Childish Gambino's "This Is America" Was Originally Intended To Be a Drake Diss Track
Learn about the hit single’s evolution.
What has become one of Childish Gambino‘s biggest songs — “This Is America” — was originally supposed to be a diss track against Drake. The “3005” singer revealed the news in a recent interview with GQ.
“I had that idea three years before,” Glover told the publication about the 2018 single. “The idea for the song started as a joke, to be completely honest. ‘This is America,’ that was all we had — that line. And 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.”
He then elaborated on the track’s process, and how it evolved into what it is today. “We studied [Michael Jackson's] ‘Thriller‘ for a long time,” he said about the music video, which was a collaboration with filmmaker Hiro Murai. “I was like, how do you make people care anything anymore? There’s just so much shit. Well, you have to have a moment in real-time, which was SNL.”
He continued, “It needed to feel like a moment. I feel like the internet kind of robs moments. That was really the work that we put in. It’s interesting that it worked. We were like, it probably wasn’t gonna work. You have to do a lot of things the first time, but ‘Thriller’ was a big, important part.”
Revisit the music video below.
