Childish Gambino: Camp

I'm going to begin 2012 by restating a simple fact that underscored every review I did last year: I don't really know shit about shit. Okay, I have a pretty decent wealth of knowledge of music and I try to apply it properly in determining what music is good and why. It'd still say that's more based in intuition, and there are serious gaps in my knowledge. I admitted early last year that you wouldn't see a lot of hip hop on this site, and that is not because I have something against the genre. I simply don't believe I'm a trustworthy voice in determining when hip hop is good. I like some rap, I hate some rap, at the end of the day I don't feel as comfortable telling people whether to buy the Kanye/Jay-Z album as I am telling them to buy an Arcade Fire. And even then I'm not sure I "know" anything... more reviewers would do well to consider this fact. Anyway.

What's more is the unavoidable fact that it's entirely possible I only bought this album because of Community. I'd like to convince myself otherwise, that I wouldn't spend $10 on a CD just because I like a performers comedic acting. It was definitely the reason I first watched his videos on YouTube, but I'd like to think that if he weren't any good, if I didn't like what I saw, if it was just a novelty, I wouldn't have kept watching and sought out the album when it was released. So cards on the table, there's that.

But I don't listen to anything I don't think is good, and I definitely don't waste time talking about it if I don't think people should buy it. And to my ears, Donald Glover's plastic debut, after years of self-releasing by download, is definitely worthy.

The man puts his considerable skills to work. He builds a complicated persona by exploring one aspect of his life on one track, then turning back to another on the next. There's a lot of great thematic exploration here about sexual politics, identity, the black experience, fame and self-consciousness. Of course, there are also more puns and references than you can possibly account for and more references to body-juices than the entire Aerosmith songbook.

One strategy to review the album would be to go down the lyrics, to see if his words ring true, if he represents and keeps it real or whatever they're saying these days: if it's all a front or if he's really 2 legit to quit (I should stop.) But I'll remind you, I really don't know shit. I don't know shit about where Childish is coming from, about the projects or the black experience or the perils of fame or even getting too much pussy (remember, I write about music on the internet.) What sells it for me is the indomitably-clever (or occasionally so-unclever-it's-clever) lyric sheet, doing a great job of finding multiple ways into an issue, usually the various conflicting ways it might affect him. It would be time-consuming to list all the lyrics that affected me - despite not sharing the background - but you can't help but nod in understanding when you hear "Culture shock at barber shops cause I ain't hood enough / We all look the same to the cops, ain't that good enough?"

Helping things along is the composition, helped by Ludwig Goransson's production, bathing the beats in a pumped-up anything-goes atmosphere, always befitting the tone of the song but never degenerating into abrasive noise or, in the case of the more delicate tracks like "Kids," schmaltz. There is a level of craft in this album that deserves commendation no matter what. And sometimes it feels like it's justly drawing attention to itself, other times it seems perfectly modest and self-effacing. It has a lot of the elements that made me love the Foster the People album last year, which is that music can sound like anything these days. A lot of the tracks, like "Heartbeat" and "Sunrise" are really made by the musical component.

But I'll tell you what. At the end of my first listen, I hadn't really drank in a lot of the lyrical content, and I couldn't quite separate all the backing tracks to see what was good. As much as a first-listen is ever adequate to draw an opinion, I was really unsure until we got to the end of "That Power," which is the absolute crux of the album, devoting one component to Gambino's flow-and-reference style, which is excellent, and then neatly using Glover's writing talents to neatly sum the album up with a spoken word anecdote that ties together the entire concept of building an identity and determining who you are in the world and how to communicate with others, and growing up and going back and just... the whole damn thing in like a 5 minute story about a bus trip. It's an excellent moment that ended any doubts and made me want to go back.

So who am I when I try to write about this album? Still some white kid from the suburbs, just like most of the people probably buying this disc. But I'm also one of the only (perhaps the only) person to appreciate both the "I want a full house Full House / They said 'You got it dude'" and "It's 400 Blows to these Truffaut Niggas", so there's that. Glover's clearly not making this album for anybody but himself, but he's also using weighty topics like race and identity as potent material for his rhymes. Or perhaps, he's using the attention he would be getting anyway to try desperately to say something important. I don't know, again, I don't know anything at all. All I know is that I listen, and I like it.

It reached me. It did. It's a blast to listen to and it connects despite my lack of a basis in experience to connect with a lot of Childish's material. Music is after all communication, and if he's reached this far, he's done good. I can't say any more than this: you know what I like, you know what you like, and the point of this site is to figure out where they overlap.

Shout out to Rap Genius for helping me attempt to cope with how much I was missing in this album.

Buy this album now: iTunes // Amazon.com // Amazon.ca