With , Donald Glover has made a hip-hop career out of doing what other rappers don’t. In a genre where showing doubt seems tantamount to losing fans, most of Gambino’s songs deal in insecurity and fears. Where most top-40 rap is content to talk about , Gambino has his fans searching for meaning everywhere, whether to unlock a secret track, better understand his new concept album or find out just what the hell is.
On Tuesday night at the Fillmore, Glover played foil to the workaday hip-hop show. Gone was the two-hour parade of rap openers vying for mixtape downloads, replaced by a one-hour wait after the posted door time (not cool), a live message board projection for the audience’s smartphone texts and drawings (very cool) and the world’s most fickle DJ, who had the songs, but never let them play for more than 15 seconds at a time (meh).
The message board, which plays into the theme of Gambino’s tech-and-death-focused new album, was the first sign that Gambino had stretched the show’s budget beyond what you’d see at a rap concert outside of Kanye West. In lieu of an opener, it was a worthy distraction, bringing the internet to uncomfortable life (roughly two dick sketches per minute) in front of Childish Gambino’s amped capacity-crowd.
When Glover did take the stage, he wiped the goofiness off the slate with his only joke of the night (“This isn’t a fucking Adele concert”), and started into “Internet” with its opener, “Crawl.” Far from sitting back and shouting lyrics over his album, Glover brought a full backing band, and even threw them the spotlight a few times. The guitarist happily snapped up a solo during “The Worst Guys” and the rhythm section turned the jazzy coolness of “Shadows” into a Rage Against The Machine-esque romp.
Glover himself rarely missed his mark, burning through almost the entirety of “Internet” in sequence (save for single “3005,” which was shuffled near the back). After a short break, he compressed a chunk of his debut, “Camp,” into a 20-minute medley, switching up melodies, rhythms and lyrics where he saw fit. By the time “Bonfire” dropped near the end of his second encore, he was understandably winded.
It wouldn’t stop him from coming out for a freestyled third-encore victory lap, wherein he sang about a(nother) girl who didn’t text him back and shouted out Denver. In turn, his fans took hundreds of Snapchats, Instagrams and Vines of the rapper before he made his final exit. Most shows discourage this sort of thing, posting signs telling their audiences to holster their devices.
But again, Gambino’s Deep Web tour isn’t “most shows” — in production, concept and in the realm of hip-hop, execution. Even as the words “Be Aware” were intermittently projected behind the stage throughout the night, the fact there’s an app for the tour for use during the show seems to encourage this incessant documentation. It worked: the best views away from the stage at the Fillmore Auditorium on Tuesday night were through hundreds of upheld, zoomed-in screens.
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Dylan Owens is Reverb’s all-purpose news blogger and album reviewer. You can read more from him in Relix magazine and the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
Glenn Ross is a Denver-based photographer and regular contributor to Reverb. See more of his work .
