Playing Around After the Party: Because the Internet 10 Years Later

A decade later, the anxieties of fame and the sonic and formal risks of the album represent a key turning point in Donald Glover's rap career.

By Justin A. Davis  |  December 11, 2023 | 10:00am
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Playing Around After the Party: Because the Internet 10 Years Later
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Donald Glover’s most recent full-length album, 3.15.20, was supposed to be his last under the Childish Gambino moniker. For the past seven years, the actor, screenwriter and musician has flitted between showrunning for FX and Amazon, picking up roles in blockbuster movie franchises and expanding his rap career into trippy, sun-soaked funk and electronic music. In a red carpet interview at this year’s Golden Globes, Glover took a more open-ended tone: “You don’t have to worry about that. He’ll be back.” The Childish Gambino name is only a sliver of Glover’s impact these days—but 12 years ago, that balance was a lot less clear.

In fact, they often seemed fundamentally at odds with each other: Glover—the endearing comedy writer and actor with an edgy, ironic streak in his viral sketches and standup—and Gambino—his indie rap name that famously came from a Wu-Tang name generator. Just before dropping his major-label debut Camp in 2011, Glover used camera tricks to interview Gambino for Rolling Stone, lobbing pointed questions at himself. “Why do you rap like shit?” Glover asked. “A lot of people have said I sound like Lil Wayne,” Gambino answered back. “People say I sound like Kanye… I don’t know where that comes from.”

Those comparisons didn’t come from nowhere. Throughout his early work as Gambino, a few stylistic trademarks had already stood out in Glover’s rapping and production style: Ye’s maximalism, Lil Wayne’s monk-like devotion to the punchline, Drake’s pop sensibility and the nerdy reference points of Blog Era indie rap at large. Throughout Camp, Glover’s lyrics leaned into an intense underdog complex along multiple fronts, confronting fans and critics who might put him into a box because of his race, class and cultural reference points. The production, helmed by Glover and Community composer Ludwig Göransson, paired bombastic pop rap with walls of club-adjacent synths and keys, driving chants and baroque flourishes.

Camp received the full gambit of reactions from critics—from NME’s Barry Nicholson (who called it “hip-hop album of the year”) to Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen (who called it “one of the most uniquely unlikable rap records of this year (and most others)”). Glover followed up in 2012 with his ROYALTY mixtape, which felt like a firmer step into the hip-hop world; less big-picture character work, more refining his style from track to track. It was a star-studded affair, featuring guests from Ghostface and Nipsey Hussle to Beck and Tina Fey. A few of these guests became vital touchstones for the music that Glover would make next, like his brother Stephen, Kilo Kish, Chance the Rapper and Göransson.

Throughout 2012, Glover toured with Chance and Danny Brown to promote these two projects, struggling to balance his growing musical profile with being one of Community’s breakout stars. As fall turned to winter, Glover began working on a new project. In a series of notes he posted to Instagram a year later, laid out on hotel stationery, he wrote that that winter’s archetypal loneliness set the mood in a vital way: “I WANT PEOPLE TO [HEAR] THIS ALBUM WHEN EVERYTHING’S CLOSED. WHEN EVERYTHING SLOWS DOWN AND QUIET. SO YOU CAN START OVER.” He rented an L.A. mansion from NBA star Chris Bosh, turning it into a temporary studio and hangout space where friends and musicians would sleep between recording sessions. During this time, Beck once asked Glover an offhand question about “whether rappers talk to each other.” When Glover replied, “I don’t like starting answers with this, but because the internet…,” Beck quipped that this could be his next album title. They shrugged it off as a joke at first, but the phrase stuck.

The lead up to Because the Internet revealed Glover’s recording environment in a mystifying way. In August, 2013, Glover dropped Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, a 25-minute film that takes place across a day in Bosh’s mansion. Scenes of Glover, Göransson and their cohort evaluating tracks are interrupted by quiet panoramas, short, meandering conversations and surreal vignettes. One moment shows Chance losing a game of Connect Four to “All Gold Everything” rapper Trinidad James; in another, Glover investigates a nosebleed and pulls a long string from his left nostril, revealing a gold tooth tied to the end. You could imagine an album coming together in scenes like these—celebrities and friends mingling in this massive estate, Glover giving and requesting feedback in his makeshift studio—but what we’re presented with feels uncanny and trancelike. As Glover put it, “the film captured how I was feeling at the time. Not just in the house, but in the world. The drifting, the not-knowing.” Before anyone really knew what the album would be, its world was bleeding out into our own.

Glover’s acting career began a major transition in the summer of 2013 after he announced he was leaving Community. Rumors began to circulate that he was leaving to pursue music full-time, but he denied this in his hotel stationery notes. “I DIDN’T LEAVE COMMUNITY TO RAP,” he scrawled. “I WANTED TO BE ON MY OWN.” As Clapping for the Wrong Reasons racked up views, Glover began preparing a new show for FX called Atlanta, set in the region where he’d grown up and its vast, vibrant hip-hop scene.

Once the album was formally announced in October, the rollout started to feel more like performance art. Glover began showing up on prominent radio shows like The Breakfast Club, Sway in the Morning and Tim Westwood TV, always sporting a white tee, brown shearling coat and fur-lined trapper hat. On Sway’s show, Glover freestyled over Drake and Jay-Z’s track “Pound Cake,” taking on a moody, muted tone; when he paused mid-verse to talk with Sway and then seamlessly transitioned back to rapping, it became a viral moment. Crowds of fans flocked to impromptu listening parties held in parks, live shows in mansions where fans’ phones were confiscated and a multimedia installation at Rough Trade’s famous New York store—all through the power of social media.

But when Because the Internet finally dropped on December 10th, 2013, Glover revealed one more card up his sleeve. Accompanying the album was a 72-page screenplay of the same name that tied the album and its rollout together. The screenplay follows a character named simply “The Boy,” a “rich kid asshole” who feeds on toxic online interactions and strained relationships; as the story progresses, The Boy eventually finds a comfortable romance and success as a drug dealer until he’s busted by undercover cops. It’s quintessentially postmodern, surreal and deeply cynical. Many of the proposed cast members were fixtures in Bosh’s mansion; the role of The Boy’s absent father is cheekily offered to Rick Ross. Between Because the Internet’s dry, eccentric humor and emotional emptiness, the project’s many parts question our shared relationship to a public commons where our increasingly short attention spans rub up against the uncomfortable fact that nothing ever really goes away. It’s a striking attempt to highlight the ways that digital culture masks a deep, abiding loneliness while we watch the world grow more and more interconnected.

Although you don’t need the screenplay to follow the music, Because the Internet is full of cinematic quirks: instrumental interludes and the noise of turning pages, chirping birds, crowds and car doors. On “III. Telegraph Ave. (“Oakland” by Lloyd),” Glover sings along to a twinkling R&B cut that’s playing on an L.A. radio station. We hear the hum of the engine, the quiet beeps of phone notifications and the distant buzz of Lloyd’s voice, until Glover’s version of the song suddenly takes over in a wave of sound. And just like his radio freestyles, Glover moves seamlessly between rapping, singing and dialogue; on the 90-second sprint of “I. The Party,” his brash flexes spiral until he yells for his guests to leave—as if he’s too angry to keep rapping anymore.

The album’s production moves seamlessly between mainstream pop rap, indie, harsh prog-rap and lush R&B—foreshadowing the scatterbrained, digitally-minded aesthetic of artists like JPEGMAFIA or Brockhampton. There are fluttering acoustic ballads (like “I. Flight of the Navigator”) and soaring vocal harmonies (like Jhené Aiko’s appearance on the bright and woozy “I. Pink Toes”); “3005,” with its bubbly synths and existential angst, sounds like a club hit turned on its head. Göransson recalled that Glover “wanted to experiment more and try to figure out how to create this really new amazing sound. I was trying to figure out if he even wanted me involved at all.” As it turned out, Göransson again became central to Glover’s aesthetic, with added help from producers like Stefan Ponce, Christian Rich, Sam Spiegel (brother of filmmaker Spike Jonze), UK experimentalist Pop Levi and bass virtuoso Thundercat.

Looking back, the sound is in subtle conversation with the Chicago indie rap scene that birthed Chance, Ponce and Vic Mensa: the way Because the Internet swings between jazzy instrumentation, neo soul and glitchy psychedelia recalls standout mixtapes from that year like Acid Rap (where Glover and Göransson both appear as guests) and Mensa’s INNANETAPE. It also shares some similarities with Kilo Kish’s 2013 mixtape K+, which dropped ten months before Because the Internet and features Glover on two tracks. Like Glover’s own album, K+ dives headfirst into left-field hip-hop and R&B tinged with electronic music, pairing harsh, buzzing percussion with bubbly synths, guitars and keys. The two projects share a saturated color palette and a fascination with breaking open moments of awkward tension; Kish’s airy, conversational delivery feels like a natural complement to Glover’s. Chance provides the chorus to “The Worst Guys”—a booming, playful single that sounds like putting a dial tone through an autotune filter—while Kish offers a bridge on Because the Internet’s most ambitious cut, “II. Zealots of Stockholm (Free Information).”

“Zealots” is a dark, glitchy prog-rap journey, swinging between two moods across three movements. It opens and closes with soaring strings, spare piano with slight flourishes of texture; The Boy reveals himself as an “existential asthmatic” in the lyrics here, struggling to reconcile losing his faith in religious, family and social ties. In between, droning vocal samples and pulsing drums drop in and out, while a deep, buzzing synth makes a jagged cut above them. “Is it real cause you’re online?” asks Kish; Glover describes a toxic hookup in a Swedish club, with a woman who disregards her partner with a kind of two-faced despair. Any serendipity that might come from two people from opposite sides of the world meeting is immediately undercut by emotional numbness, as the woman is unfazed by the prospect of cheating: “What about dude? ‘Fuck him, I just really wanna feel something.’”

In 2022, Glover interviewed himself again—this time in a longform piece for Interview Magazine. As he reflected on this moment in his career, he had a lot of praise for Because the Internet’s story and themes: “It’s the rap OK Computer. It’s prescient in tone and subject matter and it’s extremely influential. And I know no one’s gonna give me that until I’m dead. But it’s true.”

Some parts of the album do feel achingly prescient in hindsight. Take “II. Worldstar,” a scathing indictment of the rising popularity of sites like WorldstarHipHop and the economy of cruel spectacle they created. Through The Boy’s jaded persona, we get images of people seeking out virality by any means, hoping to twist it into income. Glover drops rich boy brags while comparing his narrator to Martin Scorsese, telling a cell phone cameraman to “hold it horizontal, man, be a professional” with a disaffected murmur. The production matches this emotional vacuum, too. We start off with driving, bubbly synths and fat 808s, until the beat drops out to a brief interlude—as his brother Stephen (credited as Steve G. Lover) casually describes a video of someone bleeding from their head. Then, we’re suddenly dropped back in: The beat slows down and a melancholy saxophone drifts across it, like the first exhale after holding your breath as long as you can.

“We all big brother now,” Glover raps, in between images of fight compilations with strangers and cops, drugged roommates and women dancing on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame—anticipating a moment where the lines between public and private life are fundamentally blurred. It’s striking to look back at this song and find ourselves there. Glover’s references to digital culture range from the unavoidably mainstream to the internet’s dark underbelly. The last track’s title and chorus reference Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a right-wing hacker and troll who was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for helping collect user data through an AT&T security flaw. It’s deeply unsettling to hear Glover juxtapose himself, The Boy and Auernheimer, but that feeling is intentional: We’re meant to feel tangled up together in a web.

Still, perhaps the full package of Because the Internet wasn’t as successful or groundbreaking as some critics initially viewed it. Its many moving parts and performance art approach have largely been lost in our collective memory. When you look at the dual numbering of the tracklist, for example—a reference to the screenplay’s scene numbers—it’s a stark reminder that most listeners will never encounter the screenplay (or its story) at all. Glover’s songwriting often works against him, too: like on his earlier releases, some of Because the Internet’s most reflective and emotional tracks are undercut by shallow wordplay and clunky moments of crass humor. Glover’s use of Asian women as lyrical set pieces is painfully fetishistic at times; some of his casual references feel jarring in context (like bringing up the Gaza strip in the middle of “3005”’s anxious playfulness) and the album’s edgiest jokes have aged like milk.

But Because the Internet’s sonic and formal risks—and its anxiety over Glover’s relationship to celebrity—represent a key turning point in his career. In the years since, Glover’s become more widely accepted as a forward-thinking jack of all trades. The dry surrealism on display throughout the album has become a central part of Glover’s style, while the braintrust he created in the process has grown essential to his artistic vision. Hiro Murai, who directed “Clapping for the Wrong Reasons” and all of Because the Internet’s music videos, has been a constant presence, working closely with him on Atlanta, their movie Guava Island and future music videos like “Sober” and “This Is America.”

“Where’s the line between Donny G and Gambino?” Glover raps on Because the Internet’s closer. In a textbook Glover move, the song that most clearly articulated this tension never actually made it onto the album. “yaphet kotto (freestyle),” named for the acclaimed Black actor who starred in Live and Let Die, Alien and Homicide: Life on the Street, was the song that heralded the album’s arrival two months before its release. The lyrics are a status update on the place where The Boy and Glover’s worlds meet, flitting between pride, self-deprecating humor and existential crisis. Driven by a wailing soul sample, the track invokes Glover and Gambino in equal measure, pointing out the porous boundaries between different modes of Black performance: “‘Who knew every rapper with a new crew wanna do shit on Hulu?’ That’s the blueprint: you drive until the lease up.”

Like so much of what surrounded the album, “yaphet kotto” exists in a kind of liminal space: It’s a thesis statement that holds the record together while being absent from it. A short music video shows Glover floating still in a swimming pool, dead leaves swirling in the water around him. It’s a reference to the end of the screenplay where The Boy, facing undercover cops, asks them to let him drown in his swimming pool: “It looks peaceful. Fitting. He’d like to go out like that.” We’re not told or shown explicitly what happens to The Boy in the end; the album’s closing notes lead straight back into the intro. Instead, Glover leaves us to do the same work as him, to cut through the noise and find an answer for ourselves.

 
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