This is America mashes up with Call Me Maybe, making a strange meme
It looks like a happy dance track until a man gets shot in the head.
Childish Gambino's This is America is already lighting up YouTube and has a whole new feeling when mashed up with Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe.
YouTube user Loti edited Gambino's video to swap out the song with Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, making the new video titled This Is America, so Call Me Maybe feel like a happy dance anthem until a man gets shot in the head.
Childish Gambino, aka actor Donald Glover, has quickly racked up over 100 million views since releasing the original music video on May 5, earning an impressive 55 million of those views in just four days. This newer mashup, uploaded on May 11, has received 1.5 million views as of Sunday.
Gambino's video is also a masterful commentary on racism, rampant gun violence in America, and the ongoing desensitization of it via social media.
It's almost creepy how perfect the 2012 hit song syncs up to Gambino's dance movements, with the edit using about one minute of the video. Especially the smiley group dance that starts up just seconds after the murder of a man in a chair.
Loti clarified on his YouTube page that adding the upbeat track to the video is not meant to poke fun at the original's message, he just wanted to make something fun for the internet to watch.
"I just want to make this clear, my intentions weren't to be disrespectful to the message of the song," Loti wrote on the YouTube video page. "I wasn't purposefully to be ignorant to the climate we're in, but i think the fact that so many people of all races are enjoying this is something to look at. It's just a meme made to laugh at, nothing else."
Childish Gambino's acting alter-ego is also heading to movie screens this month, playing a younger Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Solo opens on on May 24 in Australia and May 25 in the US and UK.