10 Most Controversial Music Videos Ever

10. Childish Gambino - This Is America

Childish Gambino’s This Is America was dropped surprisingly in Summer 2018, with a music video that got everybody talking instantly.

The video was most controversial for showing a deadpan Gambino machine gun down an Episcopalian choir. However, to dismiss the video as simple violence avoids its key message, almost deliberately.

The whole thing is overflowing with imagery. The gunning down is clearly representative of the Charleston Massacre, but there’s also the fact the gun is handled with care in a velvet cloth. The bodies, contrastingly, are left to rot.

The music video begins with a delicately handled gun again, as Gambino strikes a famous Jim Crow pose and shoots a smiling guitarist. A bag is wrapped around the guitarist’s head and he is unceremoniously dragged off.

Add in the fact the happy guitarist is styled to look like Trayvon Martin’s father, and the layers get deeper.

Then there’s the police violence going on constantly in the background of the video. The schoolchildren present though just watch Gambino dancing, filming it on their phones. Whether this is a critique of youth or showing their only outlet is entertainment is left unclear.

Politics and music have always mixed, but that didn’t save This Is America from controversy.