‘Voicing Protest’: Performing Cross-Cultural Revolt in Gambino's ‘This is America’ and Falz's ‘This is Nigeria’

Abstract

The paper addresses the dialectics of protest and revolt in Childish Gambino’s musical video ‘This is America’ and its adapted version in Falz’s musical video ‘This is Nigeria’ within the context of Musical Discourse Analysis. In Gambino’s ‘This is America’, the African-American youths become the centre of attention, while America is depicted as a country of racial inequality. Correspondingly, a revolt thematic is further pursued in Falz’s ‘This is Nigeria’ to reflect a devaluation of youths’ lives, and highlight other local conflicts that impinge on Nigeria’s continuity as a sovereign nation. Surprisingly, among the emerging hip hop voices in America, Donald Mckinley Glover Jr., otherwise known as Childish Gambino, most clearly heralds revolt against a longstanding racism that all too often result in the lives of African-American youths been desperately wasted through the high rate of mass shootings. Although relatively new on the list of Nigerian hip hop, Folarin Falana, whose stage name is Falz, has made a controversial but compelling reinterpretation of Nigerian social crises in ‘This is Nigeria’. His innovative adaptation of Gambino’s ‘This is America’ forcefully brings a formal order out of chaos. Apparently, the visual parallelism in their musical videos engages appropriately with metatheatre to clearly challenge conventional assumptions of youths’ lives in America and Nigeria. Suffice it to state that by embracing the path of resistance, both Gambino and Falz have proven that their individual frustrations are the frustrations of youths in their cross-cultural societies. Chaos, marginality and resentment epitomised in the two musical videos undergird the focus of this paper to explore the signification of American and Nigerian youths’ cross-cultural pursuit of protest, conflict and revolt through meta-theater in ‘This is America’ and ‘This is Nigeria’.