Because The Internet, Mistakes Are Forever

On Childish Gambino's ambitious second album, ten years later.

This piece was initially written for r/indieheads’ Album of the Year 2013 Write-Up Series. To celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Because the Internet’s release, I’m re-publishing it today. Minor edits have been made for clarification & formattting/to fix mistakes I made 2 years ago when I wrote this.

It’s weird to think of a time where Donald Glover wasn’t one of the biggest triple/quadruple threats in mainstream media, balancing a music, writing and acting career + other pots to put his hands in. But coming into 2013, Glover was at a critical juncture, as the decisions he would make for his career this year were all risky, but eventually paid off in the end considering where he is now.

An important piece to his 2013 was his continued partnership with composer Ludwig Göransson, who Glover met through Göransson’s work on the NBC show he starred in, Community. The two worked closely together on Glover’s debut album as Childish Gambino, Camp, in 2011. Despite mixed reviews all around from critics, with a particularly scathing review from Pitchfork, the album was commercially successful and helped further legitimize Glover as a musician. Essentially, going from a comedian who could rap to a comedian and a rapper.

Glover and Göransson would quickly follow-up Camp with the mixtape Royalty, a fairly eclectic project featuring a lot of big names like Tina Fey, RZA, Danny Brown, Nipsey Hustle and more. Both Glover and Göransson would make significant leaps as producers, and Glover as a performer from this project, improvements they’d continue to build on in the year or so to come.

In late 2012, the two got to work on the follow-up to Camp, wanting to make a bigger project than before. The majority of the album was recorded in Miami Heat player Chris Bosh's mansion in Los Angeles, with Glover nicknaming the mansion as “The Temple.” During the recording of the album, Glover would end up leaving Community, only appearing in five episodes of the fifth season, though Glover would still keep his eyes to television as he and FX announced a deal in July 2013 to create a music-themed show titled Atlanta. He would also release the non-album single "centipede" that month.

In August, he would release Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, a short film that essentially serves as a mood piece for Because the Internet, previewing some of the music later heard on the album and establishing its themes of loneliness and detachment.

Though for my money, the most important piece of lore building into this album isn’t the screenplay he released alongside the album (I read it once in 2014. It didn’t really land with me.), but the open letter he wrote on a series of Residence Inn post-it notes and posted in October, shortly after finishing the album. In the full letter below, he says:

I’m afraid of the future

I’m afraid my parents won’t live long enough to see my kids

I’m afraid my show will fail

I’m scared my girl will get pregnant at not the exact time we want

I’m scared I’ll never reach my potential

I’m afraid she’s still in love w/ that dude

I feel like I’m letting everyone down

I’m afraid people hate who I really am

I’m afraid I hate who I really am

I’m scared people will find out what I masturbate to

I’m afraid I’m here for nothing

I feel that this will feel pretentious

I’m scared I’ll never grow out of bro rape

I’m afraid people think I hate my race

I’m afraid people think I hate women

I hate people can say anything

I hate caring what people think

I’m afraid there’s someone better for you

Or me

I’m afraid this is all an accident

I’m scared I’ll be Tyrese

I’m afraid Dan Harmon hates me

I’m scared I won’t know anything ever again

I’m scared I never knew anything

I’m afraid I’ll regret this

I’m afraid this doesn’t matter at all

I didn’t leave Community to rap

I don’t wanna rap

I wanted to be on my own

I’ve been sick this year

I’ve seen a bunch of people die this year

This is the first time I’ve felt helpless

But I’m not on that

Kept looking for something to be in with

Follow someone’s blueprint. But you have to be on your own

The label doesn’t want me to release in December because it’s not a holiday record and I’m not a big artist. I started the record last christmas. Christmas always made me feel lonely, but it helped me restart the new year. I want people to [listen] this album when everythings closed. When everything slows down and [is] quiet. So you can start over

I got really lost last year. But I can’t be lonely tho. Cause we’re all here

We’re all stuck here.

I wanted to make something that says, no matter how bad you fuck up, or mistakes you’ve made during the year, your life, your eternity. You’re always allowed to be better. You’re always allowed to grow up. If you want

He would release the album’s lead single, “3005”, later that month and on December 10, 2013, Because the Internet would be released via Glassnote, though like most rap releases at the time it would leak a few days/weeks before.

Because the Internet feels like an album that was ahead of the curve. While influencer culture surely existed when it came out in late 2013, that term didn’t really exist yet. The internet was surely ubiquitous by this point in time in many people’s lives, but it had only just become so recently with the advent of smartphones. Hell, the term “extremely online” probably didn’t exist yet, but there were definitely people who fell under that term, as I was probably one of them.

When making fictionalized content about the internet, you run the risk of your art aging like milk. While occasionally this results in masterpieces like 1995’s Hackers, it usually results in projects entering the memory hole in record time (take most any piece of art that was made during the pandemic that was explicitly about the pandemic). Because the Internet side-steps this problem by making an important distinction that it is not an album about the internet, but an album about what happens to someone because of the internet.

Also, an important thing to note when it comes to BTI is that it does something that no previous Childish Gambino project did before, and something that every future Childish Gambino album would struggle with after: he made all the songs good. Camp is one of the most 2011 albums to ever exist, with production choices that would remain stuck in 2011 forever, and performance choices that could only ever exist in 2011, as Glover sounds rough in a lot of the songs he released prior to the BTI-era. Instead of focusing on making the songs good, it sounds like Glover was more focused on trying to get a reaction out of people, something he feels extremely aware of throughout BTI, as while the punchline-focused lyrics of his previous projects are all over this album, their intent feels much, much different.

While out of the context of the album (and honestly, even in context it gets extremely grating on some listens) “IV. Sweatpants” is the most like the old version of Childish Gambino, as when as soon as you hear him bang the table towards the end with sound effects of silverware clanging, you realize you’re listening to an adult child try to prove himself. Consider this Glover’s version of “Backseat Freestyle”, a braggadocious anthem that’s layers of insecurity would continue to peel and peel until the end of the album.

Whether he’s in character or not throughout most of this album, it’s clear as hell that the last year for Glover was rough, as aside from “IV. Sweatpants” and “3005”, something has changed in his voice. Besides the obvious answer for this change being that Glover took some kind of voice lessons and just generally improved his craft, there’s a level of detachment that lurks deep beneath the first half of Because the Internet, as rapping these punchlines he’s come up with are not exactly fun. Tracks like “I. Crawl” and “II. Worldstar” are darker just from the production alone (which I should note, is incredible and probably the best thing about the album), as Mystikal’s ad-libs heard throughout “I. Crawl” feel more like they’re trying to inflict pain on you than hype you up. Though thankfully, it goes both ways, actually.

But an important thing to highlight is this part of the open letter Glover posted in October:

I didn’t leave Community to rap

I don’t wanna rap

I wanted to be on my own

I’ve been sick this year

I’ve seen a bunch of people die this year

This is the first time I’ve felt helpless

Most of the Childish Gambino music before Because the Internet feels like listening to a person who hasn’t faced the music yet, so whatever happened to him in 2012 and 2013 when he was writing this album, the music had clearly faced him by then, and most of BTI feels like Glover’s struggle between his old self and whatever his new self is going to be. It’s also important to note that Glover had just turned 30 when he finished the LP, only fueling these struggles of transitioning even more so.

While tracks like “Heartbeats” off of Camp attempted to go for more grounded subject matter, it just failed to land due to Glover’s immaturity and the terrible, dated dubstep/synthwave production (Seriously, go listen to "Heartbeats" again and I can assure you it doesn't sound as cool now as it did in 2011). When Glover talks about this part of his life as being “the first time I’ve felt helpless”, the trilogy of “I. Flight of the Navigator”, “II. Zealots of Stockholm” and “III. Urn” really put this feeling into place, as Glover sings “Just hold me close my darling” on "Flight" with continued, nuanced desperation as the song’s scratchy acoustic guitar, computerized strings and bass hits fade out with all being left by the end is Glover’s hummed melodies.

But as I said earlier: the most important distinction that this album has in the Childish Gambino discography is that he made all of the songs good, with “II. Zealots of Stockholm” possibly being my favorite of the bunch, with the balladry in the first part of the song being thrown out suddenly as futuristic synths and a heavy bass overload the mix, producing one of the nastiest beat switches I’ve heard since The Weeknd’s “House of Balloons / Glass Table Girls”, sharing that song’s themes of the reality of trauma-fueled debauchery, debauchery of course celebrated by the internet. Most prescient about this song is Kilo Kish’s hook, as she sings the magic question of this album, “Is it real 'cause you're online?”

The phrase “Twitter isn’t real life” (really, you could swap out Twitter with online in this case scenario too) has been thrown out endlessly in the past few years but as we’ve experienced these last 6-8 years together, especially the last 4, is that even true anymore? If a budding pro wrestler/reality TV show star in Japan can get cyberbullied on Twitter and kill herself, or if Elon Musk can make a tweet and Tesla's stock price can shoot up by 13%, or if the goddamn the President of the United States can make a series of tweets and suddenly his followers are invading the Capitol, then how is this shit fake anymore?

When Because the Internet came out, I lived online basically. Especially on rap forums like Kanye To The or Odd Future Talk. I was a loser in high school with barely any real life friends, as either the people in my life had alienated me or I alienated them through puberty-induced brashness. So even though I got bullied on these rap forums every now and then (aka a lot), it felt like the only place where I was heard. But really some of the biggest days on these forums would be when big projects leaked. So when BTI leaked a week early, it was an event. Something I’ve failed to note so far going into this is that I was expecting this album to be a brick. I didn’t like “3005” and found Glover’s rollout of this album to be cringeworthy and pretentious. But as someone who was scared to open up about themselves in fear of retaliation, I was probably projecting.

I’m gonna be honest, I had no idea why I loved this album before I started writing this. Hell, even in the middle of writing this I couldn’t fully tell you why I loved this album, but it’s all clicking now. There is such a deep, cutting vulnerability to this album that’s shielded by its vast array of irony poisoned jokes and punchlines, but as soon as you chip away at that armor, you’re hearing someone that is absolutely afraid of the future and the direction he is heading in. But he can't stop himself. And that’s where I was at. Shielding my emotions and feelings with jokes because that’s all I knew at that point.

In the leaked version of the album, at least the version I had, the album’s final song “III. Life: The Biggest Troll [Andrew Auernheimer]” gets suddenly cut off on the lines “Never forget this feeling, never gon' reach a million / Eventually all my followers realize-.” At first, I thought Glover was pulling a Sopranos, leaving the story off on an ambiguous note, especially on such a pointed line. It was the moment I realized that shit, this dude is actually a genius and this is one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard.

But of course, this was not how the album actually ended, but my opinions didn’t change. As Glover’s voice increasingly goes up in pitch as he cries out “Please help me” and a lower pitch voice comes in repeating “When you die” shortly after to the point of ad nauseam, it feels like we are hearing the last words of an artist before they’re about to retreat entirely, as over the years since this album, it’s hard to get a read on Glover. Aside from the mini album/EP/mixtape Kauai, the Childish Gambino music after this feels less vulnerable, or, as I’ll say time and time again: he keeps forgetting to make all the songs good. But it’s hard to fully focus on music when you’ve got a successful, award-winning TV show to run, a continually busy acting career, and plenty of other pots to piss in.

But for one year, Donald Glover bet the house on Childish Gambino, putting everything he had into this album. And while he would go on to be more commercially successful with his following releases, it helped lay the groundwork for Glover to become one of America’s most well-regarded renaissance men. But once you bare your soul online for all to see, you only have two moves: lean into it, potentially leading to perpetual embarrassment, or retreat entirely, never letting the public get even an inch to what’s happening in your personal life without your consent.

It’s clear what option Glover chose.