Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Atlanta is the home of trap music, arguably the most popular trend in American music in this century. This project is an effort to bring Atlanta’s trap music video culture and aesthetics into conversation with other groundbreaking audio/video artists who employ surrealism to critique the use of violence. Released in 2018, the song and video by Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) entitled “This is America” garnered international attention, debuting at No 1 and earning four Grammy awards. Commentators noted the surreal combination of aloof humor, Afro-Caribbean dance, dream sequences and violence that predominates in trap videos and on Glover’s tv series Atlanta. Four years later, reggaeton musician Rene Peres Joglan (aka Residente) revisits the song with ‘This is Not America,” a new critique taking into account the cumulative responses to the original song with a fresh perspective that calls American identity into question with the colonial status of Puerto Rico. I will connect these two “America” videos to the audio and video installation art of Beatriz Santiago Munoz, whose works deal with gender, militarization and national identity. This entails a comparison of these videos with a recent exhibition by Munoz, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors (2022) which critiques the historical narrative of freedom with the colonial conditions of Puerto Rico. The aesthetic of “dream logic” which alternately incorporates subjective recollection with collective and/or dominant narratives of power, militarization, and conceptions of American identity, will be interrogated as a motif of both American rap music and Caribbean magical realism.