Quick Facts
In full:
Donald McKinley Glover, Jr.
Also known as:
Childish Gambino
Born:
September 25, 1983, Edwards Air Force Base, California, U.S. (age 41)
Awards And Honors:
Grammy Award (2019)
Grammy Award (2018)
Emmy Award (2017)
Golden Globe Award (2017)
Emmy Award (2017): Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series
Emmy Award (2017): Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series
Golden Globe Award (2017): Best Actor in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy
Grammy Award (2019): Record of the Year
Grammy Award (2019): Song of the Year
Grammy Award (2019): Best Rap/Sung Performance
Grammy Award (2019): Best Music Video
Grammy Award (2018): Best Traditional R&B Performance
Notable Family Members:
son of Donald Glover, Sr.
son of Beverly Glover
father of Legend Glover (b. 2016)
father of Drake Glover (b. 2018)
brother of Stephen Glover
Education:
New York University Tisch School of the Arts (B.A., 2006)
DeKalb School of the Arts
Movies/Tv Shows (Acted In):
"Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" (2014)
"Atlanta" (2016–2018)
"CollegeHumor Originals" (2011)
"The Martian" (2015)
"Girls" (2013)
"30 Rock" (2006–2012)
"Guava Island" (2019)
"Human Giant" (2007)
"Spider-Man: Homecoming" (2017)
"Late Night with Conan O'Brien" (2005)
"Mystery Team" (2009)
"Saturday Night Live: Cut For Time" (2018)
"Robot Chicken: Star Wars III" (2010)
"Adventure Time" (2013–2016)
"Bronx World Travelers" (2007)
"Solo: A Star Wars Story" (2018)
"Community" (2009–2014)
"The Muppets" (2011)
"The To Do List" (2013)
"Sesame Street" (2013)
"Ultimate Spider-Man" (2015)
"China, IL" (2015)
"The Lazarus Effect" (2015)
"Regular Show" (2011)
"The Lion King" (2019)
"Magic Mike XXL" (2015)
Movies/Tv Shows (Directed):
"Atlanta" (2016–2018)
Movies/Tv Shows (Writing/Creator):
"30 Rock" (2008–2009)
"Mystery Team" (2009)
"Guava Island" (2019)
"Live at Gotham" (2009)
"Atlanta" (2016–2018)
"Funny as Hell" (2011)
Albums:
"Because the Internet" (2013)
"Awaken, My Love!" (2016)
"Camp" (2011)
"3.15.2020" (2020)
Twitter Handle:
@donaldglover
Instagram Username:
childishgambino

Donald Glover (born September 25, 1983, Edwards Air Force Base, California, U.S.) is an American writer, comedian, actor, and musician who has won acclaim in all his disparate arts. He is perhaps best known for the TV series Atlanta (2016–22) and for the music he released under the name Childish Gambino.

Early life and career

Glover grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where his father was a postal worker and his mother a day-care manager. He had two siblings, and his parents served as foster parents throughout his childhood. After graduating (2002) from DeKalb School of the Arts, he attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (B.A., 2006). As a student, Glover was a founding member of the sketch comedy group Derrick Comedy, and he also embarked on a rap career. In 2006 he was hired as a writer for Tina Fey’s new sitcom 30 Rock, and he stayed with the show for three seasons, occasionally appearing onscreen as well.

Acting, writing, and producing career

In 2009 Glover was cast as former high-school sports jock Troy Barnes in the well-received comedy series Community, which centered on a community college. Also that year Derrick Comedy, after several years of creating brief YouTube sketches, released the feature film Mystery Team. In 2010 Glover performed on the stand-up comedy showcase Comedy Central Presents. After Glover left Community in 2014, he appeared in the sci-fi horror film The Lazarus Effect, played a singer in the stripper comedy Magic Mike XXL, and memorably portrayed an astrodynamics scientist in Ridley Scott’s The Martian (all 2015).

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The series Atlanta (2016–22), about an aspiring rap artist, was created, produced, written, and directed by Glover, who also had a starring role. The show, which ran for four seasons, was twice nominated for Emmy Awards for best comedy series, and Glover won an Emmy for acting and another for directing. Following a brief but significant appearance as Aaron Davis in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Glover played Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) and voiced Simba in the computer-generated imagery “live-action” version of The Lion King (2019).

In 2023 Glover reprised his role as Davis in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and served as creator, writer, and producer of the crime TV series Swarm. The latter earned him an Emmy nomination for writing. The following year he starred in a new TV series, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024– ), which he created and produced with Francesca Sloane. The series was inspired by the 2005 film about a pair of secret agents who work undercover as a happily married couple. The show earned numerous Emmy nominations in 2024, and Glover receiving nods for acting and writing. His upcoming film projects include the prequel Mufasa: The Lion King and the Star Wars spinoff Lando.

Childish Gambino and music career

In addition to acting, Glover pursued a music career under the name Childish Gambino. His first releases, the mixtapes Sick Boi (2008) and Poindexter (2009), showed a smart and somewhat goofy style. Several more mixtapes followed, notably Culdesac (2010). His major label debut, Camp, appeared in 2011, and it won favorable notice. His second album, Because the Internet (2013), was nominated for a Grammy Award for best rap album, and the single “3005” was also nominated.

He continued releasing mixtapes showcasing the evolution of his style. He added funk, psychedelia, and soul to his sound for “Awaken, My Love!” (2016), which was nominated not only for best urban contemporary album but also for best album, and the single “Redbone” took home the Grammy for best traditional R&B performance. He debuted “This Is America” during an appearance on Saturday Night Live. The song, which focuses on gun violence and racism, debuted atop the charts in several countries and won four Grammy Awards, including both record and song of the year; Childish Gambino was the first hip-hop artist to win those categories.

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Gambino’s fourth studio album, 3.15.20 (2020), was also critically praised. However, four years later he reissued the album as Atavista. Along with a shuffled tracklist and a new mix, it featured two new songs and collaborations with pop singer Ariana Grande and composer Ludwig Göransson. Also in 2024, Glover announced a world concert tour to begin later that year and said that he would be retiring the Childish Gambino persona after one final project, Bando Storm and the New World, encompassing a film and soundtrack album. Shortly before the album was released, he explained to the The New York Times his reasons for retiring the moniker: “It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done.’ It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.”

Patricia Bauer The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Top Questions

What are the four main elements of hip-hop?

How did hip-hop get its name?

Who are the founders of hip-hop?

What was the first major hip-hop song?

hip-hop, cultural movement that attained widespread popularity in the 1980s and ’90s and also the backing music for rap, the musical style incorporating rhythmic and/or rhyming speech that became the movement’s most lasting and influential art form.

Origins and the old school

Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop refers to a complex culture comprising four elements: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” (A fifth element, “knowledge of self/consciousness,” is sometimes added to the list of hip-hop elements, particularly by socially conscious hip-hop artists and scholars.) Hip-hop originated in the predominantly African American economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s. As the hip-hop movement began at society’s margins, its origins are shrouded in myth, enigma, and obfuscation.

Graffiti and break dancing, the aspects of the culture that first caught public attention, had the least lasting effect. Reputedly, the graffiti movement was started about 1972 by a Greek American teenager who signed, or “tagged,” Taki 183 (his name and street, 183rd Street) on walls throughout the New York City subway system. By 1975 youths in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn were stealing into train yards under cover of darkness to spray-paint colorful mural-size renderings of their names, imagery from underground comics and television, and even Andy Warhol-like Campbell’s soup cans onto the sides of subway cars. Soon, influential art dealers in the United States, Europe, and Japan were displaying graffiti in major galleries. New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority responded with dogs, barbed-wire fences, paint-removing acid baths, and undercover police squads.

The beginnings of the dancing, rapping, and deejaying components of hip-hop were bound together by the shared environment in which these art forms evolved. The first major hip-hop deejay was DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), an 18-year-old immigrant who introduced the huge sound systems of his native Jamaica to inner-city parties. Using two turntables, he melded percussive fragments from older records with popular dance songs to create a continuous flow of music. Kool Herc and other pioneering hip-hop deejays such as Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash isolated and extended the break beat (the part of a dance record where all sounds but the drums drop out), stimulating improvisational dancing. Contests developed in which the best dancers created break dancing, a style with a repertoire of acrobatic and occasionally airborne moves, including gravity-defying headspins and backspins.

In the meantime, deejays developed new techniques for turntable manipulation. Needle dropping, created by Grandmaster Flash, prolonged short drum breaks by playing two copies of a record simultaneously and moving the needle on one turntable back to the start of the break while the other played. Sliding the record back and forth underneath the needle created the rhythmic effect called “scratching.”

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Kool Herc was widely credited as the father of modern rapping for his spoken interjections over records, but among the wide variety of oratorical precedents cited for MCing are the epic histories of West African griots, talking blues songs, jailhouse toasts (long rhyming poems recounting outlandish deeds and misdeeds), and the dozens (the ritualized word game based on exchanging insults, usually about members of the opponent’s family). Other influences cited include the hipster-jive announcing styles of 1950s rhythm-and-blues deejays such as Jocko Henderson; the Black power poetry of Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets; rapping sections in recordings by Isaac Hayes and George Clinton; and the Jamaican style of rhythmized speech known as toasting.

Rap first came to national prominence in the United States with the release of the Sugarhill Gang’s song “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) on the independent African American-owned label Sugar Hill. Within weeks of its release, it had become a chart-topping phenomenon and given its name to a new genre of pop music. The major pioneers of rapping were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, and the Cold Crush Brothers, whose Grandmaster Caz is controversially considered by some to be the true author of some of the strongest lyrics in “Rapper’s Delight.” These early MCs and deejays constituted rap’s old school.

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