Latest Release
![](/https/music.apple.com/assets/artwork/1x1.gif)
- 19 JULY 2024
- 17 Songs
- "Awaken, My Love!" · 2016
- Camp · 2011
- Sail Out - EP · 2013
- Because the Internet · 2013
- Camp · 2011
- "Awaken, My Love!" · 2016
- Lithonia - Single · 2024
- Summer Pack - Single · 2018
- In the Night - Single · 2024
- This Is America - Single · 2018
Essential Albums
- On the face of it, Donald Glover’s “Awaken, My Love!” is a museum-quality rip of early-’70s funk and soul: the faded vocals, the fuzzed-out guitars, the collective sense of chaos and exuberance. But it’s also more than that. Glover said he’d started with childhood memories of his parents playing Funkadelic and The Isley Brothers on the stereo: specific sounds and songs, but more importantly, a general feeling—one that Glover wasn’t quite old enough to grasp. Like a funhouse mirror, he stretches his influences into weird shapes: The freak-outs are exaggerated to the point of comedy (“Me and Your Mama”) and the ballads romantic to the point of creepy (“Terrified”). It makes for a tonal fluidity that also marks his work on the television show Atlanta, which he created. Coming from an artist known for taut wordplay and manically constructed similes, the broad strokes of Awaken are a shift: You’ll think eventually, but mood comes first. And in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that followed the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and so many more, Glover’s choice to echo a period in Black music when artists took on an explicitly revolutionary cast is a canny complement to albums like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Solange Knowles’ A Seat at the Table, both of which explored Black identity with new urgency. The result is an experiment in time travel: Through sounds of the past, he captures the tensions of the present.
Albums
Artist Playlists
- The actor/comedian blossomed into a cultishly adored rapper.
- The hip-hop maximalists and classic soul that shape his sound.
Singles & EPs
- 2023
Compilations
- 2023
Appears On
- The artist on Bando Stone and The New World.
- The album that let the world know Childish Gambino wasn’t a joke.
- Celebrating the fifth anniversary of Childish Gambino's album.
- Music from Blueface, plus extras from Childish Gambino.
- Annie soundtracks a student's first steps after college.
- The Michigan comic discusses working with Chance the Rapper.
- Music from Chance the Rapper, YG, Buddy, and Childish Gambino.
More To See
About Childish Gambino
On the one hand, there's Donald Glover: the writer, actor, comedian and director extraordinaire best known for his work on the sitcom Community and his original series (and homage to his hometown) Atlanta. Then there's Childish Gambino, the Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate musician and producer who's not as easy to describe—but that's also kind of the point. Shirking definition is key to his allure, a superpower of sorts that keeps onlookers entertained, intrigued and altogether baffled in turns. Glover was born in 1983, at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, but Childish Gambino came into existence, famously, with the aid of an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator, sometime around 2008, when he decided to use the moniker so that fans of his comedy wouldn’t think his music was just a bit. While not exactly the kind of backstory many rappers and singers would readily admit to, it's a fitting place to start in order to understand his idiosyncratic approach to music, which manages to strike a delicate balance between artful and whimsical. Glover's first recordings—which he once said sounded like a “decrepit” version of Drake—predate the name change and never formally saw the light of day. But Childish Gambino's earliest mixtapes, from the late 2000s, are the reflections of a cultural sponge who simply desired to create on his own terms. Ever since, genre descriptors have grown increasingly useless—he shrewdly treats genre like more of a suggestion than a limitation—but terms like hip-hop, R&B, funk and indie electro-pop, all pushed to their experimental bounds, are good jumping-off points. Some of Gambino's biggest hits, from the nimble display of "3005" and psychedelic soul of "Redbone" to the blistering raps of "This Is America”, share little in common aesthetically, yet he executes each with aplomb. Some catalogues are emblems of polished order and cohesion, but his is a rabbit hole of tangled genius and surprises well worth falling into.
- HOMETOWN
- Los Angeles, CA, United States
- BORN
- 25 September 1983
- GENRE
- Hip-Hop/Rap