beauty standards, the pay gap, rape, and “titties”. While the beauty of the original lay in its subtle references, this pound shop remake toes the line between being reductive and dismally banal.
The strangely soulless remake strips away everything that was good about Childish Gambino’s original. The body contortions harking back to the Jim Crow era, are gone. The viral dance moves distracting from the chaos of violence towards the black community have been swapped for arhythmic twerking, and for some reason, a tapdancing breakdown. His god-like flow is eradicated and replaced with a voice that can only be described as Iggy Azealia adjacent.
There’s a general consensus that the focus of the original was to illustrate just how easily we are distracted from the abhorrent truths of racism, when presented with the spectacle of pop culture. Even though the issues in the ‘Women’s Edit’ are crucial to discuss, by borrowing the aesthetic of “This is America” it feeds into the distraction Childish Gambino was getting across. Right when the conversation was turning a critical eye on black violence and artistry, in comes Arbour to change the narrative to the plight of (mostly white) women.
But most importantly: the video is just not good enough to be worthy of any serious analysis. This also isn’t the first time Nicole Arbour has borrowed from black pop culture for a hamfisted reboot. She went viral with her parody of Dear White People, a film and TV series about the layers of racism on American campuses which she crudely named ‘Dear Fat People’ a body shaming tirade. “If you want to be positive to your body, work out and eat well,” she shouts in the six-minute-long rant.
One wonders what she will remake next. Whatever it is, we know Twitter is having none of it: