Donald Glover’s run as Childish Gambino will come to an end with the 2024 album and accompanying feature film, Bando Stone & the New World. Between his 2011 debut album Camp until now, Childish Gambino has produced some of the most visually stimulating music videos of this era in hip-hop. The thematics in these videos are just as complex as what he’s rapping about and the theme of the video doesn’t even line up with the song’s lyrics, but everything always ties itself together.
Continue reading for an overview of some of the best Childish Gambino music videos.
Photography: YouTube
This 2018 smash hit had an extremely viral moment after its release, and it won four Grammys that year. In an abstract way, the song is a commentary on life in the United States. The music video was released alongside the song and the imagery drives home the song’s meaning through shocking and horrific things happening around a constantly dancing Childish Gambino. It may take a few views to totally grasp everything that’s happening.
Bando Stone & the New World
Out of all the songs in Childish Gambino’s discography, Lithonia is one of the furthest away from what his sound normally is (if you can actually pin that down). The song itself harkens back to the days of stadium-filling rock power ballads, but the video is definitely a lot more shocking. It begins with Childish Gambino and a rock band performing the song in a living room for a small groups of people seated on the floor. Two minutes in, the experience of watching this video becomes something different entirely.
Camp
While the song and video definitely do not match, there’s still a deeper story in what we see on screen. The video depicts a group of teenagers sitting around a campfire as camp counselor tells a scary story that ends in the death of a boy. Gambino plays the boy, who at the start of the video, appears coughing up blood with a noose around his neck. As he realizes what’s happening he runs through a wooded area to the group of kids to warn them, but gets there and no one can see or hear him. He ends the video by falling to the ground in disbelief, while the noose reappears around his neck.
Atavista
Childish Gambino takes cues from jazz pioneer Cab Calloway in a video that sees Gambino and his bandmates (named Johnny and the Pipes) perform in front of a crowd that isn’t so forgiving of performances they don’t like. The crowd is wholly disinterested until a man walks towards the performers with a gun. As Johnny turns around, his hand hits the gun, which fires into the man. This event awakened the crowd to the performance, and the situation resembles the way people seek out violence and drama online and in turn desensitize themselves to more positive things.
Because the Internet
3005 was the lead single on Childish Gambino’s breakout album Because the Internet, which came with an accompanying 72-page screenplay about a central character named, The Boy. It’s a simplistic video that shows The Boy rapping the song lyrics while riding a ferris wheel with a large stuffed bear, and as the ride continues, the bear starts to look more damaged. Many interpreted the lyrics as a love song, but Childish Gambino himself describes it as an existential song. One you can that you can sing about anything, whether that’s a past partner, a vice, money or anything else with a large presence in your own life.
Because the Internet
The lyrics to the song play as The Boy bragging about his own success, accomplishments and the spoils as well. Juxtaposed against the visuals, the song touches on the close relationship between the image of a commercially successful rap artist, how his behavior influences everyone around him, but also how empty it feels to be praised for behavior he comes to realize is harmful. As The Boy repeatedly walks in a loop from the entrance of a diner, to the back exit and back around to the front. Each time around, more of the diner’s patrons are depicted with their own bodies and The Boy’s head.
Summer Pack
With a sultry instrumental and an animated music video to focus on, you may miss the real meaning behind the lyrics — they’re about climate change. But the constant appearance of more than 50 popular Black celebrities is likely to distract most people from the lyrics of the song. This creates a situation that mirrors real life, where the public is laser focused on the lives of others while the health of the environment slowly declines.
Camp
Heartbeat was the second single from Childish Gambino’s first label-backed album, Camp. It’s a story about a couple that can’t quite move past each other after a breakup. Among other songs on the album that deal in themes of not fitting in and race relations, this classic pop love song shows off Gambino’s musical range. The video, unlike some of his others, also follows the same linear storyline given by the lyrics.