Existentialism is something everyone ends up thinking a lot about. There’s a reason quarter-life, and especially mid-life crisis is in our collective vocabulary. We all know what it means to have those; drowning yourself in material possessions, using any sort of mind-altering substance consistently, and making poor long-term choices for your short-term benefit. Once we get to a certain age, these thoughts seem like they never really leave, we just get better at controlling them. I’ve recently been struggling these past couple months while this thought planted itself in my mind and the one artist that’s helped me the most right now is Donald Glover.
After his hit Youtube comedy show called Derrick Comedy with his college buddies, his first big job was writing for 30 Rock. That helped him get his role as Troy on the cult classic Community, a sitcom about a group of people from all places in life coming together in community college. The show never reached the status of The Office, but it’s creators and directors have gone on to make Rick and Morty and direct Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. Before the fifth season of Community, Donald decided to leave to become more independent, which included pursuing his musical career and creating Atlanta. His musical alter ego, Childish Gambino, had been around the entire time he was at Community. The music was very punch-line heavy hip hop that depending on how you looked at it, was either hilariously good or laughably bad. His 2011 album Camp was loved by college students, but resented by most critics, exemplified with Pitchfork giving it a 1.6 out of 10. The 2012 mixtape Royalty was received slightly better, but many of the same problems remained. It was lighthearted, easy going, and made for people to have fun too. Everything would change with his 2013 world, Because the Internet.
I. Because The Internet
Because The Internet revolved around an album, but it was the most all-encompassing world someone has attempted to create in a long time. The album is supposed to soundtrack a 73-page surreal script written by Donald, two different short films that provided both visuals and more context to the story, and the interactive tour that brought the world of The Boy to life. The Boy is the main character in the script, and Donald literally brought him to life in interviews and public appearances. Every interview he did at the time showed him wearing the exact same clothes, acting differently than his usual self, and talking a lot about existentialism. He would do live listening parties of the album in public parks around the country and would act as The Boy at these events, which included a book about philosophy called Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche & Kafka. The Boy is at the heart of everything here and to truly understand him and what makes him tick, we need to look into the script deeper.
The Boy, who is roughly the same as Glover (physically), lives with his father (Rick Ross) and likes to troll people online, so much so that he even refers to himself as an online Bill O’Reilly. After seeing someone get shot outside of a club, The Boy begins to contemplate his life and he devolves into parties, escaping with his friends, and trying to revive former relationships. Towards the end of the story, he even starts to deal drugs in order to try and escape the feelings. Throughout the story, he sees the phrase “roscoe’s wetsuit” on the walls. Constantly trying to figure out what it means, The Boy starts off lightly thinking about it before ending up all-consumed with the thought of this phrase, even threatening to murder someone he saw writing it. Without getting too deep into it, because the script itself is detailed enough for a very long article, it ends with The Boy peacefully drowning in a pool. But in fact, the visual Donald has for the final song is The Boy sitting in a coffee shop on his phone, implying that this is either a flashback to earlier in The Boy’s life, or that The Boy wrote the entire story to troll you. Personally, I believe the latter is more likely, but either one would fit the meaning of this story.
That’s what everything ends up coming back to, what does this mean. What is the point of making this entire world to live it. In one sense, you could argue the meaning is to show how nihilistic the internet generation is. The access to everything does come with lots of positives, but it also comes with the loss of innocence about the world at a young age and knowing all the negativity the world has to offer. While it does capture that feeling well, I would argue Frank Ocean’s masterpiece Blonde captures the malaise and borderline depression feeling that encompasses the millenial and Gen-Z generations more accurately. From my point of view, the meaning lands in the phrase “roscoe’s wetsuit”. To put it bluntly, roscoe’s wetsuit means nothing. It’s whole purpose is to show how things are memed into society for no reason. Just like how I always ask my brother “why” when he shows me memes and never has an answer, roscoe’s wetsuit is the same way. From my perspective, this whole experience of an album means the same thing, nothing. To quote the final verse on the album, “Life’s the Biggest Troll’, but the joke is on us. Yeah, the joke’s you showed up.”
It sounds like a depressing way to look at life, but Donald doesn’t necessarily look at it like that. In his 2013 interview with Vice, he would say this on the topic, “Since I started hanging out with Fam I just stopped trying to make it OK. People want you to think that it's OK, you're OK, take these pills, you'll be OK. But it's not OK. And instead of trying to make it OK and being told that I need to do certain things to cope, I've decided that maybe nothing is wrong and everybody feels this way. So maybe I should go with it.” I would argue that Donald is kind of right here. Or at least, it seems right from my point of view right now. It seems like everyone constantly has these thoughts in their head. To quote Eleanor from The Good Place, “All humans are aware of death, so we’re all a little bit sad all the time.” I don’t know if I truly understood that quote until just a couple months ago. It’s so uncomfortable having these thoughts that you do spend almost every day late at night trying to fend them off your brain and eventually you just have to accept them. For Donald, it seems like instead of trying to quell these thoughts in his head, he was almost inviting them at this time, like these thoughts were forcing him to work harder in his creative passions. Even in just the one Vice interview I mentioned above, he mentions death on at least three separate questions that weren’t about death to begin with. There’s no possible way that’s a healthy way to live for a long period of time, thinking about death that much.
Sadly though, much of the internet is teaching kids to feel this way. That constant existential crisis feeling is something that the internet encourages for many reasons. We’ll get to a big reason later, but another is just the overall negativity that’s everywhere on the internet. You can’t go anywhere and see people truly agreeing to collectively live better and look at death as a positive thing. Instead, everywhere you turn, there’s people arguing. There are times where a healthy, innocent argument is happening, like whether Yeezus or The Life of Pablo is Kanye’s experimental masterpiece, but the vast majority of arguments are detrimental to people. You can’t talk about advancing science forward without anti-vaxxers in the comments. Watching music videos for any artist aren’t safe either, as the comments are filled with racism, misogyny, etc. The internet is truly a cesspool of knowledge and hatred. Now, we all seem to instinctively know this, but Glover was telling us as it was happening to him in 2013. That feeling is what this generation is related to, but luckily it seems like Donald has found a way out of the algorithm.
II. The Algorithm
The algorithm has dominated Donald’s vernacular for the past few years. When he’s been able to speak freely, he always mentions the algorithm. When Donald accepted his Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series, the very first thing he did was thank the algorithm while glancing upwards. Since he started his final tour as Childish Gambino in 2018, the show would open with an (at the time) unreleased song called “Algorhythm”. The song even evolved in real time from the studio version he sent ticket holders, the rap version he performed live, the song structure change he would perform in Europe and at festivals in 2019, and the studio version that got released last year.
Of course, the question comes up, what is the algorithm? The algorithm represents society and the higher powers that are there control us. They’re not necessarily a bad thing, but they’re something that you’re forced to live within. He talks about his experience with the algorithm in a New Yorker profile in 2018, “I learn fast—I figured out the algorithm. When people become depressed and kill themselves, it’s because all they see is the algorithm, the loop.” It seems apparent here that the algorithm is society, and the loop is the circle of life. In Donald’s head, he figured out society and life. To figure out why, we need to look at his newest, abstract project that’s his most vague yet.
3.15.20 is Donald’s most recent musical project and easily his most all over the place. It did have the previously mentioned “Algorhythm” song on it, in which Donald rapped through a robotic sound effect, almost making himself act like a compliant user of this service. That’s coupled with these metallic drums that drive the song, which I view as representing the algorithm. The song ends by doing the musical equivalent of a mental breakdown. Everything from people yelling to car horns can be heard in the background of this literal noise piece to end the track, almost like Donald is breaking the algorithm.
Now that he’s broken the algorithm, the rest of the project is him trying to figure out his life outside of the all-encompassing algorithm. He had to find some sort of happiness in order to survive the bigger algorithm of life, especially after the loss of his father. The answer comes in the final track, where Donald’s voice is finally free of any filter or autotune, “There is love in every moment under the sun, boy. I did what I wanted to.” Donald’s answer for how to deal with this algorithm is, love.
When Donald was making Because The Internet, he was living in Chris Bosh’s mansion and traveling around with friends. While it sounds good enough to the average person, that was still leaving him emotionally empty and he now knows 7 years later that what he was missing was love. Instead of being the person needing love from his parents and other people, he is the parent giving love to his three kids. He’s succeeded not only in his career, but in creating a loving family. Instinctively, that drive to have your own family is something we thrive for.
Obviously me as someone who just turned 21 is a bit young to be thinking about having a legit family of my own, but contact with other people is something I’ve struggled with. Since I was young, school was always enough to fulfil my social needs. I would enjoy seeing friends while there, but not really help maintain the friendship outside of school and extracurriculars. During the pandemic, school has obviously stayed online and I thought I would be ok with it. For the first year, I was. I wasn’t putting in much more effort with maintaining human connections outside of my family and it was going well. A year later, and the effects are starting to take their toll on me. I am still in the same place as I was before, still attending the same community college, haven’t made more than a couple friends since I left high school, haven’t had the outlet of a concert, nothing. Even when I’ve tried to make connections, it hasn’t worked either. The last three scheduled events I had with other people, they haven’t shown up.
I imagine if I had to look at it, my mindstate is in a similar place as Because The Internet. Someone who spends most of their time online, consuming content, not a clear path forward, thinking about existential topics without any semblance of a solution right now because now we’re all in a global pandemic and can’t go out to places I would go. It’s a frustrating place to be in, even after these thoughts not leaving my head for multiple months. The initial super intense anxiety feeling is gone by now, but the deep dread is still there and I’m not sure if it’ll ever leave. But I can look at Donald Glover’s life and career to see that there’s somewhat of a solution to try and work towards. It lets me know that there is hope in the future that the constant thoughts can go away and I will find some meaning to live by.
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