On his new album as Childish Gambino, Glover abandons his long-standing battle between self-awareness and solipsism. Illustration by MVM

“I like music a ton, but the problem is I like weird stuff,” Donald Glover said during a filmed standup-comedy performance in 2011. “I like weird, crazy music. Weird people making music.” He went on, repeating the word “weird.” “But, as an adult, we’re not really allowed to be weird anymore,” he said. “The older you get, the less you can take weird stuff.” Glover, the restless polymath who launched his career as a writer on the TV show “30 Rock” and eventually made a fitful migration to the world of hip-hop, was expressing a timeworn sentiment that falls into the same category as “I don’t even own a television.” It was a posture that looked like self-deprecation but was meant to signal taste.

Since then, Glover’s assessment of our lamentably low tolerance for weirdness in music has been mostly disproved. Earlier this year, Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” part of a sprawling multimedia project that features ambient sound collages and a long video in which he builds a wooden staircase, reached No. 1. Other dominant artists of our era, like Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, and Kanye West, have used their fame to get across art that is certifiably weird—dense, genre-bending projects, with little hope of radio play, that are designed to be consumed in a single sitting. And Glover, who makes music under the name Childish Gambino, is taking part in the debunking of his own theory. This September, he débuted a new album at an event called Pharos—for a Greek lighthouse that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—which he threw in the desert at Joshua Tree. In order to hear Glover’s latest musical experiment—“Awaken, My Love!,” a slow-burning collection of songs steeped in early-seventies psych-funk—guests had to lock up their smartphones and agree to a “no irony” rule. Tickets sold out in six minutes.

At the time his standup performance aired on TV, Glover had just released his proper début album, “Camp,” a foray into the growing realm of music that is positioned between rap and jokes about rap. As rap has moved closer to the heart of popular culture, the genre has become a comedic playground: Andy Samberg’s group the Lonely Island uses hip-hop as a vehicle for satire; Aziz Ansari’s bits about rappers have made him an honorary member of the hip-hop élite. Meanwhile, the most successful rappers can consider themselves well-rounded entertainers—Drake has hosted “Saturday Night Live” multiple times.

Glover, best known for the character Troy on the TV show “Community,” began rapping without drawing a clear line in the joke-rap sand. “Camp” attempted to position Glover as a consummate outsider; it hinged on the double bind of being, as Glover and others have termed it, a “black nerd.” “Black male in short shorts, I’m double suspect,” he rapped, on “Backpackers.” As a novice, Glover seemed drawn to exposing his insecurities while preëmpting detractors with bursts of verbal gymnastics and the aggression of a battle rapper. “Ballin’ since ’83 / Half of ’em say he gay / Maybe that’s the reason I like Lady What-babies-say,” he continued on “Backpackers,” framing his love of Lady Gaga as an act of defiance. “I’m a problem, I’m lame as fuck, homie / But I rap like these niggas ain’t got shit on me.”

Was this self-laceration, self-expression, or self-parody? As a rapper, Glover has made a point of blurring the line between himself and his alter egos, between self-awareness and self-consciousness. And even this distinction is explicitly confronted: “I mean, where’s the line between Donnie G and Gambino?” he asks on his second album, “Because the Internet” (2013). Glover’s raw talent is obvious, but his obsession with explaining himself has often obstructed his ideas and undermined his jokes. And his fixation on his role as an iconoclast has, at times, rung hollow.

By the time he began making music, hip-hop was primed for figures who softened standard perceptions of black masculinity. In a world ruled by Kanye West and Drake, hyper-confessional lyrics, roving artistic appetites, wounded outsider mentalities, and unconventional backgrounds had become the default. These were qualities that pushed Glover closer to mass audiences, not away from them. “Because the Internet,” which broke up Glover’s blunt blocks of rap with shades of electro-pop and left-field R. & B., went gold and was nominated for a Grammy Award, as was his single “3005,” which went platinum.

Recently, Glover has taken a turn toward the understated. His new TV show, “Atlanta,” which he created and stars in, has the kind of light touch that he has never been able to bring to the microphone. The show is ostensibly a comedy, but at its finest it’s a paean to Atlanta—Glover grew up in the city’s suburbs—and to its flourishing hip-hop ecosystem. (These days, Atlanta is to hip-hop what Nashville is to country.) The show centers on a rapper named Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and his cousin Earn (played by Glover), a college dropout who becomes Paper Boi’s manager. Unlike Childish Gambino, Earn is a mumbly smart-ass who observes his surroundings in quiet exasperation. Filled with lush, dreamlike shots, the show often resembles a music video.

Paper Boi, who hasn’t yet begun to reap the financial benefits of his local popularity as a rapper, sells drugs. In one episode, he and his sidekick, Darius, go to restock their supply. They’ll be buying from a Mexican drug ring, Paper Boi explains, called the Migos. Migos is a wildly popular rap trio from Atlanta, but the show resists acknowledging that fact—one of many musical inside jokes. “Atlanta” telegraphs its hip-hop familiarity with restraint, allowing snippets of meticulously chosen music to waft from car speakers and headphones. Paper Boi and Darius arrive to complete the deal at a trailer in the woods, where “Gang,” a song by the small-time, unsigned rapper Max P, is playing quietly from the speakers. There to supply the drugs are the three members of the real-life Migos acting as the fictional Migos. Later, “Atlanta” closes the loop: Earn has a date with the mother of his daughter, and after it goes awry he mopes on a back porch, chugging champagne. “Spray the Champagne”—a song from Migos’ most recent album—begins to play as the credits roll.

For viewers in the know, the sequence is a gratifying, absurdist wink. For everyone else, it’s an uncannily appropriate song to close out an entertaining episode. “Atlanta” shows that Glover doesn’t need to write verses in order to make a profound impact in rap—after all, one of this year’s greatest hip-hop success stories has been that of DJ Khaled, a masterly connector of people and a savvy Snapchat user, who made a No. 1 album not by rapping or producing but by assembling his most powerful musician friends for a compilation. Similarly, Glover’s message is clearer when he leads from behind.

Glover has begun to carry this sensibility over to his work as Childish Gambino. “Awaken, My Love!,” the album he played at Pharos, is an ode to the fantastical funk of the seventies, which drew his attention when he was a child. Heavy on distortion and on long, swirling tangents, the record recalls an ostentatious era of weirdness in pop music—a time when artists like George Clinton and Sly Stone assembled large, ramshackle groups of collaborators and exploded previous notions of race and sexual identity. “Awaken, My Love!” is not pure homage—Glover softens the outré funk with lighter soul and surf-rock touches, and uses Auto-Tune—but he is not attempting to conceal his influences. And while this is a reinvention for Glover, it feels more like a stepping stone than a destination. The many elements of his career have in common the desire to complicate preconceived notions of the myriad textures of black life and art. In “Atlanta,” Earn is not laser-focussed on hip-hop, either—in one scene, he wakes up on a couch, with music by the indie-pop band Beach House drifting from his headphones. Another episode closes with “Hit It and Quit It,” from Funkadelic’s 1971 record “Maggot Brain.”