Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 04/02/2012 at 5:10 PM News

The Popdust Files: childish gambino, eat your vegetables, ugh

Donald Glover’s alter ego / rap dalliance Childish Gambino, whose album Camp you either really like or really want to attach printouts of Pitchfork’s excoriation to, has released a new track. It is called “Eat Your Vegetables.” Even Camp devotees must admit that it is not great. It is very, very, very, very not great. It is almost miraculous how not-great it is.

I can say this, because I’ve listened to the whole track and have about fifteen bruises on my general forehead area to show for it. Call it reconnaissance, maybe; I’ve scouted “Eat Your Vegetables” fully and can now warn you about its greatest hazards. To put this in perspective, the following five elements bugged me more than all of the following, any of which might’ve made this list on a different day: “homophobes on gay shit,” “yeah we got a safe word / we never use it,” “no I ain’t drunk / I just text badly,” the flow in general, the relentless, Maybach-style pushing of “D-Money” as a thing, Spongebob. If you think any of those or any other lyrics deserve a spot on this list, or if you think we are wrong and/or haters, you know where to comment. In the meantime:

5. “High on shrooms like Mario.” A grab at pop-culture cred too easy, like 1-1.

4. Speaking of video games, the Donkey Kong Country sample that makes up the beat. Utter, blatant nerdbait that we are going to take anyway, because everyone knows that Donkey Kong Country 2 contains more sample-able songs. (Or, since the track’s called “Eat Your Vegetables,” Commander Keen.)

3. “Like when someone is like, “what happened to Chris,” and you turn around and there’s a fat guy that kind of looks like Chris, and you like, “oh shit” and laughing and shit.” This is, in Glover’s telling, an example of a fat joke that is “never not funny.” We don’t ever not disagree.

2. “Nobody cares like it’s J Cole/Diggy,” a diss whose shelf life was over by the time Glover got out of the recording studio. (See also: the Friendster reference, although that was dated to begin with.)

1. “Man, I die for my hood / Trayvon.” That’s some opportunistic, sketchy shit / George Zimmerman. (It’s particularly bad considering the hip-hop community’s been actively supporting the Trayvon Martin case, including numerous actually sincere tracks. One of them’s embedded below Glover’s, because it’s got Diddy’s endorsement and we feel like we need to balance the universe somehow.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L0FR9srHW8