Rapper
Childish Gambino—actor/comedian Donald Glover in all other contexts—has come
out with an album that is much more than just a set of twenty tracks in your
iTunes library. There’s a short film
that’s integrated into a screenplay, and an album cover that’s one of those
weird image things that changes pictures as you look at it from different
angles. It’s an all around artistic effort
from an artist that’s well known for his ambition and refusal to categorize his
art into any specific genre, motif, or medium.
The album –
titled “Because the Internet” is, or is supposed to be about, loneliness, fear
of the future, and the effect the internet has had on society. These themes are
much more pronounced in the complimenting screenplay and film—but I’ll talk
more about that later.
Since, for
all the ambition of the project, the music isn’t terribly interesting. Each song up until (and including) “Zealots
of Stockholm” has its moments, most often when Gambino is rapping, and rarely
when the lyrics are contributing anything to the overarching themes. The problem is, there are few actual rap
verses on this record. When I first
looked at the album on my iPod, the twenty track listing was daunting— twenty
tracks for a rap album suggests a mountain of content to get through. But there is just a ton of excess fat on this
album. Many intros are over a quarter of
the song’s run-time. What seem like
extended interludes between verses never end, and just turn into the end of a
song. There may be twenty tracks, but
Gambino raps for about eleven songs worth.
This
wouldn’t be a problem if Gambino was an excellent producer, but he’s not. The production is functional under his
rapping, but when it has to stand on its own—as it does for much of the
album—it its utterly un-interesting. I
don’t want nor need to hear him repeat the same vocal sample long enough to
turn a song into an effective three-minute single.
The album
has three separate and distinct tones.
The first seven tracks are spacious, vibe-y cuts that are good to chill
to, have some great one-liners, but all fail to have an interesting enough
chorus to stand out from each other. The
division between the first and second half of the album comes with the two
singles, “Sweatpants” and “3005”, which are both great songs in their own ways,
though I’d say I lean towards “Sweatpants” if I had to pick between the
two. I think it captures precisely what
Gambino’s good at. He’s a comedian at
this core, and a bombastic song of wit, one-liners and swagger is precisely
where he can showcase his skills. The
final eleven tracks more closely follow the themes of the screenplay—mirroring
“The Boy’s fall into depression and isolation.
I really like the first couple tracks of this section; “The Party” and “No
Exit” venture into this dark Earl Sweatshirt-esque world of blaring bass and
depressing parties. But it’s over very
quickly. I really wanted to see the
album go in this direction, but what follows isn’t really related, and
completely different sonically. So, we enter
into the worst part of the album—Gambino seems to run out of ideas towards the
end, and there isn’t much more to say than the last couple songs are just kinda
bad.
Donald
Glover/Childish Gambino is a man with no allegiances. He bounds from one medium to another with no
real pattern or sense of purpose. For
this reason, I think his art suffers.
Let me show you what I mean, in a
way that I can understand. The best
player in major league baseball is named Mike Trout. He is the best hitter, a great base runner,
and a fantastic defender in center field.
All of these skills, despite being completely independent parts of the
game, all contribute to one thing—Trout’s value as a baseball player. Trout’s different
skills all contribute to his value as a player, and they can be added into one number. In
the 2014 season, his value was 7.8.
My point is, I don’t think that art works that way. I have heard Glover called the most talented
person in show business, but just because he is very good at many
things—screenwriting, directing, acting, comedy, rapping—doesn’t mean he’s
going to create art that is any greater than one of its parts.
The “Because the Internet” project
is a great example. Glover created a
related, but not intertwined, artistic experience involving his album,
screenplay, and film. Though the themes
and story line of the project were developed across all three media, none of
the three required the other two to work artistically. This created a fragmented experience, where I
was unsure how to proceed, (Should I
have listened to the album while reading the screenplay? When does the
screenplay match up with the film?) and left me with three, decent, but
separate works of art that didn’t add up to anything greater than their own
separate values. Donald Glover is a very
talented individual, but I think he needs to do one of two things: learn to
make mixed media art projects that are better integrated into one experience
(Hip-Hopera, anyone?) or concentrate on one thing, and stick with it. Otherwise he may just end up being a
entertainer who created many good things, but never one great one.
4/10
4/10
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