kay, so this one is tough for me. I’m giving a B for now, but I really do feel like that’s a placeholder rank. I just don’t have the context (musical or cultural) to really listen to it on its own terms right now, and what I did listen to made me confident that it deserves to be listened to on its own terms. I don’t tend to like rap, but I also haven’t ever listened to rap. Two reasons.
One, it doesn’t feel like it’s for me, it feels like it’s specifically not for me. Like, it’s black people singing black people music to black people. I don’t mean to mean that in a racist way, I mean to mean it in an uncertain way. How can I feel normal about listening to the n-word if one of the biggest taboos possible is for me to say it? I don’t want to ignore this genre, this music, because that would certainly be worse, because that creates distance when what I really want is to gain understanding. But I don’t know how to feel like I’m not intruding, somehow. I think the best I can do is try to listen and to learn and be respectful in my heart, and hope that that will eventually lead to understanding what respectful actions look like. Even if that’s uncomfortable and awkward right now.
Reason two is that, in my brain rap music is vulgar and repetitive and aggressive, it is high energy, it’s charged. And taking Childish Gambino as a representative sample, all of those things are pretty true. But, Glover points out that, yeah, it is dumb to rap about your dick, and that’s the whole point. I don’t know exactly what he means, but that kind of language and that kind of claim is very appealing to me, I want to learn more. Because all the parts that I heard that weren’t so vulgar and prodding I actually really liked, I thought were kinda awesome.
The first album, the most rap/hip-hop one (as far as I can tell) was alright, I was open and curious to it, up until the very last track, “That Power”. It’s almost 8 minutes long. The first 3 minutes are a song, and the last 5 are just Glover telling a story (a poem, really), with the chords of the song on loop in the background. It’s a good story, he tells it well, he’s engaging and that kind of thing is just such a vibe anyway, but toward the end, as he’s wrapping it all up, he says, “This isn’t a story about how girls are evil or how love is bad. This is a story about how I learned something, and I’m not saying this thing is true or not, I’m just saying it’s what I learned.” And, just, that’s awesome. What a line. Anybody who’s writing stuff like that’s gotta be cool, y’know?
So yeah, I can’t say that I loved everything about this on my first go, and I can’t even say that it was pleasant to listen to the whole time. But I think I can say that I’m not done with it yet, and I hope and believe that by the time I am, once I’ve better learned how to listen to it, I’ll like it quite a bit.
tunafruitsandwitch 