He employs a remarkable falsetto on “Redbone” (wrapping his voice around the words “peanut butter chocolate cake and Kool-Aid”) and jumps for Marvin Gaye heights on the strutting, acoustic guitar–bolstered coda of “Stand Tall.” Previous Gambino records proved that Glover is an adept vocalist, but he’s never before sounded so expressive. Like so many retro-leaning artists before him, Glover riffles through classic sounds for a lens through which to view his modern anxieties. He’s set up shop aboard George Clinton’s Mothership ( “Me and Your Mama,” “Boogieman” ) incorporating elements of Sly Stone’s protest funk (the blatantly titled homage “ Riot ”), Dungeon Family and OutKast’s trunk-rattling Southern grit (“ Terrified ”), Prince’s erudite R&B (“ Redbone ”), and Stevie Wonder’s anthemic psychedelia (“ Stand Tall ”). Įschewing actual rapping, Glover adopts an older set of signifiers. Not content with just those milestones, he released “Awaken, My Love!” -dropped late in the year à la Beyoncé or Black Messiah -an album so steeped in psychedelic funk traditions it inspired no less an authority than Questlove to wake D’Angelo himself up at four in the morning and demand he listen. His auteur television program Atlanta, a darkly funny look at life in the titular city, emerged as one of the year’s best television shows, and soon after, he was cast as a young Lando Calrissian in the upcoming Star Wars Han Solo film. And he seemed to realize it: the projects that orbited Because the Internet -its accompanying screenplay and the short film Clapping for the Wrong Reasons -felt designed to convey the emotional content the record itself couldn’t deliver.īut in 2016, following a long social-media absence, Glover’s emerged more focused than ever before. But no matter how “real” he got-reflecting on masculinity, sex, and drugs with his trademark wit-Glover seemed more concerned with the mechanics of music than the spirit of it.
They were fueled by Glover’s desire to be taken seriously as a capital-A artist, the kind his writing credits on 30 Rock and breakout role as Troy on Community consistently indicated he was. There’s a thin line between trying and trying too hard, and records like Camp and Because the Internet often landed on the wrong side of that line.
For someone as undeniably talented as he is, Donald Glover’s albums as Childish Gambino always seemed to exude self-conscious effort.
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