Adultish Gambino
On Bando Stone, Donald Glover spends one last night in a scene he believes he’s outgrown.
I first heard Donald Glover threaten to off Childish Gambino at Governors Ball in 2017. In a set populated with gems from the prior December’s Awaken, My Love!, he shuffled through genres and musical traditions with ease before telling the audience to look out for a final album. The decision to end his alter ego was perplexing; Glover seemed like he’d finally figured his shit out as a performer, making incredible strides since I first saw him rap, in 2011, while he was promoting his somehow simultaneously beta and aggro debut, Camp (“That well-spoken token who ain’t been heard / The only white rapper who’s allowed to say the N-word,” “Backpacks” announces). The footage from that show reveals an artist sorting out how to make his respective components jibe: unexpected sample choices, plush instrumentation, seven-inch short seams, Revenge of the Nerds comeuppance.
Thirteen years and several revolutions in Black youth culture later, Glover is no longer the outlier or underdog. By exercising his ambitions — taking roles in Star Wars and Spider-Man flicks while parodying the music business and surrounding fandom in Atlanta and Swarm — he has somewhat calmed the yearning for recognition and tug-of-war with conventional masculinity that often characterized Gambino’s perspective. Now 40, Glover is talking up ayahuasca and swearing off the spite he once used as motivation: “By the time you’re in your 70s or 80s … you wanna be like ‘Oh, anger, this is fun …’ It doesn’t really serve you as well as you want.” This is a rare bit of candor from an artist who rarely talks to the press, but he’s got something to sell: Bando Stone and the New World, an upcoming film with a soundtrack that marks the retirement of Childish Gambino. For his final mission, our Bando Calrissian is partying with cool kids and toasting to the longevity his younger, feistier incarnation fought for.
Dev Hynes once told me it was a bad idea for a creative to overload the public with everything they’re capable of at one time. Glover wouldn’t come around to that notion until his obligations as a family man and entertainment luminary required him to get more mercenary about time. A clear polymath from the start, he was firing on several cylinders in August and September of 2009 when he released the charming indie film Mystery Team, made his debut as Troy Barnes on NBC’s Community, and unveiled the Gambino mixtape Poindexter. “I ain’t ya ordinary nigga,” the opener, “Extraordinary,” stressed over a sample of “Easy Lover” from Philips Collins and Bailey, rattling off pop-culture references in a flow and cadence that sounded like Lil Wayne suffering from nasal congestion. The music itched with palpable otherness, from the experience of a Black art-school kid hailing from Stone Mountain, Georgia, and recklessly lumbered with the intention of redefining Black male cool. “I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s — there was Oprah, Michael Jordan, Eddie Murphy,” Glover said in a recent interview, reflecting on the need that inspired his character. He sought to wedge in between the old role models, to mint new molds. As he told Hot Ones’ Sean Evans, “There needs to be an alternative” to aggressive posturing in rap.
It tracks that Glover would tire of the platform he used to tell everyone he was “just different.” Not only are we in an era of music brimming with unique personalities, but Glover has found immense success as an actor and director and transformed Gambino into a hitmaking multimedia affair thanks to Awaken’s deliciously paranoid “Redbone” and the post-album Grammy winner “This Is America.” The former lingers as a document of a time when the phrase “Stay woke!” hadn’t been contorted into fodder for populist scaremongers; the latter, a gun-control yarn benefitting from Awaken’s macro perspective and Glover’s very online fandom, but also the disconcerting surrealism of director Hiro Murai (“3005,” Atlanta, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) meeting a lore-hungry public. Glover’s gambit paid off. There are TV, film, sci-fi, and music fans excited to engage with whatever he makes, and hip-hop heads for whom he is a foundational figure.
While his Gov Ball announcement turned out to be premature, the sense that Glover was looking for a neat denouement for Gambino ended up sticking. His “official” finale as Gambino feels more polished than the one he first promised, which arrived unceremoniously in 2020 as an alternatingly patchy and inspired collection of untitled tracks (it was rereleased officially this May as Atavista). Bando Stone has the same air of musical wanderlust, but the songs are tighter. Together they outline the boundaries of the project through restless twists. Mixtape fans left in the cold when Glover stopped rapping get cuts like “Talk My Shit” with Amaarae and Flo Milli, restoring the feeling of hearing Gambino get dog-walked by representatives from every American rap region on the Royalty mixtape in 2012. If you love the post-Ye maximalism and clockable sample flip of Atavista’s “Algorhythm,” you’ll perk up when “Got to Be” turns on a dime from church-choir reverie to Yeezification of the Prodigy’s “Breathe”; if you still pine for the kawaii Kauai, the jangle-pop nugget “Real Love” tosses you a bone. Bando is a twee-rap and psych-soul mirror to Miley Cyrus’s maudlin Hannah Montana finale good-bye kiss. It peruses familiar avenues, enjoying a last night out in a scene Glover feels he’s outgrown.
The list of collaborators adds to the idea that the wider world of left-field creativity Glover wished for is alive and thriving. Michael Uzowuru — a maestro of early Vince Staples tapes who has since worked with Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, and SZA — assists with production, as does longtime TDE hitmaker Dahi. Steve Lacy and Foushée pop in to help with two tracks apiece, and Chlöe and Jorja Smith counterbalance the alt-rock aesthetics with gauzy R&B. (Longtime Gambino beatmaker Ludwig Göransson, the former Community composer who won an Oscar in February for the Oppenheimer score, sits in on six songs.) The wealth of talent in the periphery says, “You don’t need me to do this anymore.” The album flubs some turns — “Got to Be” manages to make the Prodigy sound tinny and the Future impression on the Yeat collaboration “Cruisin’” is less interesting than the gorgeous high notes and riddled shouts elsewhere in the song — reaching for and occasionally grasping the command of half a dozen genres demonstrated on SZA’s SOS. But carefree outings like “Can You Feel Me,” where Glover and his son, Legend, trade affecting triplet raps over Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Sesame Street “African Alphabet,” outnumber the missteps.
While the album’s occasionally grating unpredictability highlights the musical lanes that opened since tough guys and beefcakes lost the run of rap and R&B, Bando features raps that invite interrogation of how different Childish Gambino really was. Glover has a bit of smoke with Drake, who called “This Is America” “overrated and overawarded” after it came out that the song started as a joke diss for the Canadian rapper. “Yoshinoya” revives old-Gambino gruffness, taunting an adversary with the Migos flow — “I found your house on the app / People around you ain’t slatt” — and a bit of marital bliss: “You fuckin’ these hoes, I’m fuckin’ my wife.” Whether it qualifies as Glover’s version of Kendrick dancing with Whitney and the kids in the “Not Like Us” video, it’s textbook hoe/housewife banter from a guy who speaks like he was sent to destroy a hypermasculine paradigm in hip-hop but only addressed a few of the precepts. Flexing about short shorts and dunking on dudes who start podcasts when careers in music don’t pan out, Gambino again takes the middle position between prevailing tropes, framing himself as an opponent of rap-internet and manosphere chauvinism who doesn’t mind a dip in the rhetoric as it serves him — an open-minded, well-adjusted dad who still loves braggadocio and maybe isn’t above the kind of snootiness Ciara once caught flak for after posting a sermon by a reverend criticizing single women.
Bando largely avoids the classic Gambino pitfalls — fetishization and exoticization of women of color, geek-flavored misogyny/misanthropy, catastrophic couplets, a dripping self-pity about being young, Black, and bohemian — and sticks to the original idea of just weirding people’s expectations. Here is this nerd from school who amassed enough talent, money, and clout to convincingly talk shit over trap beats, a rapper who turned out to be more of a singer, who antagonizes both woke scolds and pick-up-artist types. Glover was too musically slippery (and occasionally too in thrall to his influences) to leave a signature sound behind; his core gift in music as anywhere else is adaptability. He scratched the itch for a Ye who didn’t break bread with ghouls, a less goblin-like Lil Wayne, a Drake who leaned into those funk roots. Bando is a swan song with something for everyone, offering particulate cringe for the naysayers and sunny grooves for the devoted. This project has had worse problems; this is maturation in context.
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