Childish Gambino AKA Donald Glover is spilling the tea surrounding the origins of the GRAMMY-winning hit, "This Is America."
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During a recent interview with GQ, Glover revealed the song was originally written as a diss aimed at Drake.
“I swear to God, the idea for the song started as a joke,” Glover shared, “To be completely honest, [the line] ‘this is America’, that was all we had.”
He added, “I had that idea like three years before, and I told Hiro [Murai] the idea [and] he was like, ‘I want to do that.’ He was like, ‘I really want to do that.’ And I was like, ‘Cool.’ And I had the song."
Glover continued on to share how the song started as a direct diss to fellow rapper, Drake, by calling out his home of Canada.
“[It] was a funny way of like doing [a Drake diss],” he said. “But then I was like, ‘This s*** sounds kind of hard, though.’ So I was like, ‘Let me play with it.’ So we just had that for a long time, I told Hiro the idea, and he was like, ‘Oh, let’s do it.’”
Overall, Glover said his main goal with the song was to shed light to the culture of 2018. “To me, culture is just compression of information, So I was like, ‘All of it just needs to be compressed into this moment.’ So what was happening needed to feel like it could only be happening right now.”
Hear more from Glover’s conversation with GQ below.
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