Donald Glover Is Leaving Behind Childish Gambino Persona: It's Not Fulfilling

July 18, 2024

Donald Glover had been walking a New York City street only a moment when a young man, perhaps in his early 20s, called out to him from several yards away.

“Yo, Donald Glover, bro, I love you, man!”

Glover nodded and said thank you.

“I listen to Childish Gambino like every day,” he continued.

“I appreciate it,” Glover replied.

“You’re seriously my favorite, bro,” the man shouted, seemingly struggling for something else to say. Finally, he added, “Since I was a little kid!”

Glover chuckled to himself. “A ‘little kid’?” he said, after a beat. “That doesn’t make me feel old, I just know that I am old.”

Time comes for everyone. It has mostly been kind to Glover, the multiple Emmy- and Grammy-winning actor, musician, writer and director, who turned 40 last September. He has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years, since his college sketch comedy troupe, Derrick, found an audience on early YouTube in 2006. And he has been famous for 15, since starring in the hit NBC comedy series “Community.”

Childish Gambino, his rap alter ego, caught the attention of the hip-hop blogosphere in 2010, making it old enough to be sent off to high school. And now, after the release of his sixth album, “Bando Stone & the New World,” on Friday, he’s officially retiring the moniker.

“It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done,’” he said, describing the moment of realization. “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.”

Childish Gambino has always been the rawest expression of Glover’s art. His work as a television creator, most notably “Atlanta,” tends toward the cerebral and abstract. And his biggest film roles have come as a cog in enormous franchise machines (“Solo: A Star Wars Story,” “The Lion King,” various Spider-Man vehicles). But his early Gambino mixtapes, “I Am Just a Rapper,” “I Am Just a Rapper 2” and “Culdesac,” were gleefully unfiltered, exposing the id of a talented but embittered outsider determined to pole vault his way onto the A-list.

Glover’s early themes on those projects, and his debut album, “Camp,” seemed to win him fans and critics in equal measure. Raised a Jehovah’s Witness in a suburb of Atlanta and sent to a majority-white high school, he needled preconceptions about cultural Blackness, lashing out at unnamed critics who called him an “Oreo” for failing to present as Black enough. As if to provoke the issue, he wreathed himself in totems of 2010s white hipsterdom, commandeering tracks from Pitchfork darlings (Sleigh Bells, Grizzly Bear, Yeasayer), declaring his preference for A.P.C. jeans and Sperry Top-Siders and deploying a nasal and overly articulate vocal style — Lil Wayne with a wedgie.

“I think that kid really wanted a home,” Glover said in a restaurant in TriBeCa in the first of three conversations this month, flecks of gray spotting his beard. “I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s — there was Oprah, Michael Jordan, Eddie Murphy; not a lot of alternatives” for Black people.

“Atlanta,” set in a fictionalized version of his hometown and partly inspired by his frustrations with the music business, became a ballast. Glover hired a team of fellow young Black creatives — including his brother, Stephen — and negotiated an unusual degree of creative control from FX. As the show flourished, becoming both a critical darling and a breakout ratings success, his music as Gambino got looser and more inventive. His third album, the Parliament-Funkadelic-inspired “Awaken My Love,” released during the show’s first season in 2016, spawned the surprise radio hit “Redbone,” which won Glover his first Grammy, for best traditional R&B performance.

The single “This Is America,” released two years later with an allegorically loaded video directed by his frequent collaborator Hiro Murai, became a protest anthem and won four Grammys — including record and song of the year — beating out Kendrick Lamar, Drake and Lady Gaga. In the same period, Glover experienced transformative change in his personal life. His father, Donald Sr., died in November 2018, months after the arrival of Glover’s second son (a third was born in 2020). Becoming a parent and losing his own father made him further reconsider where he was devoting his energy.

“I’m not 25 anymore, standing in front of a boulder like, ‘This has to move,’” he said. “You give what you can, but there’s beauty everywhere in every moment. You don’t have to build it. You don’t have to search for it.”

“I thought there was a really great journey in somebody making music and not knowing what the purpose of it was,” he said. “I feel like everybody goes through that, not just artists. That feeling of like, ‘What is any of this for?’”

Making the album forced Glover to answer those questions for himself. One factor in his decision to retire Childish Gambino was the increasing logistical difficulty of making any album — let alone one that lived up to his standards — amid multiplying obligations, including to his family, his film and television projects and a new creative incubator and production company called Gilga. The same was true for many of his collaborators, including the producer Ludwig Goransson, who has been his key creative partner on every album since “Camp” but appears on only a few songs on “Bando.”

And then there were the macro challenges facing every popular musician today — the continued decline of album consumption, disruptions in the touring business and the difficulty of capturing a mass audience in a heavily fractured media environment. Rather than trying to reclaim the chart positions of “Redbone” and “This Is America,” Glover defined success for his new album in more personal terms.

“Success to me is, honestly, being able to put out a wide-scale album that I would listen to,” he said. “For this album, I really wanted to be able to play big rooms and have big, anthemic songs that fill those rooms, so that people feel a sense of togetherness.”

https://boredbat.com/why-donald-glover-is-saying-goodbye-to-childish-gambino-its-not-fulfilling/