What Donald Glover Can Teach Us About The Nature of Identity0

By Edward Kelly

On paper, it seems like a no-brainer. Comedy and rap should, in theory, go together like Shakespeare and the stage – or CBS and derivative police procedurals. Even on a surface level, the similarities between comedy and hip-hop are many. Both are, essentially, spoken word art forms that are performed, at least in the beginning, at open mic nights in front of sometimes-hostile crowds. Both are very much raw and individual acts – an oftentimes undiluted, nerve-wracking display of what happens when a fan stops simply appreciating and starts producing material. As such, they invite a very personal dissection of an artist’s skill and talent.

But in practice comedy and rap rarely combine successfully. Sure, performers like MC Frontalot or MC Chris or Baddd Spellah are rappers and comedians, but part of their success is attributable to the postmodern, wink-wink comedic juxtaposition of gangsta rap clichés mixed with nerd culture quips. And while I love the nerdcore rappers, I can’t help but feel like I’m held at arms length. There’s an artifice there that can’t be bridged because, they’re essentially playing characters.

Rappers (and really all musicians) are at their best when the music feels, for lack of a less overused word, “real.” When Ice Cube told us that it was a good day because he didn’t have to use his AK, there was a certain sense of truth – a frustrated, angry condemnation of a society that allows injustice to continue. Likewise, transcendent comedy occurs when the comedian isn’t afraid to be uncomfortably honest about his life, such as when Louis CK rants about his young daughters’ bratty attitudes. The difference, of course, is that Cube uses testosterone-fueled posturing, while CK opts for exaggerated self-deprecation. Does that mean that CK doesn’t care about the injustice he sees in the world or that Cube isn’t aware of the inherently absurd nature of childrearing?

I don’t know the answer. But I have the feeling that Donald Glover does.

Donald Glover is the type of artist that I love. He plays Troy, the not-terribly-bright jock on NBC’s Community. Glover is also a member of the Derrick Comedy troupe and wrote and starred in the ridiculously funny independent comedy Mystery Team. He also wrote for 30 Rock and, yeah, he’s only 26, which just might make him the envy of all my friends and me. Furthermore, in interviews he comes across as a modest, hard-working, lively nerd.

In contrast, Childish Gambino is Glover’s rap avatar. His most recent album, Culdesac, was released this past summer. On it, he raps about the usual suspects: girls, money, how awesome he is, etc. That might sound dismissive, but that’s only because I can’t do him justice in print. The guy’s got style, his beats are irresistibly catchy, his lyrics are beyond clever, and the songs intriguingly alternate between quotable bon mots and angry-young-man vitriol.

It seems Glover simultaneously occupies two very different worlds. As a rapper, he’s great. As a comedian, he’s fantastic. The common thread through his work is one of inherent loneliness. In Mystery Team, Glover plays an overeager man-child who is forced to face the reality that he and his childhood friends will all be moving on to different colleges soon. Throughout Culdesac, Gambino uses variations of the phrase “I’m just different.”

This is where being an obsessive pop culture enthusiast comes in handy. You see, I’ve become a cynical guy when it comes to famous people. I tend to have my theories and prejudices about certain tabloid fixtures, mainly because I have no sense of who they are as people. They’re just pictures with scintillating headlines next to them and I won’t be pushed to look beyond whatever sensationalism “US Weekly” is pushing this week. Is Kate Gosselin a bad mother? All right, whatever. Is Jennifer Aniston doomed to die alone? Yep, probably. Is it true that Lady Gaga is insane? Uh, okay?

They’re one dimensional to me. Now logically you might think, “Well, okay, if the easy-to-follow tabloid narrative divorces you from celebs’ lives, then wouldn’t having two entirely different images of one celebrity further divorce you from a person’s true soul? Shouldn’t it be harder to connect to someone like Glover when his alter ego is just as convincing as his primary identity?”

The answer: no. It actually engenders the opposite reaction. Because make no mistake about it: Gambino and Glover are two very different personalities, but at the same time I get the sense that one cannot exist without the other. Like I said, being ostracized is a common thread found throughout Glover’s work and thus while one side opts to deal with that feeling via the tried and tested “Tragedy + Time = Comedy” equation, the other side, either intentionally or not, chooses to mire in the struggle to find a voice and overcome said tragedy. Now, I don’t know Glover in the sense that I’ve talked to him or even been in the same room as him, but I feel as though there’s a mind at work that will surprise everyone, in much the same way that Steve Martin used to stop his stand-up gigs cold to pluck a mournful tune on his banjo. The brain is a fascinating thing and when someone as downright ballsy as Glover elects to allow an audience access to a different part of his psyche, you should probably pay attention because you never know what you’ll find.

And the Glover/Gambino dichotomy speaks to something larger: the two halves represent both sides of the 21st century human condition. In the age in which we live, everyone is (or should be) concerned about perception vs. reality. However, I believe that the gulf between the two is more a reflection of the differences between our internal and external selves – which are both very real. Thus everyone has that Gambino side to their personality. Gambino is the base side – Freud called it the “Id,” the portion that just wants pleasure and forgoes societal norms. Glover represents the side of ourselves that we show in public – the polite, humble side that is more palatable to the rest of the waking world. All of us might hope that we’re putting our best “Glover” foot forward (if you don’t believe me, go ahead and check all your friends’ Facebook profile pics and see which ones are accurate representations of their true identities), but we all have that other side, the Gambino side, that stays mired in darkness and says honest-but-ugly things from time to time when our vocabulary fails us in tandem with a mental filter malfunction.

Is Glover “really” the absurd funnyman who made “I have the weirdest boner right now” one of my favorite lines of the 2009-2010 TV season? Or is he “really” Gambino who says, “Dress like a gentleman, my mouth is never civilized”?

I think the real question is: does it matter?