"(If you want it) Yeah (You can have it) Oh, oh, oh"

-- from Redbone

He was born in 1983 at an Air Force base in California and raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the son of a postal worker and a daycare provider who filled the house with encouragement. At New York University he joined Derrick Comedy, a sketch group that put videos online before that was a career path, and the group's work caught the attention of Tina Fey, who hired him to write for 30 Rock at twenty-three. He was the youngest writer on the staff, and he learned the machinery of television from the inside while releasing mixtapes at night under his Wu-Tang generator name.

The music grew from a side project into a second career with its own arc. Camp and Because the Internet were hip-hop albums with anxiety and ambition baked in, and then Awaken, My Love! abandoned rap almost entirely for psychedelic soul, a George Clinton-inspired sound that produced Redbone and its Grammy. He was nominated across rap, R&B, and album of the year categories in the same seasons, proof that the genre lines meant nothing to him. He debuted This Is America on Saturday Night Live in 2018, a song and video about guns and Black life that swept the major Grammy categories, the first hip-hop song to win Record and Song of the Year.

Meanwhile Atlanta, his FX series about the city's music scene, was winning Emmys and rewriting how television depicted Black creativity. He even helped inspire Miles Morales, the animated Spider-Man.

He was born in 1983 at an Air Force base in California and raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the son of a postal worker and a daycare provider who filled the house with encouragement. At New York University he joined Derrick Comedy, a sketch group that put videos online before that was a career path, and the group's work caught the attention of Tina Fey, who hired him to write for 30 Rock at twenty-three. He was the youngest writer on the staff, and he learned the machinery of television from the inside while releasing mixtapes at night under his Wu-Tang generator name.

The music grew from a side project into a second career with its own arc. Camp and Because the Internet were hip-hop albums with anxiety and ambition baked in, and then Awaken, My Love! abandoned rap almost entirely for psychedelic soul, a George Clinton-inspired sound that produced Redbone and its Grammy. He was nominated across rap, R&B, and album of the year categories in the same seasons, proof that the genre lines meant nothing to him. He debuted This Is America on Saturday Night Live in 2018, a song and video about guns and Black life that swept the major Grammy categories, the first hip-hop song to win Record and Song of the Year. Meanwhile Atlanta, his FX series about the city's music scene, was winning Emmys and rewriting how television depicted Black creativity. He even helped inspire Miles Morales, the animated Spider-Man.

He has kept the pattern going: a role in The Lion King, the experimental album 3.15.20, a return to stand-up, an announcement that Childish Gambino was finished, and then a revival, because even endings are material to him. He has collected Grammys, Emmys, and a Peabody, and he has never made the same thing twice in a row. He is the writer who became a star, the comedian who made America confront itself, the musician who refuses to be one genre. He treats the whole culture as his studio, and he is still inventing what comes next.

Sources: Hotsupper research, Wikipedia, Britannica, IBW21 (Touré on This Is America), Wikidata