Childish Gambino and Outgrowing the Stage Name

By Ian Glackin

Hip Hop artist Donald Glover announced during his set at Los Angeles’ Camp Flog Gnaw on November 22nd that he’d suffered a stroke during his 2024 Childish Gambino Tour, forcing him to make tour date cancellations and seek medical attention. The emergency ultimately led to the termination of the tour, which was meant to be Glover’s last under the ‘Childish Gambino’ alias. As the story of the retirement of Childish Gambino has resurfaced, it prompted a curiosity to further explore his relationship with the stage name, and other examples of the retirement of stage names. 

Glover adopted the alias Childish Gambino, from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator on the internet (mine is The Unbreakable Knight), and began his music career with the 2005 release ‘The Younger I Get’, which has since been made unavailable to the public. According to Glover in an interview with Fuse, his initial affinity for the name spurred out of the idea that it could represent both the silliness and serious nature of his work. And he was right. The hip hop star rose to global fame with chart topping songs like ‘Redbone’, handling themes of infidelity and paranoia, and ‘This is America’, which discusses police brutality and systemic racism. In both songs, Gambino constructed significant political and social narratives, and managed to do so while producing music that caught fire on radio and streaming services across the world. 

But Glover’s relationship with his stage name is not what it used to be. In an interview with the New York Times in 2024, Glover elaborated that he no longer feels fulfilled by the name, saying that he felt like he “didn’t need to build in this way anymore.” Glover, who has built a name for himself in the worlds of film and comedy, alluded to a degree of personal growth that led to the realization that he’d been juggling too many projects at once, and wasn’t able to produce music to his standards. While it’s not the end of his musical career, it seems that Glover has emotionally and creatively moved past the Childish Gambino identity.

While most examples of artists moving on from their stage names involve legal disputes and a desire to avoid controversy (see ‘The Artist Previously Known as Prince’ and 2 Chainz’ former name), it’s not unheard of for artists to retire stage names due to emotional reasons. Late hip-hop legend Daniel Dumile Thompson, known by the alias MF DOOM, had an entirely separate career in the early 90s under the name ‘Zev Love X,’ rapping in the hip-hop trio KMD with his brother Dingilizwe Dumile, known as DJ Subroc. In 1993, Subroc was struck by a car and killed, altering Daniel’s life forever. In his grief, he abandoned KMD (which had recently lost its record deal with Elektra Records over album artwork), his career as a rising star in the New York scene, and the ‘Zev Love X’ name. As we all know, Daniel Thompson went on to do great things under the alias MF DOOM, and is credited heavily with creating the genre of Backpack Rap, but he had an entirely different stage identity during the first act of his career in which he explored different themes and associated with different angles of the genre.

The Weeknd has also discussed the intention to retire the stage name and perform under his given name, Abel Tesfaye. Tesfaye suffered severe vocal loss during his 2022 tour, which led him to rethink the value of his fame in relation to the physical and mental strain it requires. As put by Tesfaye, “I've always wanted my work to be famous. I don't know if I ever wanted to be famous, so that whole skill set I haven't really mastered and I don't plan to.” Similarly to Glover, Tesfaye has implied that the responsibility and difficulty that comes with being an extremely successful artist has placed immense pressure upon his shoulders. 

Retiring one’s musical identity and retiring in full are two entirely different things. The former is similar to leaving a band; artists adopt an identity to help consolidate and express their ideas in the same way that one would join a band to seek creative facilitation. They can both lead to great prosperity, and they can both be outgrown, for one reason or another. Sometimes the old name just doesn’t work anymore.