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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

