Camp – Childish Gambino

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2011	Camp	Childish Gambino	★★½	51	Hip-Hop

Childish Gambino’s debut studio album Camp is a bit of a mixed bag. The sitcom writer and actor turned rapper puts his creativity and personality on display, hints at a wide range of different influences and utilizes different vocal styles, while showing he still has a lot to learn as a lyricist and performer.

Donald Glover is clearly influenced as an artist by Kanye West, and is drawn to things like string samples, 808s and softer R&B and soul elements that allow him to both rap and sing. The more artistically produced tracks here like “Heartbeat,” “Les,” “Hold You Down” and “Kids” sound good and do a good job at showing off his creative and more sentimental side. 

While Glover can clearly rap and sing, at times on Camp his style feels out of place or buried by a track’s production. “All The Shines” seems like a track that should work as a big, moving, emotional high on the record,but isn’t as seamless as I’d like it to be. He sounds solid on it when he’s talking and when he sings, but the beautiful strings in the instrumental gets a bit too epic and swelling, in a way that his performance gets lost and the transitions between song sections are choppy, especially with the loud, stomp and clap drums (which are used ad nauseam throughout the record). 

His interests though in other internet rap groups like Odd Future or more lyrical emcees like those in Black Hippy sometimes leads him astray. This is especially apparent with the more angry or braggadocious delivery he uses on the record’s more intense beats like “Bonfire,” “Backpack” and “You See Me.” It sounds like he’s trying to rap fast or say kind of hard lines to prove that he can, not really because he wants to. The songs on their surface actually sound pretty fine and fun, but when you dig into them there isn’t much there, and the beats fill a role in a cookie-cutter kind of way while Glover’s just not up to the task as a wordsmith at this point in his career. 

I do think Glover’s personality comes through on the record though, with a few pretty funny/clever lines and references to his interests like indie and electronic music and television. And his autobiographical lyrics do a good job talking about his current struggles and conflicts, as well as his past, how he was raised, how he acted out in class, how his interest in the arts and comedy led people to make assumptions about him both in his career and his efforts to become a hip-hop star. The bars aren’t always as punchy as I’d hoped and the same few themes get repeated across the album, but I’d say he sounds solid for the most part, and the album works to tell an audience who he is, where he came from and where he’s trying to go beyond his acting career.