Review Summary: final church
The work of Childish Gambino is some of the most fascinating to examine through the lens of art vs. entertainment. I mean, this all began with the dude from Community deciding to rap, getting his name from a Wu-Tang name generator and dropping songs with bars like "had some pussy that was insane, so insane it's an enemy of Batmane" over borrowed Lil Wayne flows. Undeniably entertainment of the stupidest kind – this reviewer can confirm that "Bonfire" in a foreign country after a few-too-many sixpacks of way-too-cheap Thai beer hits
different – but hardly art in anything but the most fratboy sense.
Then something Happened. After honing his banger formula to its sharpest point on mixtape era classic
Royalty, Donald Glover became consumed with the idea of rap-as-art, of making a cohesive and thoughtful album that reflected something about the world outside itself more than how much in it the artist had tried to fuck, of vinyl records accompanied by whole-ass screenplays. It's a wild arc, matched only by Mac Miller in terms of Glover's immediate contemporaries, and the pretentious allegations are by and large counterbalanced by how good a lot of it was. From the depressive tapestry of
Because the Internet, to Glover's soulful wailing on the likes of "Me and Your Mama" or this year's effervescent pop masterpiece "Human Sacrifice". For every Jaden Smith spoken word interlude or Chance the Rapper feature, a truly transcendental moment happens in the Gambino canon.
The natural endpoint of this 'music as visual art' run, synthesised perfectly in one of the decade's most iconic moments with the music video for "This is America", was simply for Glover to take out music from the equation and go back to where he started, the visual medium. This led us to one of the best TV shows of the 2010s in Atlanta, to a throwaway short film with Rihanna and about everything inbetween quality-wise, before getting us to where I finally arrive at the point:
Bando Stone And The New World. This is a film accompanied by a soundtrack album which, allegedly, is really and truly the final Childish Gambino project. Because rappers always retire when they claim to, right?
Whether that will happen is anybody's guess, but
Bando Stone... certainly feels like both a kiss-off to the ups and downs of Childish Gambino and the apotheosis of the fusion between Glover's musical and theatrical talents. The tracklist feels intentionally designed to burn through the various eras and styles of Gambino: "Survive"'s pop-rap-with-jam-outro is straight out of
Because the Internet, giving way to the relaxing
Kauai throwback "Steps Beach", while "Got to Be"'s neck-breaking Prodigy sample could slide right on
Camp with worse rapping. Second half highlight "We Are God" even samples the original opening track for the 2020 release of
3.15.20, an unexpected moment of redemption for a version of an album seemingly lost to the streaming void. You get the sense that where the final
Atavista was maybe too concerned with being An Album and flowing like one long song,
Bando Stone... really is just an excuse for Glover to flex his acclaimed range, with a mishmash of tracks that presumably gel with moments in the movie given the snippets of dialogue peppered throughout.
The price of this lost cohesion is that the man really does have the range to pull all this off, whether he's R&B crooning on the
Awaken, My Love!-style "In the Night" or rapping his ass off like it's
Royalty again on highlight "Yoshinoya", to even trading bars with his actual son on the terminally adorable "Can You Feel Me" (I've heard of rappers sonning rappers but this is ridiculous, ha ha ha). The album stumbles a few times over its hour-plus length – the genuinely awful "Talk My Shit" sounds like a rightfully lost BROCKHAMPTON cut, "Cruisin'" is only memorable for its dual features of Yeat and a fucking frog croak on the beat, and "Happy Survival" sees Khruangbin aimlessly jam for three minutes with barely any input from Glover – but they're more than balanced out by the highs. Seven-minute centrepiece "No Excuses" is one of the greatest things he's ever done, a patiently unfolding textural masterwork where the always excellent production from Ludwig Göransson collides with saxophone runs from the inimitable Kamasi Washington. The should-be-a-single-immediately "Running Around" pays lip service to the pop-punk-rap fusion that KennyHoopla and WILLOW (the latter of whom guests on backing vocals) have recently made massive, while closer "A Place Where Love Goes" sits right in the Venn diagram of tribal banger and arena-rock hook that makes it a perfect sendoff to nearly twenty years of Childish Gambino.
I'd argue that the all-over-the-place nature of
Bando Stone... is truly a feature and not a bug - you don't open an album with an industrial hyperpop rager with pitched-up vocals followed by a Weezer-worshipping alt-rocker unless it's some kind of statement. To go a step further, maybe an album which makes the phrase 'everything and the kitchen sink' feel too mild was the only way to go out for an artist who made an art out of 'stick and move', always presenting his absolute masterpieces and complete misses with the same level of cocky assuredness and disappearing back into the ether like it was a favour he was ever here. There's no-one else like Childish Gambino, equal parts infuriating, awe-inspiring and confusing, always both deeply sincere and funny as hell. If this is really the end, the culture will feel much emptier without its funniest clown prince, and hip-hop will miss his consistently creative and surprising touch.
But, y'know. Bet you $20 this isn't the end.
