After he left Soul Coughing, Mike Doughty wrote a bunch of simpler, pared-back songs and released them on the album and EP Skittish and Rockity Roll. Many of them are just acoustic guitar and a groove box, and most of them are hell of catchy.
My favorite is “Ossining”, which I’ve been singing along to for years without ever bothering to find out what it means. I’d used context clues and the repeated “why not seek Ossining” to guess that it was a playfully made-up word for some kind of enlightenment movement. As it turns out, it’s a small city in New York state. There could still be some enigmatic double meaning to the song, though, and I’m enjoying the continued mystery.
I do know what “Lithonia” is, though — if you haven’t watched that video yet, I don’t want to spoil it but I will warn that it has a jump-scare gory ending — because I grew up near there. So did Donald Glover, since he grew up near there, too. It’s not an especially remarkable city; when I was growing up, the highlight was that it had a Dairy Queen. Now, it has a mall.
Maybe the song isn’t about the city at all, and it’s a character or something from Bando Stone and the New World, Childish Gambino’s upcoming movie. Again, I’m preferring to live with the mystery for now.
I will say that I spent a long time underestimating Childish Gambino/Donald Glover, and I hope I’ve learned my lesson. For instance: I thought it was absurd that 30 Rock picked “Stone Mountain, Georgia” as the hometown of Kenneth the page, and they set at least one episode there depicting it as the smallest, most stereotypical, backwoods shithole in the darkest part of the Appalachians. It’s actually a relatively large city, built up around a landmark co-opted by racists to celebrate the Confederacy. I assumed that the 30 Rock writers intended it as meta-commentary, since the episodes were all about how New York writers had no idea what the rest of the country was really like. Later, I found out that Glover is from Stone Mountain, and he was a writer on the series.
Also, I’d been way too dismissive of Childish Gambino’s music, as just a celebrity side project. I think it was partly a defense mechanism, because it seemed cosmically unfair that someone could be that handsome and that funny and also be a talented musician. It turns out that not only are there some fantastic songs — “3005” in particular — but more importantly, the songs aren’t “celebrity makes a hip hop record” so much as a hugely talented person having too many ideas to fit into one medium.