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Thursday, June 27, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS
Childish Gambino announced in
early 2018 that his next project would
be his last. Not the last for the musi-
cian, but for the online, Wu-Tang
Clan generated moniker that he had
been producing music under for over
a decade. I imagine then, a new, more
mature Donald Glover will rise from
those ashes and continue to make
Grammy-worthy records. But until
that day comes, we are left to wonder
what the musician’s post-Gambino
profile will look like.
Gambino headlined the 2019
Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival,
playing Friday’s first nighttime show
on the main stage, just as the sun had
tucked itself behind the rolling hills
of rural Tennessee. Gambino fol-
lowed on the heels of a disappointing
Avett Brothers set, made worse by the
fact that the anxious crowd showed
all the excitement of sitting in a
checkup waiting room. It was clear
most of the patronage to the Avett
Brothers was an attempt at scoring
prime Gambino real estate, some of
the audience members beginning the
glacial push toward the front even
before the previous performance
finished. After a few false sightings
(each accompanied by ecclesiastical
screeches, then ho-hum groans), the
singer-rapper made his entrance on
a rising platform, unearthed from
the center of the pit. Fog machine
blowing and spotlight showing, we
caught sight, for the first time, of the
figure of this final Gambino chapter:
long beard, partially braided hair,
loose white drawstring sweatpants, a
shirtless upper body.
This is the Childish Gambino we
first met in the viral music video for
his single “This is America” — a gruff,
aged reincarnation of the lanky kid
that first broke through playing Troy
on the NBC sit-com “Community.”
Gambino has come a long way in that
time, releasing three studio albums
(Camp in 2011, Because the Internet in
2013 and Awaken, My Love! in 2016)
and a slew of mixtapes in the decade
since, his musical stylings evolving
just as much as his look.
It was interesting to see these
changes played out in the audi-
ence’s energy over the course of the
show. The first half of his set came
mostly from Awaken, before the art-
ist looped back around to finish the
night off with his older crowd favor-
ites. There was a noticeable discon-
nect when Gambino played tracks off
that third studio album, the crowd
drifting off during “Zombies” and
“Riot,” snapping back into focus as
soon as the first chords of “Sober”
hit, then falling asleep again when
more Awaken was played. (Surpris-
ingly, the crowd was most recep-
tive to all of Gambino’s post-Awaken
singles, the Summer Pack and “This
is America,” a collection of songs I
think was a drop-off after the inven-
tive third album.)
Awaken was a departure for Gam-
bino, leaving his trademark snarky
bars behind for a more soulful R&B
sound. Though it topped out at num-
ber 5 on the US charts, the high-
est mark of any of the three studio
albums, the album’s startling change
of pace from the expected obsceni-
ties associated with the Gambino
brand seems to have affected Awak-
en’s staying power, raising questions
as to how the next chapter of Donald
Glover’s music will be received.
***
Gambino announced himself to
the music world as, essentially, a
quippy rapper — one armed with
clever bars about being a nerdy black
kid from the projects — his verses
often laden with an undercurrent
of dual identity. Gambino’s music
was raunchy and obscene, but, at its
core, playful more than anything
else. The rapper seemed to enjoy let-
ting his wordplay flourish, even if the
lines about girls and money were, at
times, pretty vapid. I look at this era
of Gambino’s music as the final evo-
lution of the types of raps two high
school sophomores would pass back
and forth in the back of AP Chem-
istry. Raunchy and humorous, they
don’t seem to care what anyone else
thinks of them. Camp-era Gambino
leaned on his writing more than any-
thing sonic in the songs he produced,
the beats often fairly simple, allow-
ing the focus to land on the rapper’s
talent for lyricism.
Gambino left out of his Bonnaroo
set the hit single from Camp, “Bon-
fire.” Quick-witted and crude, “Bon-
fire” epitomizes early Gambino, and
had long stood as the poster child
for what a Childish Gambino song
looked like. Leaving it out was a curi-
ous snub, the musician even shoving
the single’s iconic, siren-sounding
intro in between “3005” and “Sweat-
pants” before abandoning the song,
never returning to it before his time
on stage was up. As he walked away,
everyone was floored by the perfor-
mance, but disappointment from the
lack of “Bonfire” and “Freaks and
Geeks,” another Camp-era hit, were
common
grum-
blings.
Looking at the
artist’s musical tra-
jectory, since even
before Camp hit the
charts, the at first
strange
absence
of these two songs
begins to make some
sense.
Gambino’s
second studio album
Because the Internet
was a step forward
in production value
and size from Camp.
It was experimental
in its highly sequen-
tial, narrative for-
mat, and though not
all its risks paid off,
Because the Internet
lives on as an interesting attempt at
using music as a stepping stone for a
more expansive, multimedia experi-
ence — the album was released with
an accompanying (near-intermina-
ble) seventy-two-page screenplay as
well as a short film.
From Because the Internet, we
got two of Gambino’s biggest hits
to date, “Sweatpants” and “3005.”
Both of these Because the Internet
singles have iconic music videos
where the artist raps deadpan into
the camera while absurdities abound
around him. The two videos have a
lot of similar qualities and reflect the
atmosphere of adolescent character
erosion that the project’s screenplay
and short film also focus on creating.
This can be seen as Gambino Mach 2,
an ambitious artist working on ways
to connect his two diverging careers.
Because the Internet has some of the
same witty qualities of Gambino’s
earliest work, but already the artist
was stomaching his ego to try some-
thing new.
Jumping forward, the R&B styl-
ings of Awaken, My Love! are nearly
unrecognizable as the future sonic
direction for the kid behind Camp,
but looking at his discography from
10,000 feet up, a clear trend toward
new directions at every major step
starts to emerge. Awaken has none
of the iconic witticisms that so satu-
rated the Camp-era projects. It drops
the expansive ambition of Because
the Internet as well, making a point
to be as simple, and as soulful, a
showcase of Gambino’s singing tal-
ent as it can be. Hidden beneath this
10-year discography is an artist with
an incredible ear and an incredible
voice, and it seems as he continues
to make music, these once-hidden
talents will continue to be paid more
notice.
Gambino is not alone in the music
world as an artist whose later projects
trend away from the
sound that originally
made their name.
Two
artists
with
similar
timelines
and statures, Kid
Cudi and Chance the
Rapper, both rein-
vented
themselves
in their sophomore
and junior projects,
leaving fans of their
previous work left
feeling
slighted.
Which
raises
an
interesting question
on
what
respon-
sibility (if any) an
artist has to con-
tinue the spirit of
the work that made
them famous in the
first place. On one hand, an artist
whose projects seem too iterative on
past work may be viewed as lazy or
unoriginal, so caught up in their old
sound that they’re afraid to push at
their boundaries.
On the other, an artist whose proj-
ects are always a leap into the avant-
garde may be viewed as too in their
head — obsessed with the notion that
they can do anything, that anything
they try will be great, they consis-
tently work too far out of their ele-
ment, eventually completely losing
track their roots. In the end, whatever
choices a musician makes about their
artistic trajectory will ultimately be
settled in the court of public opinion.
The artist shouldn’t lose sleep over
alienating their base, though they
should know full well that any step
outside of their proverbial box runs
the risk of cutting them off from the
fans they’ve worked so hard to culti-
vate. If the new stuff is good enough,
people will stick around. If it’s not,
we stomach our blows, regress back
to our path, and we return to form
with something like Cudi’s Passion,
Pain & Demon Slayin’.
Putting Gambino’s career
in perspective after ‘Roo ‘19
FESTIVAL COVERAGE
FILMMAGIC
STEPHEN SATARINO
Daily Film Editor
Read more at michigandaily.com
Fog machine
blowing and
spotlight
showing, we
caught sight, for
the first time, of
the figure of this
final Gambino
chapter