“We just needed a name for ourselves, and we became Royalty.” “It was amongst the times of the MMGs and the Young Moneys, and everybody had all these collectives,” Swank says. The three met Ibra, who became the group’s de-facto art director, and Fam, who would establish himself as the strategic mind behind the group. “Those are all just backstories.” Donald called the pair up to come down to Los Angeles to work with him on music - what would eventually become Royalty. “So much of Atlanta is literally, like, me and Steve’s whole life trying to figure out the music industry,” Swank says. The two friends were struggling musicians in Atlanta, unknowingly building the material that would one day inform much of their work as writers on their hit TV show.
The collective began in 2012, during the making of Gambino’s aptly titled Royalty mixtape. Donald’s brother Stephen met Swank in college. Donald Glover, Fam Udeorji, Stephen Glover, Ibra Ake, Jamal “Swank” Olori, Chad Taylor and Miles Konstantin have spent the past seven years dedicated to creating and riding their artistic ideas in from the fringes to become an industry in and of themselves. How can you make a moment special when everybody gets everything so easily?”ĭefiant, elusive and cerebral, the men of Royalty - the seven-member collective behind many of Donald Glover’s polymathic endeavors - are comfortable grappling with their role in commodifying these moments. When it came to the album, we were searching for that. He continues: “There’s just certain moments in your life, where because of the time it has real estate in your brain, and you know: This gives me a very specific feeling from a very specific time.
We don’t have to be Game of Thrones and have Gambino ice cream.” “I don’t know if you want to hype a death up,” he says. Fam Udeorji, Gambino’s longtime manager, is absurdly calm about this, and won’t let on what any of it means. The next Childish Gambino album, which has been repeatedly teased as the project’s last gasp, could simply be the death of a moniker it could mean the end of Donald Glover’s music career entirely. It’s still unclear what, exactly, that means.
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