“A Grotesque Disneyland”
When recalling the infamous Atlanta child murders of 1979–81, James Baldwin described the city as “a kind of grotesque Disneyland.”1 This unwholesome carnival arose from a fascination with “Black death,” which “has never before elicited so much attention. The attention, the publicity, given to the slaughter becomes, itself, one more aspect of an unfortunate violation.”2 Today, Atlanta—the “Hollywood of the South”—has been fully landscaped in the monocultural image of The Walt Disney Company and other entertainment corporations. The state of Georgia has courted film production aggressively, enacting in 2006 some of the most generous tax incentives in the country (including no cap on qualifying expenditures). The Georgia Department of Economic Development claims that the film industry generates $4 billion annually, creating countless jobs in the process. But when auditing the tax incentive, Georgia State University’s Fiscal Research Center concluded, “the State of Georgia loses money.” As for those jobs, “these do not necessarily reflect full-time employment.” And by funneling tax revenue back to the corporations, Atlanta exacerbates its biggest claim to fame: racial class inequality.
This rampant entertainment industry is the necessary backdrop for the eclectic career of writer/rapper/standup comic/actor/producer/director Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino). Glover grew up OTP, “outside the perimeter” of Atlanta proper, in Stone Mountain (home to the world’s largest Confederate monument, literally blasted into the mountain-face). But he got his start in show business the same year as Georgia’s tax incentive. Fresh out of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Tina Fey hired him in 2006 to write for NBC’s 30 Rock (2006–13). He gained further renown and popularity for his role in Dan Harmon’s Community (2009–15). After that, he was everywhere, including in a slew of Disney productions like The Muppets (2011), Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), The Lion King (2019), and several Spider-Mans (2015, 2017, 2023). The quintessential artist compromised by the market, Glover now seems haunted by the Company. Which is perhaps why Disney, as an avatar for the entertainment industry’s transformation of Atlanta into a Hollywood dystopia, looms over his biggest critical success, the dramedy series Atlanta (2016–22).
That the series focuses on the career of trapper-turned-rapper Al “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry) and his manager Earn (Glover) is no accident. Like trap music itself, Atlanta coalesces its storyworld from the remaindered spoils of the entertainment industry’s strip-mining of the city. In this way, the series is a key example of Atlanta’s pre-eminent, homegrown artform. Hip-hop scholar Joycelyn Wilson dates the origins of trap, not with Gucci Mane, T.I., Goodie Mobb, nor even Outkast’s debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik (1994), but with the serial murders that Baldwin clocked as peak Disneyfication. For Wilson, trap is an aggregate of “storytelling, folklore, and culture that emerge from the poor and marginalized communities of Atlanta,” “built on the generational, psychological, linguistic, and ideological roots that grew from the traumas of the Atlanta Child Murders.” This period was formative for a generation of Black Atlantans who would later define the style and sound of Southern hip-hop.
Jesse McCarthy likewise traces the emergence of trap to this period, but for more capital-H historical reasons: the alignment of economic policy and right-wing ideology in a crusade to destroy the welfare state and roll back civil rights. As McCarthy writes, “Trap is the only music that feels like what living in contemporary America feels like. It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made. It is the funeral music that the Reagan era deserves.”3 Beneath that iconic sonic battery of hi-hat triplets sizzling over 808 decay is a legacy of racial and class inequity, resonating, too, with what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls the “new black Gothic” aesthetic of Atlanta and recent Black art and culture more generally. In the new Black Gothic, racial violence “accumulates rather than dissipates with the passage of time.” Thinking with these theorists, I see trap as a critical disposition toward neoliberal precarity—a relentless critique of everything that exists, even as it must embrace the hustle to survive in precarious times.
: :
Kill Own Your Masters
Michael Szalay argues that Atlanta “highlight[s] the forcible sacrifice of Black bodies to the occult corporate agencies that speak through them.”4 Szalay refers to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, responsible for producing and airing Glover’s show on FX. A prominent theme in new Black Gothic and trap alike is the balance between Black voice and commerce controlled by structurally white corporations. Like in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018), Atlanta dramatizes the retrofitting of Black cultural capital for the valorization of white actual capital. Glover says as much in an interview: “If ‘Atlanta’ was made just for black people, it would be a very different show. But I can’t even begin to tell you how, because blackness is always seen through a lens … of what white people can profit from at that moment.”
The theme of Black autonomy—artistic and bodily—crushed by corporations drives Atlanta from the very beginning of Paper Boi’s career. Al sees himself in Season 1 as a worker and, only much later, as an artist. Music reporter Joe Coscarelli explains that work comes before craft because trap “often represents a last resort—painful, exposed, desolate music from those whom society has tossed aside or never held onto in the first place.”5 Or, as Al bluntly explains, “This my job. … I scare people at ATMs. … So, I have to rap.”
But by Season 3, set abroad on his first European tour, Al’s self-perception shifts. After one performance, Al says, “I finally heard him—my voice.” It’s a catch-22, though. As Al gains mainstream popularity, he risks losing whatever artistic autonomy he has earned. Yet some amount of commercial success is required to have the financial autonomy that would allow him to discover that voice in the first place. Fearing that he will be alienated from his voice before he can really even own it, Al says, “If I don’t get it back now, then, uh, I’m afraid I’m gonna lose it. Forever.”
Similarly, while describing the early days of Atlanta, Glover says, “people didn’t really trust me… as a young creative person [and] young black man.” He describes his career as a slow process of “gaining people’s trust,” which “brings me closer to doing the things that I want to do, on my own terms.” In a fully elaborated culture industry, trap, too, toggles between white corporate aesthetics and Black artistic vision. This is why Earn’s biggest achievement as a manager is to secure Al the rights to his masters, the recordings from which all future copies will be made, and a lucrative advantage record labels are not typically keen to relinquish.
: :
Goofypool
By Atlanta’s final season, its allegory of Black exploitation turns from the entertainment industry in general to Disney specifically. “The Goof Who Sat by the Door” (Season 4, Episode 8) is a mockumentary about a Black animator from Georgia named Thomas Washington, who accidentally becomes Disney’s CEO. “The Goof” episode excavates the racism underneath canonical Americana, interspersing clips of animated shorts like Mickey’s Trailer (1938), in which the anthropomorphic, Black-coded dog Goofy devours a slice of watermelon. In an interview with one of Washington’s art professors, we learn that Thomas had always been intently focused on the racist history of Disney’s animation. The professor describes Washington’s obsession with a (real) Sight and Sound essay in which Disney animator Art Babbitt proposes, “Think of the Goof as a composite of an everlasting optimist, a gullible Good Samaritan, a half-wit, a shiftless, good-natured coloured boy.”6
“The Goof” is set just after the 1992 Rodney King riots, and it stresses Los Angeles’s proximity to Disney’s Burbank studio when Washington’s mother tells him to “riot with that pen and paper.” Glover’s critique of Disney, via its association with violent policing, is part of a broader indictment of the culture industry and how its stories help create buy-in for a world hostile to Black life and more generally unsuited for human habitation and flourishing. In response to the riots, Washington uses his power as CEO to create “the Blackest movie of all time,” Disney’s A Goofy Movie (1995). The mockumentary amplifies the trap themes of disposable Black life already present in A Goofy Movie, including stymied class mobility, stereotypes of Black masculinity, and the threat of police violence. But Washington’s effort to make the Blackest movie of all time leads to tragedy: the hijacking of his artistic vision and his resulting premature death by suicide.
From Glover’s hit tracks “Redbone” and “This is America” to A Goofy Movie and Atlanta, trap suffuses seemingly dissimilar works scattered across generic registers, including one of Disney’s biggest moneymakers: the superhero story. One year after Atlanta aired, Fox’s FXX network asked Glover and his brother Stephen (a frequent creative collaborator) for a 10-episode season of Deadpool: The Animated Series. For Fox (which then owned the rights to Deadpool, X-Men, and the Fantastic Four) the series should have been an easy layup after the popular films Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2 (2018). But before production began, Marvel scrapped it over creative differences with the Glovers. Deadpool now exists only in the subjunctive. Except, in response to Deadpool’s cancellation, Glover tweeted a retaliatory thread that included a script for the first season’s finale. The episode approaches new levels of self-reflexivity, as Deadpool ruminates on the cancellation of Deadpool: “Do you think they cancelled the show… cause of racism?!”
Considering a particularly offensive Taylor Swift episode, the superhero wonders whether his series would have been too “alienating [to] our white audience.” But it is hard to see what would be alienating, let alone cancelable, about the series. If anything, Deadpool’s frequent appropriation of Black culture (“I used to wear a ton of Ecko back in the day,” he says in the script) would likely have been part of the show’s appeal. Marvel often piggybacks on rap’s popularity and profitability. Consider Kendrick Lamar and Metro Boomin’s curation of the Black Panther and Across the Spider-Versesoundtracks. Or Marvel’s 2015 series of cover art rendering superheroes, including Deadpool, in the style of Run the Jewels, the rap duo of El-P and Atlanta’s Killer Mike. The gleeful ultraviolence of the Deadpool franchise lends itself especially well to trap’s whole fuck-it-we-ball ethos, and the expendability of Black life that is often the subject of trap music is classic fare for American mass entertainment. As music critic Rodney Carmichael explains, riffing on Outkast’s ATLiens (1996), “To be an ATLien means being simultaneously fetishized and stigmatized in much the same way America outwardly loves black culture but inwardly loathes black life.”7
An inevitable fight scene in the Deadpool script registers the street life that makes trap attractive to white audiences who want to “feel adrenalized by proximity.”8 As “Deadpool is SPLATTERED with bullets” fired by mercenaries, his consciousness of systemic racism is striking: “‘Y’all Sacramento police?’” he asks, referencing the killing of Stephon Clark in Sacramento that same month. When Deadpool is splattered with bullets, he occupies the position of any number of Black people who have been, or live with the possibility of being, slain by police. But not only is Deadpool not Black, he’s a hired goon, too, a white vigilante who kills with impunity (and as a self-regenerating pseudo-immortal, he faces no substantive consequences for his actions). Ultimately, he is another figure of anti-Blackness. Perhaps what canceled the show, then, was that Glover’s Deadpool was too mask-off. But “I’m not mad about this whole ‘canceled’ thing,” Glover ventriloquizes through Deadpool. “I mean, is it even a good time to have a violent, gun loving white man ranting on TV”?
: :
SuperCop City
In Atlanta’s Atlanta, even getting rich is no guarantee of safety. Latent violence—alligators, robberies, Confederate frat bros, invisible cars—shadows Al’s slow escape from the trap. In “Crank Dat Killer” (Season 4, Episode 6), Atlanta is besieged by a Black serial killer, another callback to 1979. The murderer targets those who ever filmed themselves doing the viral dance to Soulja Boy’s 2007 hit, “Crank That (Soulja Boy).” Al had once done the dance and fears he will be the next victim. He heads to the mall to blend in with a crowd, but he is stalked by a man who pulls a gun and opens fire. What follows is an absurd yet terrifying shootout (this is America, after all): the mallgoers all pull their own guns and start firing indiscriminately, allowing Al to escape in the mayhem. In a final twist, the man at the mall isn’t even the serial killer; he’s just someone Al went to school with (the killer is apprehended off screen).
Atlanta frequently devolves into pandemonium big and small, from hit and runs, racist Fastnacht celebrations, existential dread in Drake’s mansion, a drug deal with Migos gone awry, to freak encounters with Michael Vick. Instability plagues Atlanta’s main characters, even after Al and Earn make it as a rapper and manager team. The trap’s omnipresence has nothing to do with interpersonal beef, even when it does. In Atlanta’s first episode, we learn that Earn has been expelled from Princeton, but we do not learn why until the final season (cause of racism). Life is precarious regardless of whether one has access to avenues of upward mobility.
In the wake of his attempted murder, Al buys a “safe farm” where he can live in peace and grow weed. Atlanta’s penultimate episode opens in one of Georgia’s many forests, gunshots cracking the silence. We see Al practicing with a handgun before lifting an assault rifle and unloading on a target. Al’s farm is not just a ploy to escape his fame and would-be killers; it approximates the fantasy of white Southern country living. Which, really, is not so different from the fantasy of superpowered vigilantism, protecting property from (racialized) outsiders, using heavy ordnance if necessary.
From the racialized zombies of Atlanta’s Walking Dead series to the St. Louis gun couple, the right to repel an invading Black underclass with lethal force is a cornerstone of American whiteness. On the farm, Al might imagine, he can leave the trap by using a tried and tested strategy of propertied whites, namely, being rich. But however rich Al becomes, his right to defend his property is not sacrosanct like that of white property owners. One day on the farm, his tractor rolls onto him, injuring his leg severely. When Al finally manages to crawl back to his farmhouse, he is attacked by a feral hog. Fighting for his life, Al eventually kills the pig by bludgeoning it with a cast iron skillet. The near-supernatural violence that permeates Atlanta suggests Al will always be vulnerable to harassment—by one kind of pig or another.
Uncannily, Al’s forest shooting range also invokes the site now infamously known as Cop City, the $115 million military-grade police training facility in DeKalb County’s South River Forest. With its authorization in 2021, Cop City ignited national and global outrage, plus a grassroots occupation by forest defenders to obstruct the facility’s construction. But pro-police politicians, the Atlanta Police Department, Atlanta Police Foundation (a private nonprofit that provides additional funding to the APD without public oversight), the city, and the state have all doubled down on the project. Police have raided forest defenders’ camps, cracked down on campus protests, brought trumped up charges against bail fund organizers, and fatally shot a forest defender. And in January 2023, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation hit forest defenders with domestic terrorism charges. These actions are meant to have a chilling effect on protestors and anyone otherwise opposing Cop City.
Forest defenders articulate their mission as self-defense because police protect the processes capital requires to thrive, including the destruction of vital ecosystems and the production of racialized surplus populations. As the entertainment goldrush continues, Atlanta will continue to push its poor further into the margins, just as it did to host the 1996 Olympics and again to construct its famed BeltLine. In Atlanta and Atlanta alike, politics is a land grab abetted by the superpowered assault of whiteness.
Baldwin was right that Atlanta stands synecdochally for America. Prior to Cop City—whose construction is ongoing—the location was home to the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. It was purchased by the city for use as a cemetery during the Civil War, bought by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and US Federal Penitentiary Atlanta in the early 1920s, and used as a prison until 1995. There is a long, uninterrupted line extending from slavery to Jim Crow to Cop City. It’s a place with the kind of haunted-ass history that only Atlanta—or more likely Disney—would dream up.
: :
Endnotes
- James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Henry Holt, 1995 [1985]), 11.
- Ibid., 10.
- Jesse McCarthy, “Notes on Trap,” Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? (New York: Liveright, 2022), 112.
- Michael Szalay, Second Lives: Black Market Melodramas & the Reinvention of Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 258–9.
- Joe Coscarelli, Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 93.
- Art Babbitt, “Character Analysis of the Goof,” Sight and Sound 43, no. 2 (1934): 94.
- Rodney Carmichael, “ATLieNation: A dystopian meditation on Atlanta’s disappearing Afrofuture,” Creative Loafing, October 5, 2016.
- Coscarelli, 126.
Mitch R. Murray