Make Valuable Things

Upon the release of Childish Gambino’s final studio album, Cherith King revisits an exploration of his contribution to the “new black Gothic.”

By Cherith KingAugust 6, 2024

“YOU’VE GOT TO MAKE VALUABLE THINGS,” Donald Glover told Zane Lowe during an interview to promote Bando Stone and the New World (2024), his sixth and supposedly final studio album under the Childish Gambino moniker. Glover doesn’t see his exit as a strategic calculation, or a bitter move from the industry—he sees this album as one of “sincerity,” of “very valuable stuff.”

I approached Bando Stone with the same expectation I’ve adopted for all of Glover’s projects: to be surprised by “the moment” he creates. Glover has a track record of constructing expansive environments around his albums. This undertaking began with his second studio album, Because the Internet (2013), a release accompanied by a short film and script. In 2019, he co-wrote the screenplay for Guava Island, a film in which he stars and contributes the soundtrack. Bando Stone and the New World is his largest musical project yet: its release comes with a forthcoming film and world tour, starting next week on August 11. Now that its run has come to an end, the Childish Gambino project is revealed to be largely about “the moment,” with a meaning that has fluctuated with and for the time he creates within.

In 2018, Childish Gambino’s artistic image evolved into a double identity, one of the satirical artist and cultural commentator, with his release of “This Is America,” a deliberately political song about the exploitative exhibition of Black suffering and pain on the American stage. Despite the plagiarism controversy, the song’s cultural significance created conversation. Glover’s single about Jim Crow, gun violence, and racial ignorance was so popular that it won four Grammys. Once again, Childish Gambino created a moment, but this time, it painted a bloody, raw, horrific picture.

In an LARB essay from that same year, Sheri-Marie Harrison defined Glover’s artistic expression as belonging to the “new black Gothic” revival, one to which filmmaker Jordan Peele and writer Jesmyn Ward also belong. Harrison writes: “‘This Is America’ participates in and is informed by this much larger aesthetic conversation, employing Gothic tropes to embed contemporary developments such as mandatory minimum sentencing and the War on Drugs in a longer history of slavery and Jim Crow.” Even when Glover is being funny (to be expected, given his comedy background), he creates very real “moments” to communicate directly with his audience. In his Emmy-winning comedy series Atlanta (2016–22), amid humor, Glover retains the serious moments with visceral scenes of racial inequality and systemic injustice. Harrison writes that through his art, Glover displays how “the laughter of the new black Gothic is always proximate to the ways in which daily black life can suddenly descend into horror.”

When asked about his musical career, Glover has said that he always thought of the Childish Gambino name as “a child growing into a boss, like a Gambino,” and that he knew this “character” he created would eventually end. Through Childish Gambino, Glover has stretched the boundaries of music and media in a way that has led not only to the production of massive hits but also to vital cultural conversations. For more than a decade, Glover’s Childish Gambino project has blurred genre lines and created societal markers that have permanently altered the course of music and media. In other words, Glover has satisfied his own commands by making not one but many valuable things.