Before presenting the award for Best Album at last month’s BET Awards, Donald Glover had to let his heart out, revealing that although he has more Grammys than Will Smith, he has the same number of BET Awards as Sam Smith.
“This is the Black Entertainment Television Awards,” he said. “How much more entertaining can we get?”
Whether as a star in front of the camera, a writer and director behind it, or a musician under the name Childish Gambino, Glover’s artwork is often obsessed with that conundrum: What exactly does he have to do to earn our attention and respect? That’s at least part of the driving force at the heart of “Stone and the New World,” an album released Friday that serves as the soundtrack to the upcoming film of the same name.
In the film, Glover (who also directs) plays the title role of a musician who wakes up one day to find himself the last man on Earth. He soon teams up with a woman and her child and embarks on a journey of survival; as night falls, the surreal environment only becomes more eerie. When his new companion asks if he has any real-world skills like shooting or hunting, he replies that he can sing. “You’re useless,” she tells him.
As an album, “Band” seeks meaning not in the sci-fi dystopias of the movies, but in the dystopia we live in: the end of the world, where the planet is burning, war is raging on multiple fronts, and empires are in decline. What can musicians offer the world in this moment? What can fathers offer their children?
Sonically, “Band,” which Glover has said will be his final album under the name Childish Gambino, represents the culmination of the wide-ranging approach to hip-hop, pop and R&B that his internet-created alias has explored over the past decade.
Opener “H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥” promises to be an album that evokes the bursts of noise and megalomania of rapper Ye’s Yeezus, but with a few notable exceptions (like the Prodigy’s “Breathe” and the ominous 2 Live Crew-sampling “Got to Be”), Bando is a lot brighter and warmer than that.
Instead, Glover and his team of producers (including Michael Uzowru and longtime collaborator Ludwig Göransson, who won an Oscar for his score to Oppenheimer) opted for summer-ready pop, ranging from psychedelic crescendos (“Lithonia”) to Pharrell-esque jams (“Survive”) to acoustic strumming (“Steps Beach”). As with all Gambino albums, some tracks work better than others; the sultry hip-shaker “In the Night” feels more current than Trap or Die’s “Talk My That.”
Pop cuts like “Real Love,” “Running Around” and “A Place Where Love Goes,” his take on the Max Martin-produced Calvin Harris/Rihanna collaboration, are so saccharine that they almost sound like performers, as if Glover is boasting that he could easily make the Top 40 if he really wanted to. (Or maybe some of these songs are intended as songs for the band Stone, who sing a bit of his song “Party Monkey” in the film’s trailer.)
Glover continues to grow as a lyricist, and “Bando” has less of the duds of Gambino’s past work (“With my son, we two watching Bluey like the Crips,” he raps, so you might disagree). But his lines about everyday life (“It’s easy to forgive me when I’ve got milk and pastries,” “My baby yells, ‘1 a.m.? Let me crawl into bed with him”) ring true, as does the simple truth of the country crossover “Dadvocate”: “I’d be lying if I said I’m stronger than I look/…It’s not safe to be a woman, it’s hard to be a man.”
Being a man is hard, being a husband and father is even harder. Beyond the daily challenges, quiet moments with his kids are a reminder that they will outlive him. Glover finds the bright side of existential dread on “Steps Beach,” a tender song about “time on the sand” that “will wash away.” If that’s true, why not record a lilting, Afropop-inspired duet with his son, as Glover does on “Can You Feel Me.” Existence, apocalyptic or not, is fleeting.
Only time will tell if Stone and company survive this adventure. The film doesn’t yet have a release date. Despite the dialogue, it’s hard to understand the context of the album without the film. Will the album join the ranks of “Superfly” and “Purple Rain” or is it just a marketing ploy akin to Glover’s collaboration with 21 Savage earlier this year? Either way, the Childish Gambino project has survived long enough for Glover to finish this aspect of the story on his own terms, with our entertainment secondary.