In 2013, American actor, writer and musician Donald Glover told an interviewer in promotion of his upcoming studio album: ‘I don’t want to make albums anymore, anyway. Cause I feel like it’s just kind of silly to make albums… like just albums just albums… you got to make worlds and lives.’1 Glover, known by his musical moniker Childish Gambino, released his second studio album Because the Internet in late 2013, and launched a microcosm of a world along with it. In tandem with the album rollout, Glover released a short film and a seventy-two-page, one-act play, featuring a nameless protagonist referred to only as The Boy. Glover performed in character as The Boy on his The Deep Web Tour, which used set pieces featured in the short film and opportunities for digital audience interaction unique to each show. At the time, Glover’s use of technology to expand the bounds of the album was revolutionary. He had effectively created a world.
Glover released his sixth album under the Childish Gambino moniker, Bando Stone and the New World, in July 2024, employing the same tactics in his craft. Similar to the one-act play that accompanied Because The Internet, Bando Stone and The New Worldserves as a soundtrack for an upcoming feature film of the same name, starring Glover as the fictional Bando Stone.2 Further, Glover performed the album in character as Bando Stone at a listening party on Little Island in New York City,3 blurring the lines between reality and fiction once more.
Donald Glover is not the first pop artist to adopt alter egos in artistry and performance (David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust and Eminem/Slim Shady are prime examples), nor is he the first artist to proclaim the upheaval that the internet would bring to the distribution and consumption of pop music.4 However, Glover was prolific in leveraging the internet itself as an artistic means of creation and even prophetic in identifying how advancing technology would change the medium of the studio album.
In the years between Because the Internet and Bando Stone and the New World, Glover’s once revolutionary immersive world-building techniques have become commonplace in the most successful studio albums. This is partially due to the emphasis of audiovisual content on music distribution services like Spotify and Apple Music. Spotify, for example, is currently advertising a video option for podcasters5 and the option for artists to add a short, looped video to accompany individual tracks, with the tagline ‘Give your music new depth.’6 Simultaneously the rise of “smart algorithms,” or personal algorithmic-based recommendation services, have steadily been employed on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram since 2014.7 These algorithms reward short, sonically catchy content over the lyrically masterful work that often unfolds through a full-length album, reducing the depth of creativity to the lowest common denominator, the fifteen-second clip.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rise of the internet ruptured the distribution and consumption of studio albums. Now, further advancements in technology and new trends in music consumption have created a metamorphosis of the medium itself. In the wake of these rapid changes, more pop artists have released increasingly immersive and experiential albums through strategies including embodied opportunities for fan engagement, communal digital spaces, audiovisual content and easily identifiable brand identity.
Donald Glover is by no means the only artist seeking to provide a world-like experience for fans. Charli xcx, Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish have all released major albums in 2024, each working to establish and maintain a community of listeners through their artistry and marketing. As for a prime example, no pop artist has been as successful in creating an immersive, parasocial musical ecosystem as Taylor Swift.
On Swift’s rollout of her eleventh studio album The Tortured Poet’s Department, she created an embodied experience for fans by launching an in-person pop-up at the Los Angeles shopping center The Grove.8 Key to the pop-up’s success was the communal cracking of clues in the exhibit on social media platforms, nourishing Swift’s established digital community on TikTok and Instagram. Swift also partnered with TikTok to deliver a digital audiovisual experience to fans, allowing fans to unlock virtual ‘charms’ for each of Swift’s eleven albums as they complete tasks in-app, tying in ‘video highlights from each tour stop’ and ‘a playlist tied to each week’s album theme.’9 While Swift does not implement alter-egos as Glover does, she does not need to for her albums to be immersive. The number of characters featured in Swift’s albums could be counted—including Travis Kelce and Kim Kardashian—which led the New York Times to publish a piece titled ‘A Brief Guide to Who’s Who on Taylor Swift’s “Tortured Poets.”’10
If pop artists once created albums but now build worlds, does this heighten the creative burden and responsibility the artist carries? Plagued by similar questions, Grammy award-winning artist Maggie Rogers achieved her Master of Arts in Religion and Public Life from Harvard Divinity School. Rogers told an interviewer at Harvard Divinity ‘A really palpable and obvious and potent way that we connect to each other is through culture, through social media, but it puts a lot of emphasis and power in the hands of people who are artists.’11 Rogers continued to describe the ‘nontraditional ministerial position’ that fans put her in, along with the ‘moral and spiritual guidance’ they seek from her. ‘That wasn’t the job I signed up to do,’ said Rogers.12 So, if pop artists like Rogers are now creators of immersive realities—of worlds—do they participate in those worlds along with the listener, or reign over their world below like a kind of god? Are listeners then going to these worlds for entertainment, escapism or spiritual guidance? All of the above?
As the pop studio album transfigures in form, a new opportunity arises to consider the studio album theologically, through the creative framework established by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien described the literary artist as a world-builder with the phrase “sub-creator.” He explored the term a few times in his academic work, once in lecture at the University of St Andrews in 1938, later published as the work ‘On Fairy-Stories’, and again in the poem ‘Mythopoeia’.13 Admittedly, Tolkien is specifically referencing the genres of literary fairy stories and fantasy in ‘On Fairy-Stories’. Still, his general theological reflections on the artist as sub-creator can reasonably be applied to the pop artist’s studio album, especially as the mediums draw closer together due to the increasingly immersive qualities and literary depth found in such albums.
Imagining the human artist as both derivative and participatory in divine creation, Tolkien wisely distinguishes ‘The Primary World’ (God’s ultimate truth, beauty and goodness in Creation) from ‘The Secondary World’ that sub-creators build through their artistry,14 echoing the creation mandate given to humanity in Genesis 1:28. Tolkien claims that when the artist is effective in their craft, they create a Secondary World ‘where your mind can enter.’15 ‘You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.’16
At first, reading Tolkien’s words can be unnerving. Do listeners really find themselves inside the world of a pop artist when they listen to a masterful album? It may be anxiety-inducing to consider the worlds that listeners have unwittingly entered, as not all pop artists are equally concerned with exploring the transcendentals in their work. However, Tolkien’s words quell these anxieties, as he states ‘Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.’17 On this same topic in his Letter to Artists, John Paul II beautifully writes ‘Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption.’18 Thus, even the poorest, seemingly decrepit studio albums plead ‘to the fulfillment’ of New Creation.
In a secular, western culture that often prescribes ultimate reality to one’s inner creative voice, this primary/secondary distinction is helpful, as even the best human artist is incapable of creating a Primary World. In other words, if the pop artist is derivative of the Ultimate Artist, then the artist is now freed from the burden of perfection, as their Secondary World is only a piece of artistic mimesis that points to The Primary World, either effectively or poorly. While Maggie Rogers’ point about the ‘power’19 bestowed upon artists by listeners is incisive, separating secondary worlds from the Primary World relinquishes some of this power and returns it where it is due—to the Ultimate Artist. The sub-creator, if they choose to do so, can yield the power they bestow over their world below and be released to participate in the celebration of beauty made possible through art and creativity.
The artist is not the only one who is freed by this creative framework but the listener, too. Should the listener recognize the pop artist as they are—as a mere sub-creator—they will now engage with these worlds with renewed purpose. Instead of listening to an album for entertainment, escapism or even emotional or spiritual guidance, the listener is now redirected to The Primary World and the redemption of all things every time they find themselves in an artist’s world. These listeners do not belong to the fandom of a secondary world, but, rather, they belong to The Primary World as they experience a piece of artistry and ask ‘Is it true?’20 When the listener recognizes that these secondary worlds (no matter how immersive they may seem) are merely ‘reflected light through whom is splintered from a single White’,21 they too are freed to experience the fullness of beauty in The Primary World.
Glover’s 2024 album Bando Stone and The New World is Glover’s final album under the Childish Gambino moniker. Exploring ideas including love, fatherhood and the inescapable passage of time, the album serves as a capstone for Glover’s music career thus far. One line in the single ‘Survive (feat. Chlöe)’ reads:
‘It’s a new verse with my old flow,
There’s a new world and an old one.’22
As Glover concludes this chapter of his career, he reflects to earlier projects like Because The Internet and now finds himself in a wildly different world. Considering the wave of changes brought to the music industry over the past decade, it is easy to understand Glover’s sentiment. The studio album is neither created nor consumed in the way that it once was, and the medium shall continue to change. Whether the studio album is waxing or waning at any moment is beside the point, for ‘Story, fantasy, [will] still go on, and should go on,’23 according to Tolkien, until everything sad becomes untrue. In the meantime, the pop artist and the listener have the same task: to participate in the redemption of the Ultimate Artist’s world.
