Did Childish Gambino deserve today's brutal Pitchfork review? →

So, minutes after I posted the thing about Childish Gambino here, it was decided that it’d be worth expounding on more fully on CultureMap. Give it a read, unless you’re really and truly sick of the guy 100% (which is understandable).

He defended his work’s misogyny with comparisons to other artists and half-hearted deflections (“It sometimes can be crazy and misogynistic and unfair, but so is life,” he insisted, and his publicist pulled him away to take care of a quick stage task as I started asking a follow-up). He generally seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning. On Camp, he’s opposes it more overtly: “You better shut your mouth before I fuck it,” he raps to a critic who claims that she “wrote about rape culture” in the song “Backpackers.”

It’s weird. A guy whose stand-up material is thoughtful about a culture that can be tough on women is not someone that I’d expect to threaten to mouth-rape people who are critical of the misogyny in his music that he personally acknowledged when I asked him about it.