This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
The relationship between images and music has always been a powerful, inescapable part of the music listening experience. Album art. Music videos. Full-length concert documentaries. And now NFT collectibles. In 2018, Childish Gambino produced a music video for “This Is America” that was intricately and artistically tied to the track with perfection. There are few music videos that have left as powerful an impression as this one.
It’s easy to let the music video steal the thunder of this song itself. Which would be a shame. “This is America” blends hip hop with gospel and afrobeat textures, making the musicality completely different than anything else out there. Then there’s the message. Gun violence. Police brutality. Discrimination. Childish Gambino took this raw, honest commentary and the most un-pop-like track all the way to #1 on the charts. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime song.
“Look how I'm geekin' ouT. I'm so fitted. I'm on Gucci. I'm so pretty, yeah, yeah.”