I remember thinking, like, ‘Oh yeah, the 27-year-old thing.’ Because I was 27. They stayed in my room with me-basically saved my life. I threw up in my sleep on my back, and I was supposed to be alone that night, but my band decided to stay instead. “I got really drunk afterward, and that was the night that Amy Winehouse died. “We played ‘Bonfire’ first at House of Blues in San Diego,” says Glover, reclining on his hotel bed at the Renaissance Asheville. Whether you catch the reference or not, “human centipede” is also a perfect epithet to follow “You can kiss my ass.” As with almost all of Glover’s lines, it can be taken at least two ways, depending on what you know.
Human Centipede, like so many other Childish Gambino references, is an out-of-the-way attraction on the popular landscape: a horror movie in which a deranged scientist kidnaps tourists and sews their mouths to each other’s anuses to create a bizarre pet. I don’t know, all I know is I’m the best one. Man, why does every black actor gotta rap some? You wanna see my girl? I ain’t that dumb. Or you can fuckin’ kiss my ass, Human Centipede. “You’re my favorite rapper now” Yeah, dude, I better be, His recent performance of “Bonfire” on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon shows an explosive performer with satiric wit so biting it’d make Jonathan Swift blush:
In person, he’s true to the character he portrays on Community, Troy Barnes-middle-class black kid, funny, full of energy, unabashed lover of life, music and girls. It was tweeted and Tumblred to kingdom come.
Cumming on her face, / Now that’s poetry in motion.” This line became a mini-meme in literary circles, editors forwarding it, poets using it as their Facebook statuses. On the runaway YouTube hit “Freaks and Geeks” (4.7 million views so far, and more than 30,000 “likes”), he famously says, “But beware this shit is potent. Glover’s songs are loaded with literary references, too. Google and a penis reference, same sentence, goody goody!” So many layers of irony. I got a package like a gangsta: G-mail. 2,” the information-age-appropriate comedy of “I’mma hit it twice: retail. On “Bonfire” he overdoes it with, “My dick is like an accent mark / It’s all about the over-e’s.” And how about, in a guest appearance on J. Other rappers get clever, of course, as in Kanye’s lines from “Gorgeous”: “The same people that tried to blackball me / forgot about two things, my black balls.” But they’re not chronically, constantly, even suicidally clever the way Glover is, whose every line seems loaded with punning double-entendre. “I’ve been sitting on these hands since the end of the show,” he explains with a grin.īefore meeting Glover, the thing I’d noticed about his Childish Gambino persona was its incessant cleverness. When I meet up with him half an hour after his set, his handshake is warm. At one point during the show, he takes off the cap and sets it on the platform in front of the drum kit-then, a couple songs later, caves and put it back on. Never mind the weather, Glover sticks with his signature outfit, short-shorts and a polo, adding only a red-and-white striped wool cap for warmth. He’s literally on top at this year’s Moogfest in Asheville, N.C., elevation 2100 feet-and perhaps literally freezing, jumping around an outdoor stage on a night that would eventually get down to 27 degrees. “My career is like awards shows, it’s going long,” he says in “You Know Me” “I make it look real easy, like I’m showing thong.” Now, at 28, with his fourth album Camp releasing today on Glassnote Records (and already getting tons of hype), it’s hard not to agree that Glover is on top. Glover really does do all of it: He started writing for 30 Rock straight out of college, joined the ensemble cast of NBC’s Community in 2009, made a movie called Mystery Team that same year and showed it at Sundance, all the while performing standup and recording three full-length albums of his own distinctive brand of hyper-clever rap music. Nigga, I do all of it.”īut it isn’t just typical rap-world bluster. “Yeah! Yes I’m on top! I’m going this hard, and no I won’t stop!” shouts Childish Gambino, aka comic actor Donald Glover, in his song “Hero”-“Actor, writer, rapper.