When I was 14, I met Childish Gambino through his 2010 mixtapes I Am Just a Rapper and I Am Just a Rapper 2. This was when he was a sitcom star and then a rapper, rapping with tons of pop culture references, going off line after line in a husky voice that made him sound like Urkel Da Drought 3. I liked them because they were satire, or maybe not, and maybe that was the point. If anything, the mixtapes were lovable, nerdy, and goofy—playing with a rap persona that was shaping up and hinting at the racial insecurities that would make 2011 Camp a pop-rap disaster.
All these years later, Childish Gambino is just a side project of Donald Glover, who has worked tirelessly to shift his perception of himself from nerdy, goofy, and insecure black artist to cool, layered, and serious black artist. I'm thinking of 2018 New Yorker profile in which he said, “I'm a fast learner—I figured out the algorithm,” and described his “superpower” as being able to make people believe anything he wanted about him if he tried hard enough.
He tried and succeeded. “Wake up my love!” as of 2016 it was essentially the Parliament-meets-Maxwell funk project. It's nowhere near as psychedelic or raucous as he'd like it to be (I'll give it up for “Riot,” though), but he's infused his music with the stamp of Blackness he craves. Then there was the song and video for “This Is America,” more obscure and less radical than his reputation, but immediately giving his songs an aura of importance. And, oh yeah, there's that TV show he created called Atlanta, one of the best shows of the 21st century, which bodes well for his desire to make great Black art. Through the dark comedy and hyperlocal lens of his hometown, the show blurs the lines between persona and reality, a thought he was moving towards in his 2013 work Because the Internet. And yet his greatest achievement Atlanta it's much simpler: it was funny.
Not much humor Bando Stone and the New World, billed as Donald Glover's final album as Childish Gambino. The reason he gave The New York Times? “It is not satisfactory. And I just felt like I didn't need to build that way anymore.” You can sense it in the way he seems burdened with the pressure to live up to his self-image. It's a strained album that wants so badly to end the Childish Gambino experiment, that wants to be the middle finger to everyone who thought they didn't have the range to pull off what they wanted, that wants to be the kind of vulnerable record that lasts because a new generation of teenagers see themselves in his music. That's fine and all. Atlanta they had similar ambitions. But also, the best episodes contained something you'd never seen before, and it was exciting to watch Donald and his writers' room subvert television expectations. In the meantime, Bando Stone and the New World it's a familiar slog and the swings are algorithmic rather than experimental.
