Feels Like Summer: A Forecast of Animation’s Political and Documentary Function in Music Videos
Childish Gambino - Feels Like Summer (2018).
Childish Gambino’s animated music video “Feels Like Summer” (Childish Gambino, 2018) places many animated representations of hip-hop artists, actors and well-known celebrities in a fictional Atlanta neighbourhood. We see celebrities engaging in various fun summer activities in this fantasy community, including Migos playing basketball, Will Smith washing his car, and J Cole dowsing the hip-hop duo of Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee with a water hose for annoying him with water guns. However, listening closely to the lyrics, it is clear that Gambino is talking about the dangers of climate change, stating “every day gets hotter than the one before,” and that we’re running out of water and killing the bees. With the lyrics cautioning against our harmful actions negatively impacting the climate, the use of animation in this music video allows us to comprehend the complex and interlinked messages of climate change, race and politics that Gambino is conveying. We see evidence of animation’s longstanding political function, as well as engagements with the medium’s ongoing relationship to documentary. The latter is more evident in two parts of the music video, where the animated representation of Gambino seems to be reflecting his thoughts as he walks through the street in the hot sun. Animation helps to visualise the fantasy spaces within his subconscious, as he relates certain celebrities to the lyrics. Focusing on the first of these sequences, this blog post analyses animation’s ability as a medium to visually communicate the nuances of climate change, politics, race and hip-hop culture, as put forth by Gambino’s clever storytelling throughout the video. Drawing on the work on the politics of animation by Eric Herhuth, this post argues that the animation in Gambino’s video provides an interesting fantasy world for the animated representations of the celebrities to interact with one another, their actions creating an important dialogue with the framing social and political contexts.
Shannon Sharpe on O.J. Simpson.
Released in 2018, Gambino’s music video features a number of popular Black celebrities from the worlds of politics and media, such as Kid Cudi, Kanye West, Michelle Obama, Beyoncé Knowles, and NFL player Shannon Sharpe. The sequence in question starts off with Kid Cudi looking down melancholically, followed by a tearful Kanye West being consoled by Michelle Obama. Following the duo, Beyoncé Knowles next stands in a powerful pose, wearing a ‘R.I.P. Fredo Santana’ t-shirt, an up-and-coming rapper who worked with Gambino but died of a drug overdose in 2018. The last person in this sequence is Shannon Sharpe sitting on a bench, with a cup of melting ice-cream. The purpose of separating these specific celebrities allows their actions to represent specific lyrics: “Oh, I know you know that pain I'm hopin' that this world will change… But it just seems the same.” The lyrics empathise with the pain of the many who have suffered even when the mentioned celebrities have been beacons of hope for the Black community. Cudi’s own experiences with mental health struggles were met more with cynicism than optimism; Obama’s positive advocacy for the African-American community; West’s various political debacles; Beyoncé standing up and supporting new talent but the young and talented kids face the grim realities of institutional racism; and Shannon Sharpe who has voiced his opinion of how being Black and being a sportsperson go hand-in-hand, contrary to assumptions around OJ Simpson (Skip and Shannon 2017). All of these figures’ influences on the Black community span decades, but they are ironically not in isolation from – but in conversation with – the institutional racism that is still prevalent across the world. Therefore, during this sequence, the animated representation of these celebrities helps to convey a deeper understanding of the links between race and politics.
An interesting point of focus is the representation of both Kanye West and Michelle Obama. While West is one of the leading hip-hop artists in the world, here he is seen as a contrast to the more positive influence of Michelle Obama. Through the use of animation, Gambino provides a personal commentary on the overlap between social and political events that involve the duo, and their diverse effects on the Black community in America. West’s controversial political opinions have created a negative image of not only himself as a hip-hop artist, but as a member of the Black community too (Monteverde and McCollum 2020). West spoke against the efforts of the Bush administration during Hurricane Katrina, about the lack of progress seen in Chicago during Barack Obama’s presidency, and even rapping about how he was seen as someone against the ideals, and ultimately against his own race (Monteverde and McCollum 2020, 20-21, 25-27). Additionally, his later support for Trump, whose racist and misogynistic comments and actions have come under much scrutiny, tipped the scales against West as a star. By being resistant to the grievances of his own community, West is blinded by the outsider who won the White House, seeing a part of himself in Trump (Monteverde and McCollum 2020, 26). However, in the song “Ye vs. the People”, Kanye’s intentions to put aside his differences and be a part of a unified and equal America were humble, but his political actions, affiliations and the idea that “wearin’ a hat’ll show people the we equal” say otherwise. Therefore, by having West’s animated representation wear a MAGA hat in Feels Like Summer, Gambino references this particular song to convey that he understood and empathised with West’s intentions in helping create a better America. By animating Obama hugging West (Fig. 1), Gambino extends an olive branch to show a reconciliation between the two. This is because the animated embrace is a remediation of a well-known photo of Obama hugging former President George W. Bush (Fig. 2), which came to symbolise friendship between the two, and as Obama herself said, it emphasised their need for being Americans despite their differences (Hoffman, 2018). By employing animation, Gambino creatively conveys the culmination of these converging social and political contexts in the video.
Fig. 1 - Michelle Obama hugs Kanye West.
Fig. 2 - First lady Michelle Obama hugs former President George W. Bush during the dedication ceremony for the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, Saturday, Sept. 24, 2016. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michelle-obama-embraces-george-w-bush-why-photo-was-so-n654451.
Gambino’s direction - as well as Justin Richeberg’s animated artistry - provides an important addition to the analysis of animated music videos, race and hip-hop. The analysis of animation often “takes place within historical contexts shaped by political events and by the ideas and concepts in circulation” (Herhuth 2018, 170). Therefore, the “animation of politics” and the “politics of animation” inform us and each other of the many “inconsistencies” in how animation is produced and how it is received, allowing an analysis of the contexts which led to Gambino’s inclusion of figures and the audience's reception of them (Herhuth 2018, 170). Gambino’s choice of character style, of more realistic cartoons over exaggerated caricatures in his depiction of popular celebrities, is appropriate for the subject matter because caricatures are “the only way to get a recognition of satire, to undermine the actual heavy political implication”, and to “counter the valuation of accurate iconic representation” (Herhuth 2018, 177). This is because “the further removed from recognizable reality a cartoon becomes, the less likely it is to be judged seriously” (Herhuth 2018, 177). As a music video, Feels Like Summer puts forward a political message of race and climate change, doing so by getting over the need for the audience to analyse the appearance of the cartoons of the celebrities, and instead to highlight the meaning behind the imagery and actions. When we recognise exaggerated political caricatures in newspapers or animated shorts, we justify their exaggerated actions as humour. With the help of animation, Gambino sets out to visualise what he thinks these figures have done, and should do, coupled with the most simplistic rendition of their cartoonish selves, as part of his environmental message. This strategy places an emphasis not on their appearance, but on their animated actions and the multitude of contexts surrounding them. This element can be linked to the documentary function of animation, as Gambino showcases these well-known icons in an isolated, introspective narrative akin to the techniques of animated documentary (see Honess Roe 2013). This approach highlights animation’s ability to represent the non-fictional in a fictional setting, in a space between the thoughts and reflections within Gambino’s mind. Gambino’s psychology becomes an environment where the characters are privileged to be within that space, supporting the idea that these characters are “undergoing processes of reverberation: existing beyond the location of events” (Wood 2006, 136). Creating a fantasy narrative within the music video provides Gambino with the power to represent an intersection of celebrities and climate change. This points to an element of animated documentary, to “evoke" feelings of a reality known to the artist, while still existing within fictional construction of a music video (Honess Roe 2013, 25). A paradox is created, where we believe the animated celebrities to be disconnected from the music video and within the static space of Gambino’s thoughts, but their animated actions, as mentioned above, are connected within the bigger social and political contexts that informs Gambino’s perception of them.
In conclusion, Gambino’s choice of using animation as a medium to explore its political and documentary functions within the music video brings attention to the breadth of interdisciplinary analysis exploring various intersections of social contexts. While there is an increase in music artists choosing to animate their music videos, there needs to be a deeper enquiry into the realm of animated music videos. Animation as a medium finds the perfect partner in music, as seen in examples of Walt Disney, however, to see expressions of political, social and racial messages through music channelled through the medium of animation allows us to expand on the very pervasiveness of animation.
**Article published: October 22, 2021**
References
Herhuth, Eric. 2018. “Political Animation and Propaganda.” In The Animation Studies Reader, edited by Nichola Dobson, Annabelle Honess Roe, Amy Ratelle and Caroline Ruddell, 169-180. London: Bloomsbury Academic
Hoffman, Ashely. 2018. “Michelle Obama on Her Bond With 'Beautiful, Funny, Kind, Sweet Man' George W. Bush” TIME (November 14), available at: https://time.com/5454153/michelle-obama-on-george-w-bush/.
Honess Roe, Annabelle. 2013. Animated Documentary. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Monteverde, Giuliana and McCollum, Victoria. 2020. “‘I miss the old Kanye’: Keeping Up with Kanye, Kim and President Donald Trump.” In Resist!: Protest Media and Popular Culture in the Brexit-Trump Era, edited by Giuliana Monteverde and Victoria McCollum, 19-49. Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield.
Skip and Shannon: UNDISPUTED. 2017. Shannon Sharpe on O.J. Simpson: can't embrace someone that didn't embrace my community | UNDISPUTED. YouTube Video. https://youtu.be/4azYlRRudfk.
Wood, Aylish. 2006. “Re-Animating Space.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1, no. 2: 133–152.
Biography
Hrithvika is a Liberal Arts graduate from King’s College London, where she majored in Politics and minored in Digital Humanities. It was this academic interdisciplinary background that led to an enquiry of politics and animation. With an interest in the intersections of the social and political when it comes to technology and design, she is currently pursuing a career in UX design to help solve problems with a focus on sustainability and inclusivity.
