The Singles Jukebox

“New Theory: Cody LaRae is the name of a SPAM employee“

[Video]
[5.55]

Taylor Alatorre: Sooner or later, the zeitgeist outruns you. “Lithonia” is Gambino’s half-willing surrender to the New World, and despite its overfamiliar post-apocalyptic mode, it is nothing more than the long-delayed acceptance that what he’s “with” is no longer “it.” He’ll never again be the 30-year-old kid who predicted the American Dialect Society’s 2013 Word of the Year; more thankfully, he’ll also never again be the guy who called himself rap’s Andrew Auernheimer. Left with little choice but to lean further into his out-of-touchness, he concludes that it must be rock opera time. It helps that the list of canonical rock operas is so small as to make faithful homage largely plug-and-play: a vaguely sketched outsider hero to serve as author surrogate, power chords as brick walls to be broken through, references to drugs and fame and the combination thereof, and you’re 90% done. Ever a student of pop culture, Glover doesn’t try to rescue the form from its post-Green Day cultural ignominy and instead embraces its excesses for entirely pragmatic reasons – there is simply no better backing track for the Life-Altering Realization. We don’t need to know much about who Cody LaRae is, only that he’s at a point where a regressive teenage sentiment like “nobody gives a fuck” can seem like profound insight (it is), and also that his name is more fun to say than Tommy or Pink.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Donald Glover is capable of producing a genuinely great song — “Redbone,” if nothing else, demonstrated that — but a lot of his Childish Gambino work gets by on affect: stylish set pieces that demand attention but, on subsequent listens, reveal a paucity of ideas. Is “This is America” getting plays in 2024? “Lithonia” is stunning in conception and execution, recasting Glover as emo revivalist drenched in a downpour of torrid guitar distortion and angst, but once the storm ebbs, I don’t feel as if it left much of anything behind. It’s a glorious noise, though; hopefully “nobody gives a fuck” will not turn out to be clairvoyant.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: An uncharacteristically chameleonic Max Martin tries to turn this into an ABBA song while Childish Gambino tries to turn it into a pop-punk song, and I assume that if I imbibed more of the album’s lore I would learn who Cody LaRae is and what he tried to do. (Alas, the Donald Glover Wiki is no help, as the only edit this summer is some guy saying “Wtf.”) When you release a rock-opera-coded single severed from its rock opera, you risk the possibility that nobody gives a fuck.
[5]

Ian Mathers: What are N*E*R*D up to these days, anyway?
[6]

Harlan Talib Ockey: “Lithonia” is full of meta recursion. LaRae/Stone had a break from music, and so did Glover/Gambino. LaRae is from an Atlanta suburb, and so is Glover. Musically, he alternates LaRae’s amateurish belting with Bando Stone’s more nuanced vocal delivery. The lyrics switch between first and third person, letting Gambino extrapolate on LaRae and LaRae on himself and Stone. It’s very intellectually interesting, but all this lyrical lore forms an impermeable layer between the listener and the actual song.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Sorta-crunchy, kinda-glammy scene setting, where the feedback precedes the blocky Weezer downstrokes and the vocals keen like Panic! at the Disco. It feels like I’m missing a playbill.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: The frustrating thing about “Lithonia” is that it doesn’t explode into glorious technicolor as Max Martin’s work is supposed to do, but simply crashes against the wall. The drum production hides the way it strikes the kick then stumble through the snare, scattering little tom runs that stop the momentum whenever they appear, then reveals them to present the beating heart below the frustration and bitterness. Either way, the color drains out of the song whenever they arrive or leave. It’s a novel part, not a masterful one, since being novel is how you earn money and mastery is how you become a ghoul.
[6]

Leah Isobel: “Lithonia” swings wildly between corny and affecting. Donald’s lead vocal is overdone, but his backing harmonies have a gentle shininess; the guitars have a nice bit of crunch and the bassline is lovely, but the synth piano and strings are just tacky. The insistence on making things just a little wrong draws attention to the places where they aren’t, like a pair of pre-Sharpied sneakers. It feels slightly condescending.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Organ? Guitar power chords? Childish Gambino-the-thespian has sure learned shock tactics for the sake of Childish-Gambino-the-musician. I’m less inclined to endorse a statement like “Nobody gives a fuck” in 2024, but “Lithonia” isn’t my song. What lets it down are its strengths. After the melodramatic opening, it doesn’t have anywhere to go. I might come to the same conclusion about Gambino’s career so far.
[5]

Andrew Karpan: In committing himself to making nihilist post-Kanye pop jams for the vitally unimportant Urban Outfitters vinyl buying demographic, Glover prepares himself to eventually make his own Norman Fucking Rockwell! I have to admit that I’m with him on this. Good riddance to Childish Gambino! Good riddance to 2011, prestige TV, refried electronic soul, and the other forgotten dreams best unremembered from that decade. 
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: When I saw Childish Gambino live in 2013, it was perhaps the worst show I’ve been to in my life. Packed high up into the Shrine Auditorium in LA, gazing down onto Donald Glover from the rafters, I realized that he didn’t quite have it; he lacked some ineffable skill that would allow all of the grand visions of his project to cohere. He performed in a projected simulacrum of a vast and empty mansion, sounding completely swallowed up in the work; the clothes were wearing him, as they say. When I saw him again, on the other side of the decade, he finally lived up to his ambitions; after a number one hit, an acclaimed TV show, a role in Star Wars, he was suddenly the performer he always wished he could be. Even when performing lesser works, he seemed a magnetic force, his sweaty face on the music festival screen impossible to look away from. Now we stand at the putative end of Childish Gambino’s project, his attentions turned elsewhere. “Lithonia” feels at once tossed off and deeply effortful — which makes it in some sense the perfect Childish Gambino track. He’s brilliant at times — the chorus here, in all of its arena-rock meathead glory, has worn me down — and utterly ineffectual the rest, executing the minimum viable versions of his ideas and hoping that everything hangs together. In “Lithonia,” it does, but only barely; every iteration of Childish Gambino fights for control, with no clear victor by song’s end.
[6]