The 2018 single “This Is America” is arguably Childish Gambino’s (aka Donald Glover) biggest song; It’s his only No. 1 single to date, but 2016’s “Redbone” is his most-streamed song with 1.3 billion Spotify plays (vs. about half a billion for “This Is America”), despite its lower Hot 100 peak at No. 12. Either way, it turns out the hit track stemmed from, as Glover put it, a “Drake diss.”
Glover discussed the single in a new video interview with GQ shared today (April 4), and while he said the initial version of the song took digs at Drake, it sounds like that was more of a creative exercise than it was an expression of any actual malice towards Drake. At 17:28 into the video above, Glover said:
“It started as a… the idea for the song started as a joke, to be completely honest. ‘This is America’: that was all we had, was, like, that line. And it started as a Drake diss, to be honest [laughs], as like, a funny way of, like, doing it. But then I was like, ‘This sh*t sounds kind of hard, though, you know?’ So I was like, ‘Let me play with it.’ So we just had that for a long time.”
Watch the interview above and revisit the classic “This Is America” video below.
Source: https://uproxx.com/music/childish-gambino-drake-diss-this-is-america/