Donald Glover at the world premiere of The Martian. Credit to NASA HQ PHOTO.

In 2006 Donald Glover went viral as part of the sketch comedy troupe Derrick Comedy.¹ The same year he was hired by Tina Fey as a staff writer for 30 Rock. He stayed on until 2009 when he left the show and was subsequently picked up to co-star on another critically-acclaimed comedy, Dan Harmon’s Community. In 2010 he performed a stand-up special for Comedy Central Presents. His first album as Childish Gambino, Camp, was released the next year followed by Because the Internet accompanied by a screenplay and short film in 2013.

“Girls Are Not To Be Trusted” by Derrick Comedy, Donald’s first introduction to a public audience.

He started his foray into Hollywood movies in 2015 with roles in Magic Mike XXL and The Martian. His Emmy-award-winning TV show, Atlanta — an indefinable dramedy both surreal and deeply grounded, premiered the following fall. The same year saw “Awaken, My Love!” chart at number 5 and reach certified gold. In 2017, Time placed Donald on its annual list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Just this month we‘ve seen This Is America debut at number one on the US Billboard Hot 100, garner 150 million+ views, and spark a flurry of conversation that’s sent us to 19th century racist caricatures looking for answers. It’s almost an aside to mention he’s starring in some of the most iconic roles in a generation as Lando Calrissian in the just released picture Solo: A Star Wars Movie and as Simba, starring alongside Beyoncé in the fast-tracked Disney blockbuster The Lion King dropping next year.

Donald Glover is 34 years old. 34 years old. Everything he’s done as an adult—from performing comedy to acting to singing to producing to writing to rapping—he’s, within a few years, rose to the very top of his game both artistically and commercially. In August I have tickets to see Radiohead, the English rock band of three plus decades ranking among “The Greatest Artists of All Time,”² and in September I have tickets to see Childish Gambino. At the same stadium. And his were more expensive. His blend of hip-hop, rock, and electronic music stacks up against Danger Mouse and Gorillaz, long-established musicians who have pioneered that style of genre-mixing, as well as J. Cole’s KOD and any other contemporary album at the peak of both popular success and critical attention. Atlanta has been met with near universal acclaim and within two seasons has easily become one of the best shows on television. Donald has gotten more hype in Solo than Alden Ehren-whatever. And that dude’s a great actor! He was in that Coen brothers movie and worked with Francis Ford Coppola.

Verse of “Bitch, Look at Me Now” from the I AM JUST A RAPPER mixtape.

Donald is a genius. And I mean genius genius. The word is thrown around a lot. You might call your SO a genius for looking under that one thing when you couldn’t find your keys or your friend a genius for opening a wine bottle without a cork screw. But I mean a literal genius—“a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge.”³ If we were to quantify it we might look to Mensa, an organization for people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardized IQ test, or compare with recipients of the MacArthur “Genius Grant.” But regardless of how we define it, I know of no explanation for how one person can so quickly excel at so many things other than supernatural talent and cognitive ability.

That’s not to say his achievements are simply a function of some inherited genetic trait. The studies of genius and IQ have shown as much. Arthur Jensen, an American psychologist, wrote “Though such exceptional creativity is conspicuously lacking in the vast majority of people who have a high IQ, it is probably impossible to find any creative geniuses with low IQs. In other words, high ability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of socially significant creativity.”⁴ He is driven, thoughtful, worldly, and hardworking on top of being wildly intelligent. Donald Glover is a genius, and we don’t deserve him.

In 1908 Claude Monet, a founder of French Impressionist painting, took a knife to “fifteen major water lily canvases in a bout of destruction.”⁵

“My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that’s left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear.”

Water Lilies, 1917–1919, Honolulu Museum of Art.

Today these canvases, were they intact, would garner millions of dollars at auction. Mozart died at a time of financial woes and mixed success. Emily Bronte had to write under a male pseudonym in order to be published, only to find modest sales and intense panning by some critics. One wrote, “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery.”⁶ There are countless stories like these, and the point I’m trying to make is that society at large can so often fail their geniuses while reaping immense rewards from their work for centuries to come.

Those who were victims of society in their time now comprise much of our deepest canon in art, music, and literature.

Obviously Donald Glover is not a financial or critical failure, but that doesn’t mean that we as a society won’t once again fail in nurturing and respecting his extraordinary talent. Today the problem is so often the opposite. We heap on artists like Donald fame and fortune far beyond what they ever hoped or asked for and then demand things they never offered. Entertain us, engage us, stimulate us, heal our division, tell us your life, show us your wife, let us know us know what it means and how much you’re worth. And on the other side of the coin, the invariably dark and threatening aspects of public attention wherein he got death threats following fan speculation that he could play Spiderman and the con artist Alex Jones uses This is America to stoke animus and connect the “voodoo dancing” to inane conspiracies the like of pizzagate.

And the fact is he never created anything in exchange for what we as a society could provide. He’s had an impulsive need to create before ever making any money to speak of, and that continues to propel him to this day. We’re the beneficiaries of his own need to express himself. It’s great he’s got the resources now to do whatever he wants, but if we’re not careful we could repeat what happened to Chappelle when he left the spotlight for a decade or whatever is happening to Kanye right now, two famous entertainers who became the very best in their field and yet have struggled deeply with their relationship to the general public.

Montage of online media attention from the past couple weeks.

Because, while it might seem from the outside they have everything in the world, the attention isn’t all it’s made out to be. In a recent New Yorker profile⁷, the most in-depth conversation Glover has had with the public in some years, he says, “You walk into the party and realize you are the party. It’s ‘The only reason I invited all these people is because I hoped you’d come.’ So then it’s just work for me — and, if it’s work, you should pay me. Loyalty becomes math: Does this person live and die by how much money I make? Does this person have children with me and do they care about those children? The equation hasn’t been proved wrong yet. I can count on two fingers the people who actually love me.”

That’s really tough. As some random guy I don’t have to wonder how much my commercial worth factors into personal relationships. It takes much more than two fingers to count how many people love me. You compare that to his talk with Marc Maron on WTF⁷ in December of 2011, when he was still on Community and Childish Gambino was just starting out, and he seems much happier, like there’s less of a weight on his shoulders. He tells Marc, “I never really liked talking about race. I was always the type of person who didn’t want to get into it. I was just like, ‘Oh, let’s just keep it-.’ The older I got and the more shit I started doing, like music-wise and comedy-wise, it became a thing.”

That might be surprising considering we’re inundated with think-pieces like, “How Childish Gambino changed the race debate with a pop video.”⁸ Now, it’s like he can’t escape it. This is a man who grew up in Georgia under the shadow of Confederate leaders carved into Stone Mountain, and it’s been his rise to stardom that has made his race inseparable from his message. “Everyone’s been trying to turn me into their woke bae,” he says. “But that’s not what I am. I’m fucked up, too — and that’s where the good shit comes from.”

Society did nothing to encourage Donald Glover to succeed, and if anything stacked the game against him. Growing up outside Atlanta, he lived through the “story of the forgotten in a city where wealth is plentiful, but poverty can be inescapable” that he depicts on television.¹⁰

Now that he’s broken through and become undeniable it’s like everyone wants a piece of him. And I get it. I only know all this about him because I’ve scoured the Internet looking for interviews—trying to figure out what I can gleam from him that makes him so talented, getting jealous and insecure over everything he has accomplished. But I’m the lucky one who gets to sit here and just enjoy his work while he grapples with the disappointing and contradictory nature of praise on that scale.

You can tell just watching him in contractually-mandated media appearances that it’s not about the fame and glory for him. When he talked to Chris Van Vliet for some canned promo he laughs along with the banal questions and forced smiles, but when Chris asks him a real, albeit uninspired, question about the “This is America” video his eyes drift down to the floor, his voice lowers, and he seems uncomfortable while he more-or-less refuses to answer and tries to turn the conversation back to Star Wars. On Kimmel when Jimmy opens with how hot he’s been he gives an enthusiastic “I’m on fire!” followed the same line under with breath with a look of melancholy.¹² His appearances remind me of a long television interview with David Foster Wallace, the controversial writer undoubtably gifted in intellect who committed suicide in 2008.

Donald Glover’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, March 10th, 2018.

Maybe it seems like I’m nitpicking, I’m sure plenty of people in his position hate interviews and talk shows and no doubt he can turn on the charm like the best of them, but if anything we should expect geniuses, especially those in such a difficult public position, to be plagued by issues of depression, anxiety, ego, and insecurities.

“Unfortunately, creative geniuses are more vulnerable to major mental disorders. There are many examples of this phenomenon throughout history. Charles Darwin was aloof, obsessive-compulsive, and a hypochondriac. His co-discoverer and fellow genius, Alfred Wallace, was also aloof and a lonely wanderer. Nikola Tesla was often mentally compromised, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart suffered from mood swings. Beethoven was periodically depressed; Tolstoy was a strange, otherworldly, idiosyncratic aristocrat; and let’s not forget the periodically outright psychotic, super-genius Isaac Newton… Creative individuals share a similar lopsided temperament with other individuals who are vulnerable to major mental disorders. Their temperamental components are an extreme variant that originates from evolutionary pressures. Although deficient in social algorithms, this releases enormous brain power that enables these unencumbered individuals to excel in creative activities.”¹³

In October of 2013, Donald Glover shared a series of notes on Instagram detailing some thoughts and personal troubles.

Donald says as much in the New Yorker profile. “Is there anything you’re bad at?” the interviewer asks. “To be honest, no,” he says. “Probably just people. People don’t like to be studied, or bested…My struggle is to use my humanity to create a classic work — but I don’t know if humanity is worth it, or if we’re going to make it. I don’t know if there’s much time left.” A few years back we got a rare look inside from some handwritten notes scribbled on hotel stationary. It seems like this was a particularly difficult period for him, and I’m sure he’s in a much different place now, but it also revealed a lot of deep-seated issues that don’t just go away when your single or you bank account blows up. Many of which we as a society put upon him through how we look at race and masculinity or the vapid yet all consuming nature of celebrity. We certainly didn’t make things easier for him.

This is a great time to be a fan of Donald Glover, but I’m not sure how all of this is working out for him. Everyone, myself included, should probably chill out a bit. If we give him time and space amazing work will follow. And if any of y’all know Donald maybe give him a call and ask how he’s doing.