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From Childish To Fully Grown Man: Donald Glover’s Music In Retrospect

It’s interesting how history can overlap, because I’ll find something because of something else. For instance, I won’t forget where I was when I first heard Childish Gambino’s Camp, but I only found it because of Donald Glover appearing on the TV show Community. The year was 2011, and I was fresh out of high school, but I was just starting to expand my music taste. I wasn’t super into rap music at the time, but I was getting sick of the same metalcore, post-hardcore, and rock albums I was listening to. The show Community premiered in 2009, and it was a really quirky, fun, and unique show that dealt with a group of community college students, but one of my favorite characters was Troy Barnes.

Played by Donald Glover, he was one of the standout characters on the show, but I found out that he made music, too. Getting the name from a Wu-Tang Clan generator, he started rapping in the late 2000s. Donald Glover got his start both writing for 30 Rock at only 23, and then being in the YouTube sketch comedy group Derrick Comedy, but it was his work in Community that got him noticed by a lot of people. He was rapping at the same time, too, and I’ve heard some of those early mixtapes, but they’re not very good. I listened to those mixtapes in retrospect, along with 2010’s Culdesac, which is the point where he got a lot better.

I wanted to write a retrospective of his work, because he released his final two albums last year, Atavista (which is a reissue / remaster of 3.15.2020), and Bando Stone & The New World, so what better way to celebrate his music than to talk about his work as a whole? Like I said, his first handful of mixtapes weren’t very good, but 2010’a Culdesac was the first sign he got better; it’s still a bit rough around the edges, but there are some great tracks on it. Really, Glover went viral because of a few different things: a remix of Adele’s Rolling In The Deep, rapping over indie songs by Sleigh Bells and Grizzly Bear, and his song “Freaks & Geeks,” which came out in early 2011 before Camp did.

I first heard of him through his debut single “Bonfire” from Camp, and I remember being at my old PC back in 2011 when the song came out. I’m pretty sure that I found out about Childish Gambino through AbsolutePunk, back when that website was still a thing. I remember being in my bedroom, and I was blown away when I heard it, because it was unlike anything I had ever heard. I wasn’t familiar with rap music, minus what was popular at the time, but Camp is the first rap album I ever listened to. I posted a big retrospective on it last year, even though it turned 10 in 2021, so if you want more of my thoughts on that album, check that out, but I can talk about it a bit here, too.

Camp is an interesting record, because it’s an album that I’m very nostalgic about, but I can acknowledge that it hasn’t aged the best in certain respects. That’s namely due to certain lyrics with language that hasn’t aged well (especially language that was more “acceptable” at the time but very problematic now), and certain pop culture references that feel very dated, because they were more relevant in 2011. There are also arguments to be made about the tone of this record, especially how Donald Glover tried to be serious and humorous at the same time; he tried to combine ideas like his credibility as a rapper, his racial identity as a Black man being into nerd culture (being a nerd was starting to get popular, too), and just his relationship woes that he was going through at the time.

The production on Camp went nuts, too, because Community composer Ludwig Göransson became his most frequent collaborator, and he’s one hell of a composer, but the tone of the album is a bit all over the place. You’ve got songs like “Bonfire” and “Backpackers” that are more straight up hip-hop cuts, but then you have pop-rap cuts like “Firefly,” “Heartbeat,” and “Kids,” and songs like “LES” and “Outside” are more cinematic and melodramatic cuts with strings. Hell, the last track of this thing is almost eight minutes, but the second half is a monologue where Glover talks about an embarrassing experience when he was 13, and the moral of the story is to be as transparent as possible with people, so no one can hold anything against you, because they already know it.

The irony of that is Donald Glover would go onto revealing less about himself with his next few albums, especially with 2013’s Because The Internet. Camp is still an album that I have a lot of fondness for, despite all of its issues, but I can look past them for various reasons. Glover would come back in 2014 with Because The Internet, and it’s a very different beast from Camp. The album is a loose concept album about the Internet, but the album has more of an alternative rap and R&B feel to it, versus the more straightforward pop-rap sound of Camp. I’m more split on Because The Internet, because it has more of an experimental sound, and I’m not crazy about all of it. I don’t think the album is bad at any point, but not every track keeps my interest, so I only really love about two-thirds of it.

We did get some mixtapes in between and after the two albums, though, including 2012’s Royalty (which I like a handful of tracks from) 2014’s STN MTN / Kauai (which I really love). The latter project is cool, too, because it consisted of a mixtape and EP, the latter of which was commercially available. Just a couple of years later, we got Awaken, My Love, and this was an album that both shocked longtime fans and got Glover more mainstream recognition. This record was almost a side quest in his sound by being a funk and R&B record, very much influenced by the 1970s, but it was a divisive album. I enjoyed it when it came out, and I still like it today, but an unpopular opinion is that it’s my least favorite of his. I love the sound, but it’s more or less another experimental record with stuff that doesn’t do much for me, minus “Redbone” or something like that. This record shot him up to the upper echelons of stardom, though, earning him Grammy nominations and more recognition from publications and blogs. The same people that didn’t take him seriously just a few years ago were now riding his coattails.

He somehow got even bigger with “This Is America” in 2018, because that song swept the Grammy’s, but he dropped a couple of singles in the summertime. Those songs didn’t get too popular, but they were catchy little tunes. After “This Is America,” he kinda disappeared for a few years, quietly releasing the project 3.15.20, which came out right before the pandemic really hit. That record came and went, kind of just because of how hectic 2020 was, but in 2024, Glover announced a few different things, most importantly his retirement from music. He announced that he would have two more albums coming out — a remastered and finished version of his last album, now titled Atavista, and a soundtrack to an upcoming movie that still hasn’t come out called Bando Stone & The New World.

Atavista was one of my favorite albums of last year, while Bando Stone has some great songs, but it’s a bit of a scattershot album. It’s almost like the indirect sequel to Because The Internet, because of how it encompasses a lot of sounds and ideas, but when it works, it really works. That’s how I feel about BTI, too, but it’s fitting that he would go out with his most diverse album to date. Atavista, however, is one of my favorite R&B albums in recent memory. There’s a strong neo-soul and R&B influence to it, especially nods to Prince, Michael Jackson, Maxwell, D’Angelo, and even dare I say, Kanye. Like 2005-era Kanye, where he blended soul, R&B, and hip-hop to make for a cool and unique sound.

If that’s all we’re going to get from Glover, I suppose he went out on a high note. He’ll surely he missed, and if he wants to make music again, I’m sure people would eat it up with no questions asked. He could release music under his own name, versus the Childish Gambino moniker, but if this is all we get, I’m happy with it. His body of work is a unique one, especially from where he started and where he ended. Personally, I prefer his first two albums, but that’s kind of because I have nostalgia for them. I love Atavista, however, especially when I always loved Glover’s singing and more R&B influences, so this is where it all culminates.

I’ve been a fan of Childish Gambino for the past 14 years, so basically almost half of my life at this point, and I’ve grown up with his music. I’ve been growing up with his music, just as he’s been growing. He’s only nine years older than me, but it’s awesome that he and I have been growing and evolving at the same time. I guess that’s why I wanted to write this, because I wanted to talk about my journey with Donald Glover’s music, and how I’ve both grown up with it, and how I’ve grown with it. Donald Glover is one of my favorite artists, and even after he’s done making music, he still will be.