Childish Gambino's Most Unexpected Career Moves

Yesterday, we learned that Donald Glover might not be calling himself Childish Gambino for much longer. As that's the only rap name we know him by, this came as a bit of a shock, but it's far from the first surprising move of his career. Ever the unconventional MC, Gambino is always throwing people for a loop, whether due to unexpected collaborations, attention-getting soundbites from interviews or highly opinionated tweets. By this point, his fans know to expect the unexpected.

It's currently unclear what Glover's new rap alias will be (or if he's even changing it for sure), but we thought we'd take this opportunity to look back on what has been one of the most unorthodox and consistently surprising careers this side of Kanye West's. In the same interview that he discussed the possible name change, Glover said, "I look at my life like something you should be able to paint," and if that's the case, what an abstract piece of work this is. Read on to reminisce on Glover's most unexpected career moves.

In 2011, Glover appeared on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" and was asked about his rap name. Hilariously enough, he got it from inputting his actual name in this website:

"I think it was like sophomore year of college. We were all hanging out, chilling and drinking and then we were like, 'oh, Wu-Tang name generator, let's put our name in.' And we're putting them all in, and they're all funny and stuff, and then mine came up and I was like, 'you guys, it's not funny anymore. This is something big.' I just really liked it."

Since 2011's Camp, every Childish Gambino project has featured work from Göransson, a classically-trained Swedish composer. At first, he may seem an unlikely choice for a hip-hop maestro, but him and Glover met during production for "Community," a show for which he served as the chief composer. He's since gone on to make soundtracks for the shows "New Girl" and "Happy Endings," as well as the films "Fruitvale Station," "We're The Millers" and "30 Minutes Or Less." On the non-video side of music, he's also notched collaborations with Chance The Rapper, Pell and HAIM.

In the process of rolling out his 2012 mixtape, Royalty, Gambino chose to share two seemingly-incompatible tracks within days of each other. On May 26th of that year, he leaked "Black Faces," a Nipsey Hussle collaboration produced by Boi-1da that proved to be one of his harder songs at the time, and four days later, gave us "Silk Pillow," a song featuring and co-produced by none other than Beck. Not only is Glover most likely the only musician to have notched collabs with both Hussle and Beck in his career, but he did it in the same week.

In the same ballpark as the last slide, this one occurred on another Royalty track, "Real Estate." Here we have Alley Boy, a guy who's one of the more intimidating rappers in Atlanta, brushing shoulders with Gambino's "30 Rock" friend Tina Fey on an amazing outro. The shit talk goes from "We in this bitch like we fucking a dog or some shit my nigga" to "My president is black and my Prius is blue, motherfucker" real quick. Amazing.

At the time of the release of Leona Lewis' 2012 album, Glassface, 'Bino's only prior guest appearances had come on tracks by people in his indie-rap world, including J. Cole, Das Racist's Heems and Rapsody. But then the "Bleeding Love" pop star tapped him for a low-key guest verse on "Trouble," making him the only guest on the album. 

Gambino's always had a pretty strange social media presence (who could forget his series of Instagrams showing emotional poems on hotel note pads?), and one of his most drastic actions was a complete upheaval of his Twitter account a few months before Because The Internet dropped. Oddly enough, Kanye West pulled this same move just days before Glover did, heralding the arrival of Yeezus, so maybe Childish was taking inspiration from Mr. West? Whatever the case, it's a move he'd soon repeat, as both his Instagram and Twitter now have zero posts. 

Okay, so Bosh wasn't around at the time, and it wasn't like Glover was crashing in the guest room or anything, but still, this made for a good story. Gambino and his team rented the basketball star's L.A. home for $45,000 a month, and that's where the album was born.

Looking to merge his two professions, Glover gave fans of his music a look into his screenwriting talents as well. The storyline was even more unexpected, starring Gambino as "The Boy" with Rick Ross playing his dad and Chance The Rapper playing a friend. 

After releasing Because The Internet, Gambino shared a lyric video for "3005" that starred adult film star Abella Anderson. What's more, a few weeks later, he tweeted out a link to a video chat with her and wrote "ask her about 'tickets'." That's a hell of a way to announce your tour. 

The comic book hero Spiderman has always been close to Glover's heart, as he encouraged a Twitter campaign called #donald4spiderman back in 2010, which eventually attracted creator Stan Lee's attention. Although he ended up losing out to Andrew Garfield, he went on to voice the alternate Spidey, Miles Morales, in the Disney XD animated series "Ultimate Spider-Man: Web Warriors" last year.

After being dissatisfied with the way Glassnote handled the Because The Internet music videos, Glover took to Twitter last May to proclaim "someone buy me out of this contract," going on to invite Def Jam and Atlantic to the party. As we haven't heard any news of a new deal, we can assume that Glassnote heard his complaints and responded accordingly.

Released last fall, the two-part STN MTN/KAUAI project consisted of a pretty typical Gambino EP and a seemingly out-of-character mixtape. The Gangsta Grillz look with DJ Drama was certainly unexpected, but removed from all of his film experience and indie-minded music-making, Gambino still grew up with the mixtape series as a youth in Atlanta.

Childish Gambino - STN MTN