Unlike CB, I was not a Community fan. But I still fell for Donald Glover. He was a writer on 30 Rock, he’s been building steam as an actor, and I actually love the music of his “alter ego,” Childish Gambino. Glover is young, talented, and he can write his own ticket in a lot of ways. So it’s interesting to me that he chose to write his own ticket by creating a new show for FX called Atlanta. It’s a show about Glover’s character acting as manager/hustler for his cousin, an aspiring rapper and current drug dealer. The show is set in Atlanta, features a primarily African-American cast, and the writers are all African-American too, or at least that’s what Vulture says. Glover can seem (at times) very prickly about doing media, but he sat down with Vulture to discuss the show, and it’s one of the best interviews I’ve read with Glover. You can read the piece here. Some highlights:
Why he did ‘Atlanta’: “I wanted to show white people, you don’t know everything about black culture. I know it’s very easy to feel that way. Like, I get it, you can hear about the Nae Nae the day it comes out. You follow Hood Vines, and you have your one black friend and you think they teach you everything, I get it that Deshaun said that black people love … n-gga, I hate Deshaun.”
On OJ Simpson:“Our relationship with O.J. is black people’s relationship with America.”
On The Catcher in the Rye: “When we were kids, it didn’t make sense to us. This dude is like, ‘Everybody’s phony’ — that’s such a white struggle, not realizing until you’re a teenager that adults are full of sh-t. Black people learn that real early.”
FX wanted the drug dealer character to live in a ‘trap-like apartment’: “We were like, ‘No, he’s a drug dealer, he makes enough money to live in a regular apartment.’ There were some things so subtle and black that people had no idea what we were talking about.”
His relationship to ‘the black community’: “I know when I go to Baltimore, when I go to D.C., it’s like 50-50 — half of them are like, ‘I love this dude, this dude’s cool.’ And the other half are like, ‘This coon-ass dude.’ But I have no hate in my heart for no black person ever. Because we’re in a position where the system has f–ked us up so bad we can’t always trust each other.”
His withdrawal from social media: “A lot of people don’t understand me, which is good. I don’t give a f—k.”
What he wants for the show: “The No. 1 thing we kept coming back to is that it needs to be funny first and foremost. I never wanted this sh-t to be important. I never wanted this show to be about diversity; all that sh-t is wack to me. There’s a lot of clapter going on.” He was referencing a Seth Meyers coinage: politically correct humor that elicits applause but that isn’t actually funny. “A lot of n-ggas be like …” — Glover started clapping exaggeratedly — “ ‘So true, yes, so, so true.’ But what you did isn’t funny; they’re just clapping and laughing to be on the right side of history.”
[From Vulture]
Throughout the piece, Glover and the writer talk about the beauty and the complexity of black experience, and the black experience within Atlanta specifically. It’s really interesting to me from a political standpoint, because what Glover describes is exactly why some people believe Georgia is ripe to “turn blue” in this presidential election. Georgia isn’t just some backwater state filled with white hillbillies. Atlanta is the center of what has become a thriving black middle-class. And it will be interesting to see a show that reflects that kind of inclusion at every level.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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