There's a subsequent fade-in of melancholy carnival music that segues into the repetition of "Don't be mad 'cause I'm doin' me better than you doin' you," a line that perfectly encapsulates what makes Because the Internet so timely and metamodern.
The vision of solipsism hits fever pitch when he attempts to cut through the literal and metaphoric noise by interjecting, "And I don't give a fuck about my family name" - a presumable reference to his privileged upbringing in the face of the expectation that "authentic" rappers come from harsh circumstances - followed in the video by a slow track out as he clenches his teeth in rage then softens to fear, then confusion, as if to show that, though he's the song's pilot, he's as lost as the rest of us. Which of the voices here belongs to Donald Glover, which to Childish Gambino, which to The Boy (the accompanying script's protagonist)? To stratify it even further, which is - Childish Gambino's Twitter self - and which are simply imagined voices or characters? In crafting such a whirlpool, Gambino forces us to interrogate not just the artifice of persona - that goes without saying - but our need for it as a means of processing and engaging with the present world. And, because we know that Glover is deeply invested in social media #lifestylereporting, the album (in conversation with his use of persona in daily life) makes it impossible to pin down exactly who's saying what. The process of discovering and listening to music has become so dependent on cyberspace, that, no matter if he's "talking" to his lover, his boys, his fans, his ghosts, or himself, he knows he's ultimately talking to the Internet horde. The constant fluctuation forces us to read this collage as a composite persona - a singular identity engaged in continuous code-switching, more cuttlefish than parrot - existing as the summation of all the performed identities. Gambino doesn't forecast when shifts occur, and what results is a layering of simultaneous (and often contradictory) realities. This isn't the persona play we might see from Eminem or Styles P, where specific voices are used as outlets for distinct parts of the performers' personalities. But Glover's oscillation extends beyond mere technique he employs different personae in different songs (as well as shifting within the songs themselves) depending on his rhetorical goals: sometimes the lover ("Telegraph Ave," "3005"), sometimes the frustrated youth ("Sweatpants"), sometimes the jaded celeb ("The Party"), sometimes the mellow-high philosopher ("No Exit," "Flight of the Navigator").
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