When I was 14, I was introduced to 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 first and a rapper second, rapping with a glut of pop culture references, getting off punchline after punchline in a congested voice that made him sound like Urkel doing Da Drought 3. I liked them because they were satire, or maybe not, and maybe that was the point. If anything, the mixtapes were endearingly corny, nerdy, and goofy—he played with a rap character he was forming and hinted at the racial insecurities that would make 2011’s Camp a pop-rap disaster.
All these years later, Childish Gambino is merely a side project of Donald Glover, who has worked tirelessly to shift the perception of himself from nerdy, goofy, and insecure Black artist to a cool, layered, and serious Black artist. I think of his 2018 New Yorker profile in which he said, “I learn fast—I figured out the algorithm,” and described his “superpower” as getting people to believe whatever he wanted them to about him if he tried hard enough.
He did try and it worked. “Awaken, My Love!” from 2016 was essentially his Parliament-meets-Maxwell funk project. It’s nowhere near as soulful or groovy as he wanted it to be (I’ll give it up for “Riot,” though), but it did infuse his music with the stamp of Blackness he was thirsty for. Then there was the song and video for “This Is America,” more vague and less radical than its reputation, but it instantly gave his songs the aura of importance. And, oh yeah, there’s this television show he created called Atlanta, one of the best shows of the 21st century, the thing that makes good on his desire to make exceptional Black art. Through dark comedy and the hyperlocal lens of his hometown, the show blurs the lines between persona and reality, a thought he was veering toward on the 2013 project Because the Internet. And yet the greatest achievement of Atlanta is much more straightforward: It was funny as hell.
There’s not much of a sense of humor on 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’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.” You can feel that in how he seems burdened with the pressure of living up to the perception he has molded for himself. It’s a strained album that so badly wants to end the Childish Gambino experiment with a bang, that wants to be a middle finger to everyone who ever thought he didn’t have the range to pull off whatever he set his sights on, 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 had similar ambitions baked in. But also, the best episodes featured something you had never seen before in your life, and it was exciting to watch Donald and his writers’ room subvert the expectations of TV. Meanwhile, Bando Stone and the New World is a familiar slog, and the swings feel algorithmic rather than experimental.
Think of all of the albums over the last decade or so that have shaped the identities of teenagers, or at least teenagers who buy records off the end-caps at Urban Outfitters: Bando Stone extracts a little bit of that sauce while sounding nowhere near as compelling as the originals. Yeezus is one, of course, not a big surprise considering that Gambino has always worshiped the showmanship, contradictions, and music of Kanye. Here, his throbbing, glitchy, pitch-shifting intro “H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥” with a chant of “Everybody Satan and I’m G-O-D” aims for the provocativeness of Ye’s 2013 heat check, but it’s more like one of the joyless, angry blasts of noise you’ll find on Donda. Then, like some of SZA’s SOS, he does the pop-punk nostalgia thing on “Running Around,” but instead of raging like she did, it’s more unbearably cutesy in the vein of Teezo Touchdown. I can’t forget “Got to Be,” a chaotic sample-heavy mashup that brings to mind the mayhem of JPEGMAFIA, though his crate digging would be more adventurous than weaving together the Prodigy and Uncle Luke.
Of the spiritual raids going on here, the most effective is Frank Ocean’s style of R&B. That could be because the album is covered with the fingerprints of Michael Uzowuru, a megastar whisperer who once loomed around the Odd Future camp and was behind a few of Frank’s most memorable songs, including “Chanel” and “Nights.” Uzowuru has production credits on the seven-minute “No Excuses” (along with Glover and his longtime collaborator Ludwig Göransson) and it has this slow-mo jazziness that feels like lightweight Fela Kuti that meshes well with Gambino’s sweet, cloudy Blonde-esque croons. He pulls it off well enough—I’ve liked his voice since the 106 & Park–era R&B hums he hit at the end of his Sway freestyle in 2013. I’d say the same for “Steps Beach” (co-produced by Steve Lacy), which is fuzzy lyrically but his swooning falsetto is incredibly romantic. His singing goes off the rails when he steps outside of this zone, specifically the theatrical “Lithonia.” The album is supposed to be a soundtrack for a film that he hasn’t released yet, so maybe “Lithonia” will make more sense inside a different narrative arc, though that won’t change that his full-throated belts make him sound like Troy Bolton.
Gambino doesn’t even sound like he’s having that much fun trying on all these new hats; the main point just seems to be that range = greatness. A few moments say otherwise, like the high-pitched flexing mode Amaarae and Flo Milli put him onto on “Talk My Shit” or the intergalactic vibe out with Yeat on “Cruisin’.” He does have some heavier thoughts bubbling, such as fatherhood and aging on “Dadvocate” and “Can You Feel Me.” Both are incredibly earnest moments from an artist whose earnestness is always up for debate.
But maybe that’s the problem. It’s hard to grasp who Childish Gambino is supposed to be. So even when he’s genuine, I have a little bit of skepticism on my mind. That’s always what kept me at a distance from Gambino’s music, constantly wondering What does he want to get out of this? The only thing that stops me from doing that is when the project is just so great that I forget about that question entirely, like Atlanta was and how Bando Stone and the New World isn’t. Still, there is one song from the album I’ve been stuck on: “Yoshinoya,” one of the few straight-up rap tracks. It has some of that goofball cheesiness that marked the I Am Just a Rapper series. In the second verse he mentions his Chick-fil-A order, calls out the “old heads” who clown his “short shorts and PRO-Keds”, and criticizes cosplaying rappers. He doesn’t usually write verses that silly anymore, but it feels right. Because even for how radically his music has morphed over the years, the blustering smart-ass still feels like the closest I ever got to knowing Childish Gambino.
