Childish Gambino, Denzel Curry and Curren$y channel rap's blog era

Near the end of “Yoshinoya,” a punchy cut from the album Donald Glover has called his last as Childish Gambino, Bando Stone & the New World, he makes a subtle yet pointed observation about the state of the rap ecosystem: “Man, the blog era over, takin’ all our stars.”

The first half of the sentence is easy enough to decipher, a reference to a loosely defined but pivotal period in rap history between the late 2000s and early 2010s, when a crop of homegrown online outlets and file-hosting services disrupted the idea of who could be a star and who could make one. With his early Childish Gambino mixtapes, Glover was among the many who found this in-between space to be their entry point to an audience of seekers. But in the days since the album’s release, I’ve been wrestling with what he could have meant by the rest of that thought — “takin’ all our stars.” If I had to guess at what Glover might be pining for, it’s the particular pipeline the blog era established, in which rappers who didn’t quite fit on either side of the mainstream-underground binary could still have room to grow, still mindfully find their way from raw prospect in development to fully formed artist with an identity.

A little latticework of independent sites — Nah Right, IllRoots, MissInfo.tv, Pigeons & Planes, The Smoking Section and many more — formed the rap blogosphere, a Web 2.0 movement that arose in a moment when traditional music-industry development seemed to be failing and the voracious listeners of a post-Napster world were snatching up all the free music their CPUs could handle. As mixtape retailers began filling up with direct-to-web releases, searching for audiences outside the label system, the blogs became middlemen, jumpstarting the careers of rappers like Mac Miller, Big K.R.I.T. and Iggy Azalea. These blogs came to have their own relationships with those rising, too; 2DopeBoyz was notably a target of Odd Future’s ire for not posting their early music. The online presences for print magazines like The Fader, SPIN and Complex quickly became part of the blog apparatus, which premiered new music from up-and-coming artists, fronted download links and videos (from an upstart sharing platform called YouTube) and even ran their own editorials. Some rappers, like Wale and Logic, ended up in deals as a result. Others, like Macklemore and Chance the Rapper, end up not needing them. The makeshift, highly unofficial system became a crucial workaround for anyone subverting the game, all anchored by a collector’s economy that prioritized the artists' visions.

“Over the last half-decade, people have realized that they appreciate gatekeepers in some form,” Eric Rosenthal, who co-created the podcast The Blog Era, recently told Rolling Stone. “They want somebody to tell them what is good, worth listening to, and who they can attach themselves to and believe in. And you don’t have that anymore.” Granted, many blog-era rappers are still out here; the ones who never quite ascended to stardom in the way the Drakes, Kendricks and Coles did have simply had to rework their approach for the shift from digital crate-digging to app-based listening. But there’s no doubt something was lost in the transition.

Glover’s sendoff for Childish Gambino, released July 19 and billed as the soundtrack for a forthcoming movie, feels in some ways like a sendoff for that time — especially when considered along two other projects, put out on the same day, by fixtures of this bygone era. In new releases from the Miami dynamo Denzel Curry and the New Orleans cruiser Curren$y, you can sense the same spirit Glover seems to be mourning, the traces of a disappearing way of doing things. They are works that feel as if they need to be deliberately clicked into, low risk and a touch inconspicuous, and yet always in conversation with their own little communities.

The Childish Gambino persona was a direct blog product. By 2010, Glover had already taken off on a different trajectory, as a standout on Community with a burgeoning standup act, which seemed at odds with a dark-horse music career. There was skepticism to be sure, but the incongruity was part of the intrigue. His debut, Camp, was marked by the early interactions of the social web, the shout-into-the-void candor of Twitter coursing through his verses. As he attempted to make a case for himself as a real rapper and not just a comedian who rapped, Glover subtly sought the validation of the blog fraternity. On “R.I.P.,” from the 2012 mixtape Royalty, he rapped, “Drop a new stack, all lames get to steppin' / Drop a new track, all blogs go to heaven.” That same year, on a song called “F*** Your Blog,” after raging against the network of keyboard warriors who had now become gatekeepers and could use the screen as a shield from dialogue, he rapped, “N****, the internet isn’t real!” The IRL vs. URL dichotomy of those days seemed to shape at least some of the distance between Glover and Gambino. He was trying to make sense of how he was already perceived in the real world, while also managing the context collapse of a rap career trapped somewhere between meaningful subversion and ironic joke.

In opposition to the prevailing rap stereotypes, Glover read as clever and nerdy, erudite and an outsider. He was the NYU student handpicked by Tina Fey to write for 30 Rock, and positioned himself as a bellwether, bringing comic wit and fresh perspective to hip-hop over a Grizzly Bear sample. Truthfully, he wasn’t far off from the other next gen-rap personalities rising up from the middle class, like Drake or Wale or Asher Roth, but he was sharp enough to play directly into his most suburban signifiers. There was an awkwardness there, too, that he couldn’t shake just yet, his gangly flows betraying a swag imbalance he once classified as “Hard for a Pitchfork, soft for a Roc-A-Fella,” but there was just enough curiosity and bandwidth for him to be paid due attention online without being taken too seriously, as he worked through the kinks in his style. You can hear the steady stream of corrections in the space between Camp and his 2013 album Because the Internet, and so on through his soul detour “Awaken, My Love!” and his auteur-crowning, song of the year-winning “This is America.” And it is because of all the blogrolling that he was able to make his greatest contribution to rap, the hit FX series Atlanta, which plays out the absurdities and horrors of life at the industry’s fringes.

Bando Stone & the New World feels like a lesser benefit of all his tinkering, and a more refined display of those earlier jack-of-all-trades impulses. It is the most elaborate Gambino album, and the most expansive one, yet it is still throwing everything at the wall — closer in tone and intent to his tapes, particularly the sounds of 2014’s STN MTN / Kauai, than to his studio projects. Even its billing as a soundtrack changes the stakes: It can be less cohesive, less of a pronouncement. It can work at the song level and not be functionally required to work on a holistic one. Without having seen the promised film, it’s hard to say with any authority whether the album is thematically coherent. But in its willingness to spiral in so many directions — the streaking MPC exercise “Survive,” the mini-raver opera “Got to Be,” the Afro-infused R&B of “In the Night,” with delicious turns from both Jorja Smith and Amaarae, and the mellow funk odyssey “No Excuses” — I hear the labor of its entire history.

As Gambino was trying to make the move from funny guy to serious artist, Denzel Curry was ingratiating himself to acolytes of the mystic stylez, in sound and practice, posting his early mixtapes to the page of Raider Klan collective founder Spaceghostpurrp and, eventually, to DatPiff, the defining digital mixtape distributor. DatPiff has since fallen, but you can still find a dead link on Curry’s Facebook page for King of the Mischievous South Vol. 1 (Underground Tape 1996), captioned “NEW MIXTAPE DOWNLOAD,” a remnant of a moment when rising artists felt more directly one-on-one with their listeners. (As Eric Rosenthal put it to Rolling Stone, “You could tag Fabolous, or you could tag Wiz Khalifa, and they’d get back to you.”) His songs wouldn’t really click until Strictly 4 My R.V.I.D.X.R.Z. a few months later, but King of the Mischievous South Vol. 1 was the first of Curry’s records to tease out what he was after long-term — transforming raw, bass-boosted, chopped and screwed music of eldritch delights into a cirque for the stunts of a self-described Black metal terrorist.

With the new King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2, Curry returns to the mixtape format with a sequel to a decade-old project that has become nearly inaccessible, as if to rekindle its energy for a new age. The Miami rapper has prioritized thematic albums over the last decade — 2018’s Ta13oo wrestled with inner darkness, 2019’s ZUU toured his city’s musical history and 2022’s Melt My Eyez See Your Future embraced jazz-rap consciousness — which makes this clear pivot directly back toward the low-stakes world of mixtapes its own kind of artistic statement. The original tape, like much of the Raider Klan movement, drew liberally from the spooky funk and horrorcore of late ‘90s Memphis rap, playing in a familiar sandbox in search of a new sound, and out of that phonk Curry found himself as a kamikaze performer. This time around, he has different aims — evoking those same trademarks for a Southern showcase that connects the influences of his past to their many reverberations. Several of his Memphis forebears receive their flowers: Kingpin Skinny Pimp plays chaperone, and Juicy J and Project Pat take turns delivering throwback renditions. But the tape’s true triumph is curatorial, as advocacy for slept-on Southern eccentrics like Maxo Kream, TiaCorine, That Mexican OT and Kenny Mason via breathless features. It’s the kind of thing you can imagine prompting a blog to get excited about some of the down-ballot names, begin following their careers more closely and share that journey of discovery with those loading up the site on a near-daily basis.

That was the process through which I first embraced Curren$y. Having never really appreciated his run-on style before, I was forced to engage with it when he teamed up with Wiz Khalifa, who had won me over with Star Power and Flight School (mixtapes I’d found on blogs), for 2009’s How Fly. That tape put everything in context for me, and I discovered what many already knew or were also realizing: His flows bore out the hunt for a life in perpetual recline, and at the same time a striving, build-at-all-costs mentality. On projects like Covert Coup with the Alchemist, Verde Terrace, Weekend at Burnie’s and his Pilot Talk trilogy, he continued to flesh out a mixtape empire perfectly suited for blogs, and you can still find him there. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the overwhelm of the streaming era, how its relentless pace can feel difficult to manage, and yet Curren$y is one of the few rappers who seem to be era-proof. After a stint as a Cash Money Records signee didn’t pan out, he rebuked the major label system and set out on his own. The internet proved a perfect ally for an artist who moved like a living data cache waiting to be unzipped; wading through his discography could often feel like falling down the rabbit hole of YouTube’s early years. Curren$y continued to serve his stoner sect well into the 2010s with various exploits, releasing 2015’s Pilot Talk III as a $100 USB drive bundled with accompanying merch, and he has remained resourceful since, maintaining a steady stream of take-it-or-leave-it projects featuring the usual suspects (Wiz, the Alchemist, producer Harry Fraud), with more than 17 dropped just 2020.

His new album, Radioactive, produced entirely by the in-house beatmaker for his Jet Life label, MonstaBeatz, feels distinctly resistant to the winds of change. Listening to it is like opening a time capsule: It has all of the hallmarks of the most downloadable Curren$y music, which is to say that it is brimming with a kind of frivolity and accessible prosperity that is missing from a lot of modern rap. He still is lavishing in the finer indulgences of luxury — private jets and Rolexes and Rolls Royces — but his pursuit and enjoyment of these things is far less corporate than that of his peers. He is never asset-managing in his songs, never trying to convince you of his importance; he is after the smoothest existence possible, and the way he raps has always fed that foggy sense of endless recreation activated by a weed-induced time dilation. Every Curren$y song sounds like he’s picking up right where he left off, allowing you to enter and exit the conversation at your leisure.

Both King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2 and Radioactive are reminiscent of a listening experience that is being lost to time (figuratively and literally, as the sites themselves vanish into the 404 graveyard). The blog era was cut short in the mid-2010s by the rise of streaming, its mass-market approach both easier on a society shifting toward cloud computing and purportedly better for business (though whose business, exactly, has always been in question). For many artists now, mixtapes and albums are branding pegs of equal weight, and the platforms that serve them don’t encourage discovery and exploration so much as passive investment. But the takeaway here isn’t about the album versus mixtape versus playlist divide, which has always been primarily a commercial distinction. It is more about a time when one’s corner of the internet really felt like a corner — a place to hang out and get wind of things around the way; where artists and listeners could come into their own, often in conversation with each other; where music being shared by actual people you trusted, staking their reputations on their recommendations, was the norm. The stewards of the blogs were following their tastes, providing specific, actionable and personal listening guidance in a way large corporate entities simply can’t.

And yet, even if Glover’s verdict — that the blog era is over, that something has been taken from us as a culture — feels accurate, I think his ultimate assessment is slightly off. We do have stars of all different levels of fame, working in or with or around or even in defiance of the current systems. Running through these albums, which refuse to fully let the old ways go, is a nice reminder of that.