Hip hop has always been hilarious. It’s just that the sober issues surrounding it — race and “realness,” not to mention the inability of outsiders to get the references — obscured its lighter side.
Even so, few hip-hop artists have blurred the boundaries of rap and humor more subversively — or for a more serious end — than Childish Gambino.
At this point, he’s more widely known as a comic than a rapper. Under his birth name, Donald Glover, Gambino has written for “The Daily Show” and “30 Rock” and enjoyed a recurring acting part on “Community.”
He also boasts zero street cred, having attended the pricey NYU after growing up in a leafy suburb (as did P. Diddy, lest anyone forget). Gambino’s first quasi-corporate CD, “Camp,” appears on Glassnote Records, home to the hit, non-hip-hop bands Phoenix and Mumford & Sons.
Yet at the same time, he has issued four full hip-hop albums on indie labels, dating back to 2002’s “The Younger I Get.” And he became the guy to watch at this year’s key backpacker hip-hop fest, Rock the Bells.
Just how “alterna” he’s willing to get can be summed up by the title Gambino chose for his CD: “Camp,” a term as central and stirring to modern gay identity as coming out. Gambino (who took his nom-de-rap from an online Wu-Tang Clan random name generator) isn’t making a statement about his sexuality. He’s showing how far he’ll go to undermine assumptions about what makes a rapper credible, let alone virile.
In fact, that’s the central motif in and purpose of his raps. Many of his stories find him trapped between worlds, stuck in an all-white school where he’s utterly misunderstood. This leads him to first question his own racial identity, and then to confront everyone else’s assumptions about it. “I used to get called Oreo and fa—ot/I used to get more laughs when I got laughed at,” he raps in “Fire Fly.”
Gambino’s verse can be hysterically rude, like any good comic, or like Chris Rock and Eminem (at his Slim Shady-est). But it’s all to an ironic purpose. Unlike Shady, Gambino’s flow seldom apes a comedian’s mugging. There’s a surprising sincerity to his delivery and a conventional use of hip hop’s minimalist notions of melody, despite his stated love of uber-wimpy, collegiate indie acts like Grizzly Bear and Sufjan Stevens.
Gambino directly mentions the latter in his lyrics, claiming to be the only black kid at Stevens concerts. In fact, it’s Gambino’s verse that varies and individualizes his work more than anything musical. Check out his references to Francois Truffaut and the East Village club Pianos.
In that sense, he’s expanding on arty hip-hop stars like Kanye and Kid Cudi (not to mention, eons ago, De La Soul). He’s widening the definition of what has become an increasingly inclusive genre. And that gives his music, even at its most routine, the thrill of liberation.
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