this is AMERICA
It’s a notably lowkey evening for Gary Clark Jr. Having just announced This Land – the unbearably long-awaited follow-up to his 2015 breakthrough LP, The Story Of Sonny Boy Slim – the Texan shredder plods into a booth at his local tavern, orders a plate of wings (extra hot – you know the drill) and melts into a transcendental state of relaxation. It’s almost surprising how blasé he is; after all, it was just days prior that he’d sent a shockwave through the blues-rock community with the opaquely blunt and polarising video to the title track off This Land.
For those who haven’t yet seen the clip (first of all, you’re doing yourself a disservice), its first half is simple enough – choice shots of Clark doing what he does best (tearing the absolute hell out of a fretboard) are interspersed with shots of young black kids swinging off tree branches, playing pattycake and… Well, being kids. It’s when we turn to nighttime and our protagonist – a young black boy with little expression, gazing curiously as he soaks in a world of acrimony around him – stumbles down a hallway to hell that a more sinister vision starts to unwind.
Ghostly white hands, cold and anonymous, claw violently at the glass door that separates our nameless hero from the real world, a single tear rolling down his cheek as he stares in terror. A series of errant shots drill metaphors en masse – a snake darts through a field of dead grass; the boy grapples with a noose hanging from a tree; he drowns in a lake and runs for his life through a field; a school of kids stand, deadpan, on confederate flags and grasp glossy black speartips. The imagery is sudden, sharp, incoherent – a shiver-inducing parallel to the political unrest that many an innocent child is shaken by in the current state of the Western world.
But politics had never been too regnant in Clark’s life. Though being raised in the proud red state of Texas, where racial tension is rampant and civil rights laws don’t exactly have the most G-rated of histories, Clark was surrounded by the blues and its vibrant community – one which he swears is categorically open-armed. He ponders to us, “Is there a divide in the blues scene? Absolutely not. The blues scene to
