The pathos of the “God’s Plan” video comes, explicitly, from the way inequality looms large over it. It also “advances consumerism and corporate capitalism, and rationalizes the very global inequality it seeks to redress.” “Celebrity humanitarianism, far from being altruistic … is most often self-serving, helping to promote institutional aggrandizement and the celebrity ‘brand,’” Kapoor writes in the book. Fundamentally, spectacles of giving have some element of selfish advertising motive, and they often end up making the viewer feel okay about an unfair status quo.
If you’re looking for the larger underpinning of such attitudes, you can read scholars like Ilan Kapoor, author of the 2012 book Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity. Today, when Taylor Swift helps pay her fans’ student loans, it’s seen, by her harshest critics, as a sign of smugness. “He has bought fame and paid cash for it,” Mark Twain once quipped about Andrew Carnegie’s libraries, part of the industrialist’s transformative philanthropic career. Celebrity do-goodery is an American tradition resenting stars who use public service for public relations is also a tradition. Still, there’s a tension inherent in the video’s premise. Evans pays special attention to emotion: the shock and the weeping as Drake plays Santa, yes, but also the joys of dance, sing-alongs, and shopping. From there, the video casts its sanctifying gaze on a wide range of folks, mostly of color, including both men and women, children and the elderly. The monologue offers a taste of Miami personality, but it also hints at a message about money, race, and dignity. To start, we hear one man talk about being the same age as Denzel Washington, not having Denzel’s money, and still looking good and feeling fine. Those residents, now, are all over the “God’s Plan” video. In fact, Drake may be slyly addressing a seven-year-old callout by 2 Live Crew’s Uncle Luke against rappers who exploit Miami’s glam and ignore its average resident. Absent are clichés of yachts and strippers that have made Miami the ultimate music-video setting. Steadicam gives a feeling of vérité, while overhead crowd shots-involving, we see, a cherrypicker that Drake perches in-add grandeur. Director Karena Evans strikingly juxtaposes colorful and worn-down homes with the sleekness of high-end department stores and post-modern campus architecture. It is good-both in the moral sense and the aesthetic sense. The word “humanitainment” has been used to describe splashy celebrity-generosity efforts ranging from the Live 8 concert to David Beckham’s UNICEF work, and that term certainly seems to fit “God’s Plan.” It’s an act of grace, and it’s a show-one perfectly calibrated to currently popular attitudes around giving, stardom, and society. What is this video: goodhearted charity, pop promotional spectacle, or both? Both, making it part of a long history. The family members cover their eyes, and they hug. Star-struck thrill melts into a more tender emotion. Drake smiles and hands the family a wad of cash. One of the kids notices the rapper sitting next to her, and shrieks.
In one moment, Drake sidles up to a family who’s sitting on a ledge. In it, the Toronto superstar distributes his million-dollar production budget to people around Miami-by telling all the shoppers in a Sabor Tropical Supermarket that everything on the shelves are free, by presenting a scholarship check to an unsuspecting student, by giving gift cards to women at a shelter, and more. 1 song in the country, bottles and elevates that Publishers Clearing House feeling. And you start wondering what that jumbo check could do for you.ĭrake’s new video for “God’s Plan,” the No. You feel gratitude for the Clearing House. As a viewer, you feel happy for the winner. But it’s when the money is actually presented, and the amount of the prize revealed, that the crying begins.
When the “Prize Patrol” first knocks on a door, the sweepstakes winner might gasp and hesitantly smile at the cameras and the balloons, recognizing the familiar script they’ve suddenly been inserted into. Dip into the strangely hypnotic film genre that documents the Publishers Clearing House delivering jumbo checks to people, and you begin to notice a pattern.