Childish Gambino - Because The Internet

Because The Internet might possibly edge out Between The Buried And Me's Colors for the coveted Bottle of Beef Worst Album for Vinyl Award. They're both fantastic albums that have no business being on vinyl, they're so long they have to be double albums, and they both completely fail to fit themselves into 4 satisfying sections with a pause in between, but BTI has many extra levels of terrible. 

1) the side flips happen inside multi-movement works. 2) those multi-movement works don't actually have titles. 3) the track names are only printed inside the insert and you have to physically cross-reference the track list with the track credits to figure out which tracks group together and/or which side they are on. 4) not a gatefold double album, just a 5-sided box with 2 records and an insert stuffed into it. 6) no track names or even side names on the record labels; you have to actually hold the record under strong light and look at the runout etching to figure out which side you're about to play. 7) the actual cover art is a GIF with a blur/zoom animation; you can't print that on cardboard. 8) as concepts go, the album itself being a meme is a hard sell, intellectually speaking. 

About point 8. See, Childish Gambino is a character Donald Glover plays, and that character sees reality through meme colored glasses. That's not the hard part, the hard part is that you would assume that by extension the album is a meme. But "Hip Hop Album as meme" doesn't make any sense unless you're also willing to say Tyler The Creator's albums are memes, or Kid Cudi, or Kanye West. 

Don't get mad at me for pointing it out, but the real point/purpose of a "Hip Hop Album" is to tell your fish out of water story. Usually that story takes the form of Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, where a street kid finds himself in the lap of luxury or ironically elevates his social status by destroying the community even more. But, because the internet, BTI is more like Carlton went to live with Will in Philly because Donald Glover is an actual pretty famous comedian/actor playing the persona of a relatively small/obscure rapper. That goes way beyond "on the nose" into Jim Rose Circus style hammering a ten-penny nail into your septum. It's quite a lot like David Duchovney making an Alt-Rock album, and the whole thing very quickly spirals out of control into calling out the entire music industry as fake.

Now, I'm not going to stand here and say Donald Glover and Bo Burnham are telling you the stories each other is supposed to be telling you, but I kind of just did. Bo Burnham retired "because of the internet," Childish Gambino retired because he's a not real person who pwnd the internet. At an SAT Analogy section level (which itself is a pre-internet meme), Childish Gambino is to Donald Glover as Borat is to Sacha Baron Coen, so unless your ears have a dedicated post-irony setting, this whole thing feels very confusing. You should, at some level, be mad that he's doing him better than you're doing you, but not mad at him, mad at the wider system that's preventing you from manifesting your own destiny. At that level BTI says reality is fiction, only the fiction you create for yourself is real.

[Alex Trebek impression] oooh, I'm sorry, the judges are telling me you didn't phrase your response in the form of a meme, so we will have to deduct $1,000. Susan, your category?