Category:
Hip-Hop

Try if you like:
Curren$y, Danny Brown, Das Racist, Kayne West, Kendrick Lamar

For me, good hip hop has always existed at the intersection between genuine satire and a genuine commitment to the genre's form and tropes. Donald Glover’s project, Childhood Gambino, seems to fall squarely and securely at that intersection. So squarely at that intersection in fact that it is almost impossible to tell which side he stands on.

But music first, right? Can Childish Gambino rap? Yes! Very well in fact. His flow is quick, aggressive and occasionally deadly stylish. And the beats? Not dazzling. Instead, they are mediocre and uninspired and if the lyrics weren’t so incredibly engrossing the beats would pull Childish Gambino into the deepest pits of mediocrity. 

Instead of sick beats, Donald Glover (a TV writer, actor and comedian by trade) has written some sick lyrics that engaged me in conversation with an album in a way that no album has in a long long time. And we’ve arrived at the intersection: given the context of Donald Glover’s life, is CAMP entirely satire or was the intention to make a hip hop record in the manner of all of those other hip hop records. Without sitting down to actually talk to Glover off the record, any answer the press may come up with is based exclusively on speculation. 

So the conversation persists from all fronts. Glover too, is deeply in conversation with his own experiences of race and socio-economic position. One of the most striking lines on the album is in the song, 'Hold You Down': "this one kid said something really bad, he said I wasn’t really black because I had a dad. I think that’s kinda sad but mostly because a lot of black kids think they're suppose to agree with that.” Glover is striving, aggressively, to remind us that race is a deeply personal experience and there is no one correct way to experience it. 

Conversely, Glover seems obsessed with “hos and hos and hos and hos” and all the boring, overwrought and overused misogynistic/homophobic slurs, coupled with an abundance of the “n” word, drenched in bravado and swimming in every other hip hop cliché ever written. But maybe that’s the joke. It’s as if he goes back and forth between sincerity and satire. 

Or maybe I just want it to be all of those things because as a woman I need to be able to unpack hip hop in the right way to make it feel ok to “like” it. Because I like it. I like CAMP. It’s fun as fuck and smarter than most releases this year. And hip hop seems to remain one of the few genres that continues to polarize people and create passionate conversation about its fundamental social position in a way that pop music no longer can.