On September 2, 2018, the hip hop artist Childish Gambino, also known as Donald Glover, released a music video for his song “Feels Like Summer” from the EP “Summer Pack”. The video featured a vintage cartoon format where Childish Gambino walked along a street surrounded by prominent African American musicians and celebrities while in the blistering summer heat. On its surface, the video appears to be honoring celebrity talent, but with a deeper analysis, the music video has a different meaning that reflects our eagerness to attach ourselves to these very celebrities and distract ourselves from existential issues like climate change.

Most people viewing the music video see a street of a generic lower-income community featuring various day-to-day activities: playing basketball, washing a car, smoking in a car, lying in the sun, playing tug-of-war (Childish Gambino 00:01:01, 00:01:24, 00:00:47, 00:02:48, 00:01:34). Juxtaposed with these mundane activities, are their participants: A-list and B-list celebrities. Depicted in cartoon form, the audience sees figures such as Kanye West, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, and Will Smith, among many others (00:02:07, 00:03:53, 00:04:03, 00:01:29, 00:02:25, 00:01:24). In fact, given the number of celebrities, watching the video becomes a guessing game of who the next star on the screen will be, distracting viewers from reflecting on the music video on a deeper level. The activities that these celebrities partake in fall into two main categories. First, many are just relaxing, often lying down on the ground or dancing. Second, many are in conflict with other people. For example, in one microscene, various musicians are playing tug of war. In another micro-scene, Travis Scott takes a block away from a wooden block castle built by Nicki Minaj, destroying it (00:01:29). The video also features brief scenes where Childish Gambino goes into the darkness. The people featured in these sections represent those who we have lost, through death like with Whitney Houston and an ice cream cup representing XXXTentacion (00:02:28), or through political shifts like with Barack Obama (00:02:25), or through psychological issues like with Kanye West, who is shown crying and comforted by Michelle Obama (00:02:07).

However, both the celebrities and the celebrity worship obscure the meaning that ties the song and the video together. In one sense, Childish Gambino is honoring these celebrities by putting them in his video, he is also encouraging us to devote less time to them. Instead, Childish Gambino wants us to focus on the existential threat of climate change. Rather than depict a regular summer day, the video is depicting the ever-rising temperature of the earth. The lyrics of “Feels Like Summer” reinforce this interpretation. In the second verse, he sings, “Every day gets hotter than the one before / Running out of water, it’s about to go down” and moves on to say that the bees are dying and birds no longer sing. And in the refrain, he mentions explicitly that he wants the world to change—not only the warming of the climate but the attitudes towards that warming—but it never does.

Visually, the cartoon is almost completely made out of warm colors like yellows, reds, and browns. This could partly allude to African-American skin tones, but it is more likely that these colors are what one thinks of in a warming Earth with growing droughts and a lack of green vegetation. Additionally, the neighborhood is illuminated by the unusually large and bright sun, a figure that is always present in the background, referring to the inability for humanity to avoid the effects of climate change.

Looking through the lens of climate change, the micro-scenes of conflict between celebrities are perhaps depictions of flaws in human nature that are exacerbating climate change. That we are competing with one another instead of cooperating, that we are concerned more with our cars and less with the gases they emit, and that people like to destroy what others have built, are all character flaws that have undercut any drastic response to the oncoming ecological disaster.

The two meanings in the text are actually related. The surface meaning about celebrities is part of what is driving climate change. That people, including many watching the video, focus on the daily lives of celebrities instead of the long term risks we face as a planet is a feature of the video. The choice of celebrities to demonstrate human nature is intentional as it makes a self-reflexive point. The audience becomes part of the problem of being distracted by what does not really matter. Luckily, if one realizes that the deeper point of the video is actually about the dangers of climate change, one also sees the related critique of human nature and resulting celebrity worship that Childish Gambino is making concurrently.