Donald Glover Has Always Been This Good

Donald Glover was doing something interesting long before Community, and Community was already enough. As Childish Gambino he makes hip-hop with no interest in performing toughness—no posturing, no borrowed swagger, none of the exhausting theater of credibility that the genre keeps demanding from people. Sober is the latest track: loose, lightly romantic, carrying a Michael Jackson quality he wears without making a thing of it. It just is what it is.

There are plenty of artists who work very hard to seem effortless and land somewhere adjacent to it. Glover doesn’t appear to be working at all. That’s either a talent or a gift, and I’ve stopped trying to distinguish between the two. The music sounds like nobody else’s. That’s the only thing that ever actually matters.