Freestyle, Hip-Hop, Videos | New Childish Gambino on Tim Westwood [Video]

Posted by jeffwbaird on July 14, 2012

It seems that the days of genuine freestyling are all but behind us. Once a critical part of an upcoming emcee’s resume, freestyle sessions (like those of popular English DJ Tim Westwood) have now become a place where artists preview written verses, generally covering up the fact that they actually can’t freestyle at all. In the past year or so, this fact has become even more transparent, with artists like Drake (and now Childish Gambino) literally reading their “freestyle” verses off of their phones. Call it what you want—I’d still say it’s more honest than the opposite—like when J. Cole went on Westwood last year and delivered an impeccable freestyle that we all realized a few months later was just a verse on his debut album. Regardless, Childish Gambino is blowing up fast, and not only that—he is improving ridiculously fast as a rapper. While there are definitely a few songs off of CAMP that I like to bump, on a scale of most impressive elements of the project, his flow and lyricism were dead-last. Royalty, on the contrary (which you can download here in case you missed it), is a showcase of his radical improvement, which occured most clearly in those two areas. Now, he’s on a press tour, and of course makes the critical Westwood stop to drop off a handful of newly-scribed verses (you can tell just how fresh they are when CG laughs at the “bok choy” line). Watch him drop some impressive lines over Usher’s “Lemme See”, and do justice to the Harry Fraud instrumental that has been getting torn apart lately (cc: Kinetics’ “Chris Nolan”).