Donald Glover aka. Childish Gambino has revealed there’s a juicy backstory behind how one of his most acclaimed tracks, ‘This Is America’, came to be.

Released in 2018, ‘This Is America’ is one of those songs in a league of its own. Praised for its unflinching confrontation of modern American issues including ongoing systemic racism, mass shootings and gun violence, it was accompanied by a bleak and powerful music video, undoubtedly one of the best of all time.

The song won four Grammy Awards including Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Music Video, making Gambino the first hip-hop artist (and ‘This Is America’ the first rap song) ever to win those first two categories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY&ab_channel=ChildishGambinoVEVO

For a song with so much power, it’s pretty crazy to think that it could have had such trivial origins. But as it turns out, ‘This Is America’ wasn’t always the song it is today. Speaking in a recent interview with GQ, Glover revealed the track started as a bit of a joke and only had one line, but when he realised its potential, he began to take it more seriously.

“I had the idea three years before,” Glover said, musing: “Time is the oven that makes something special.”

“The idea for the song started as a joke…‘This is America’ — all we had was that line,” Glover described. “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. So I was like, let me play with it.”

I can't believe changing audio can alter the whole experience of the iconic video: "This is America" by @donaldglover pic.twitter.com/aKNZgvtc3w

— Taka Shirasu (@taka_shirasu) October 21, 2022

Glover then described how he told director Hiro Murai about the idea, who was quickly keen to be involved. Talking about the conceptualisation process behind the video, Glover revealed he and Murai studied Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video “for a long time”, trying to work out what made the video so iconic.

“How do you make people care about anything anymore?” Glover reflected, rare insight into his mindset at the time of writing the track. ”There’s just so much shit.” In answer to his own question, he says: “you have to have a moment in real-time, which was SNL” – the song debuted on the famed late-night comedy show.

“To me, culture is just compression of information, so all of it needs to just be compressed into this moment. So what was happening needed to feel like it could only be happening right now.”

“We shot it on film – that was deliberate. We were like: two takes…It needed to feel like a moment, because I feel like the internet kind of robs moments.” Elsewhere, he reveals it was “interesting” that it worked: “We were like, it probably wasn’t going to work.”

“Culture is the compression of information.” –@donaldglover on This Is America

— Greg Finch (@Finchmeister) April 4, 2023

It’s a captivating interview, during which Glover also hilariously dubbs the song “‘We Are The World’ – but for trap” (‘This Is America’ features backing vocals from Young Thug, Slim Jxmmi of Rae Sremmurd, BlocBoy JB, Quavo of Migos and 21 Savage).

Watch the full thing below.