Donald Glover is a restless polyglot, and you can watch him tire of a medium just as he appears to get good at it. He caught the small screen bug after a stint as a writer for 30 Rock and skated off to join the ensemble cast of NBC’s Community in 2009. With Community approaching what might be its twilight, Glover jumped ship this year to become the star and showrunner of his own loosely autobiographical FX sitcom Atlanta. He hasn’t had much time for stand-up since 2011’s hour-long special Weirdo. In a sense, his rap career, hatched in 2008 after plugging his name into an online Wu-Tang rap name generator and receiving “Childish Gambino” as a result, has been his most enduring project. It has also been his most troubled.
Early Childish Gambino releases like 2008’s Sick Boi carried the playful “Just fucking around, sorry!” vibe of a rap career started on a lark but buckled under too much squeaky voiced Lil Wayne worship. Gambino later linked up with Community composer Ludwig Göransson for Culdesac and EP, proudly twee-as-fuck offerings that pondered Glover’s outsider upbringing over increasingly plush instrumental settings. But as the beloved Community awarded Glover’s musical exploits a higher profile, the pridefully uncool sloganeering of songs like Culdesac’s “Different” crystallized into spite. Gambino seemed to draft Camp, his nerd rage nadir of a debut studio album, as a piss and vinegar shower for his doubters. It spent more time thumbing its nose at the backpackers, racists, and dismissive women that gouged out the massive chip on Glover’s shoulder than it did, you know, trying to be a good rap album. The 2012 follow-up mixtape Royalty tried to recover by calling in buddies from Black Hippy, Wu-Tang Clan, and more to boost Gambino’s hip-hop cred, but he ended up getting creamed every step of the way by his more talented friends.
This year Donald Glover got weird. He announced a new album, the clunkily titled Because the Internet, and launched into a promotional campaign that included a confessional series of Instagram posts about depression and fear, frank talk about mortality in interviews, an introductory prelude-cum-making-of-featurette titled Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, an installation at the new Rough Trade NYC store, and, finally, a 76-page, four-act screenplay that shares a title with the album. The star of Because the Internet is “the Boy,” the future estranged son of Rick Ross who gets his kicks trolling celebrities online and hosting mansion parties that only serve to amplify a nagging loneliness. The story tracks the Boy’s helpless, irrational descent to his own undoing. Viewed through the lens of the album and screenplay, Gambino’s pre-release antics may have even been part of a long con to tease the themes of the project out into the real world.
If you’re fleet enough of a reader, the sequential song prompts in the screenplay reveal the album to be less of a stand-alone release than the full-fledged audio component to a daring multi-platform media project whose audio and literary wings collude to complement and even explain each other. “II. Worldstar” begins as a blippy trap number and takes a hard left on a found-sound fight sequence before landing on a psychedelic chamber jazz coda all because of a club night gone wrong in the play’s first act. Unfortunately, as the play begins to lurch with purpose the album resolves to allow the screenplay to do the heavy lifting. The third and final acts of the album are ill-served by the hairpin shifts in action they’re meant to soundtrack, and in the process, we get a series of jerky, very literal advance-the-plot numbers like “The Party” and “No Exit” followed by over-long, mournful fare like “I. Flight of the Navigator” and “II. Zealots of Stockholm (Free Information)”, songs that are well-timed and appropriate in the context of the multi-platform project but don’t make much sense without the screenplay. It’s all very ambitious, but experiencing Because the Internet as the artist intended requires an hour of fully plugged in attentive reading, embedded Youtube clip viewing, and listening.
On its own, Because the Internet’s album component breaks a number of Childish Gambino’s poor rap habits. Glover’s mic skills have radically improved since the last few outings, and his delivery is quite often formidable. The bouts of Kanye, Drake, and Lil Wayne tribute that assailed earlier efforts are mercifully absent. He seems to have found his own voice. Royalty’s injurious guest overload is scaled back in service to showcasing Gambino’s newfound mic control, so that all of the guests here are assigned hook detail. Chance the Rapper, Azealia Banks, Problem, and Mystikal all creep into the picture alongside Lloyd, Miguel and Jhené Aiko, but barring the Aiko spot on “Pink Toes”, Gambino takes all the verses. It’s a blessing and a curse; Gambino’s gotten rather good at the physical act of rapping, but he can still be a Christmas ham with the wordplay. The album is a minefield of wacka-wacka punchlines, facepalm-inducing hashtag raps and clever-until-you-really-think-about-it puns in spots, hampered periodically by gunk like, “In the garage/I had a menage/I murdered the vag,” “I got no patience, ’cause I’m not a doctor/Girl, why are you lyin’? Girl, why you Mufasa?,” “Yeah, you got some silverware, but really, are you eating, though?” and, my favorite, “Tia and Tamera in my bed, I’m a Smart Guy.” (If you’re Smart Guy Taj Mowry, and Tia and Tamera are in your bed, you’re not getting any action. They’re your sisters.)
With Gambino’s wordplay ping-ponging from caustic wit to message board snark, the enduring strength of the album is its production. Gambino and Göransson handle the bulk of it here alongside usual suspect Stefan Ponce and alley oops from twin act Christian Rich and Flying Lotus associate Thundercat. Because the Internet’s production team not only ensures the sounds are pretty, spacey, and jarring in all the right places, but they also effortlessly nail the album’s Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz synchronicity gambit. “III. Telegraph Ave. (‘Oakland’ by Lloyd)” kicks off with a tinny fragment of a Lloyd song bellowing out of a radio station and opens up into a full blown Gambino R&B showcase. (Glover might be a better singer than a rapper now, as tracks like “Telegraph Ave.” and the curt, exquisite “III. Urn” regularly bear out.) Following in lock step with the screenplay, you learn that it’s a Secret Life of Walter Mitty–style bout of impassioned karaoke to a song that nails the protagonist’s station in life a touch too closely. It’s not only the album’s best song; Gambino’s hook writing nearly bests guys we’d previously thought him to mimic, and he slides masterfully into and out of a cogent sixteen on the back end. It’s also a fulfilling payoff for bothering with the totality of Gambino’s project in the first place, a gobstopping execution of a lofty idea.
When the parts here come together you can catch a glimpse of Glover’s ambitious plan fully realized, but these moments run scarce the further into the project you trudge. This is saying nothing of the risky outlying assumption that everyone interested in the new Childish Gambino album is also interested in (or aware of) the new Childish Gambino screenplay you’re meant read online alongside it. Because the Internet is a nobly expansive attempt at plumbing the catacombs of social media for meaning and exploring the gap between the performative avatars we present as our online selves and the offline realities of our lives, but like the Twitter hounds and comment section warriors it speaks to and about, it could ultimately do well with a little less multitasking.
