How Donald Glover's "This is America" video utilizes sensory psychology to make a profound statement
"This is America" is a music video released last Saturday by Donald Glover, AKA Childish Gambino. ...there's a lot to unpack about it. Other sources have covered to death this video, which felt to me less like a typical viral music video and more like an interpretive dance piece. With my background in psychology, I had a very specific reaction to it. It's the kind of video you have to watch at least a few times. Fortunately, that's made easy on the viewer since it's just as catchy and full of jaunty, fun dance moves as it is horrifying Kubrickian scenes representing everything from biblical signs of the apocalypse to the Rodney King beatings. The brilliance of the video comes from the fact that Gambino and his backup dancers spend most of the video distracting the audience from what's going on behind them, occasionally shocking us with gun violence and abrupt tempo changes. This can best be demonstrated by an experiment I first saw in a psych...