Childish Gambino

“I’m not trying to be for anybody anymore,” Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover, told Apple Music. “It’s too much work.” A valid sentiment coming from the multihyphenate artist. Sure, on the one hand, there’s Glover: the writer, actor, comedian, and director extraordinaire known for the sitcom Community and his original series (and homage to his hometown) Atlanta. Then there’s Gambino, the Grammy-winning musician and producer who’s not as easy to describe. 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. 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 electropop, all pushed to their experimental bounds, are good jumping-off points. Some of Gambino’s biggest hits, from the nimble display of “3005” (from 2013’s Because the Internet) and psychedelic soul of “Redbone” (2016’s “Awaken, My Love!”) to the blistering raps of “This Is America” (2018), share little in common aesthetically, yet he executes each with aplomb. In 2024, his once-unfinished 2020 project which became Atavista made its appearance. The same year, Gambino offered up Bando Stone and the New World, the final album from his alter-ego. (Although he’s since appeared on the 2025 JENNIE track “Damn Right”). “I remember seeing the ending of The Sopranos and being like, ‘I feel very content.’ And I know some people didn’t feel that way, but I remember watching it. It’s like, ‘Man, I have to make something that makes people OK with an ending like that.’”