HIP-HOP
Childish Gambino, "Because the Internet" (Glassnote)
Donald Glover's newest album as Childish Gambino is a self-aware portrait of a young man isolated by technology, celebrity and relentless introspection. Anyone who caught Glover's recent bloodletting Instagram session (in which he listed a barrage of self-criticisms on hotel stationery) might think that unplugging from the Web would give his brain a much-deserved break. But then he'd have lost his source material for this sometimes goofy, often sad, very capable laptop-rap album.
Trollish Web-culture jokes abound here (there's a song named after the indicted hacker Weev and the popular fight-video site Worldstar Hip-Hop), but it's all done in service of documenting the rootless, distracted millennial male mind. "3005" is a lush, electro-bendy production where he tries to muster up a commitment to fidelity; "Crawl" takes moves from Odd Future's gnarled, noisy goth-rap while "No Exit" nails the aimless night-driving of a guy who wants to be out late but suspects he's too old for this.
For fans who will miss his less-than-entirely-jovial exit from his day job on NBC's "Community," "Because the Internet" carves a place for him in today's Web-addled indie-rap world, even if some offline fresh air might do him some good as well.
August Brown, Los Angeles Times
B.O.B, "Underground Luxury" (Atlantic)
B.o.B arrived as a crafty, pop-leaning rapper-producer, scoring big hits with Bruno Mars on "Nothin' on You" and Paramore's Hayley Williams on "Airplanes." But the follow-up failed to click as well, so now we get "Underground Luxury," where he mostly dumbs down his sound to its most formulaic and crass, while cultivating an anti-hero persona.
He shows some style in "Headband" and some soul-searching in "Coastline," but mostly it's about buying crap, using women and putting out half-baked conspiracy theories, then wondering why people think he's a jerk. "I guess I bit off more than I could chew," he laments in "Nobody Told Me." Guess so.
