Childish Gambino Is Done. Donald Glover Is Ready For What’s Next

On the expansive soundtrack album Bando Stone & the New World, he explores what a musician can offer his audience at the end of the world.

At last month’s Bet Awards, Donald Glover had to get something off his chest before presenting the award for best album, noting that he has more Grammys than Will Smith, but the same number of Bet Awards as Sam Smith.

“It’s the Black Entertainment Television Awards,” he said. “How much more entertaining do I have to do?”

Whether as a star in front of the camera, a writer-director behind it or a musician under the moniker Childish Gambino, Glover’s artistic output is often fixated on that conundrum: What exactly does he have to do to get our attention and respect? That’s at least part of the animating force at the centre of Bando Stone & the New World, an album released on Friday that serves as a soundtrack for a forthcoming film of the same name.

In the film, Glover (who also directed) stars as the titular character, a musician who wakes up one day as seemingly the last man on Earth. He soon teams up with a woman and her child on a journey of survival, as the surreal surroundings only get freakier at night. When his new companion asks whether he has real-world skills – shooting, hunting – he says he can sing. “You’re useless,” she says.

As an album, Bando looks for meaning at the end of the world, if not in the sci-fi dystopia of the film, in the dystopia we inhabit, with a planet on fire, wars on multiple fronts and empires in sunset. What can a musician offer the world at this moment? What can a father offer his children?

Sonically, Bando – which Glover says will be his last album as Childish Gambino – is the apotheosis of the wide-ranging approach to hip-hop, pop and R&B that Glover has explored during his last decade under his internet-generated alias.

Opener H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥ promises an album recalling the ruptured noise and delusions of grandeur in rapper Ye’s Yeezus, but with a few notable exceptions (such as the sinister Got to Be, which samples Prodigy’s Breathe and 2 Live Crew), Bando is a much sunnier, warmer album than that.

Instead, Glover and his producers – including Michael Uzowuru and Ludwig Goransson, a longtime collaborator who won an Oscar for his Oppenheimer score – opt for summer-ready pop, from psychedelic crescendos (Lithonia) to Pharrell-esque jams (Survive) to acoustic strummers (Steps Beach). As with all Gambino albums, some tracks work better than others: The steamy hip shaker In the Night feels more of the moment than the trap-or-die Talk My S***.

Pop confections such as Real Love, Running Around and the Max Martin-produced A Place Where Love Goes, which plays like his version of a Calvin Harris-Rihanna collaboration, are so saccharine-sweet they almost seem like put-ons, as if Glover is showing off how easily he could do Top 40 if he really wanted to. (Or perhaps some of these are intended to be songs by Bando Stone, who sings a bit of his song Party Monkey in the film’s trailer.)

Glover continues to grow as a lyricist, and Bando has fewer of the clunkers that have marked past Gambino outings. (Your results may vary when he raps, “With my son, watching Bluey like we both Crip”.) But lived-in lyrics about his quotidian reality (“Easy to forgive me when there’s milk and pastries”, “Baby screamin’ out, ‘Is it 1am?’, let him crawl in bed”) ring true, as do the simple truths of country crossover Dadvocate: “If I told you I was stronger than I looked, then I’d be lyin’/ ... You ain’t safe bein’ a woman, and it’s hard to be a man.”

If being a man is hard, being a husband and a father is even harder. Beyond the day-to-day challenges, every quiet moment with children is a reminder that they will hopefully outlive you. Glover finds the sunny side of existential dread on Steps Beach, a gentle tune about “moments in the sand” that will be “washed away”. If that’s true, why not record a lilting, Afropop-inflected duet with your son, as Glover does on Can You Feel Me? Existence is fleeting, apocalypse or not.

Time will tell whether Bando Stone and his companions survive their adventure; the film does not yet have a release date. Even with interludes of dialogue, it’s tough to place the album in context without the movie in hand; will it find a place in the lineage of Superfly or Purple Rain, or is it a marketing stunt like the one Glover helped 21 Savage with earlier this year? Either way, the Childish Gambino project has survived long enough to let Glover end this phase of his story on his own terms. Our entertainment seems secondary.

This article was originally published in the Washington Post.

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