This week, Childish Gambino released his second studio album, Because the Internet, after streaming it online to fight internet leaks that seem nearly inevitable in today’s market. And don’t get us wrong: The 19-track project is both a social criticism of the world and an honest display of Gambino’s manic thoughts and emotions is a solid feat for the budding rap-singer. But Gambino, better known as actor/writer Donald Glover, provided a much more major play in the rollout of his LP– a self-written screenplay to read while the album is played that includes dialogue, silent video footage and cues for when to start playing each song.

The script features appearances from Chance the Rapper, Rick Ross, Jhené Aiko and a handful of other characters that accompany Gambino’s character, The Boy, in his experiences. Each scene is matched up with every song or interlude and you kind of find yourself asking, well, what came first, the album or the screenplay?

Often, soundtracks are put together to fit the mood of a film or story but maybe this time it worked the other way around. Gambino often makes references in his lyrics to things that happen to “The Boy” like failed attempts at a ménage a trois, a lack of purpose and surrounding himself with friends that he can’t really trust.

No matter which was finished first, when played together, as they should be, the screenplay and the album come together to create a completely different world (one Gambino might truly live in).

As a music listener, the experience spoiled me. I didn’t have to listen and work to connect my own dots; Gambino snatched my kindergarten workbook, connected every dot there is and colored in all the pictures. Then he gave it back to me and said “Here, just enjoy it.”

No one else seems to be paying too much attention to the screenplay aspect of this release. Maybe that’s because it’s 75 pages long and requires a certain attention span that the internet seems to be making obsolete. Given that, it took me a couple sittings to finish, I could definitely understand this. But once I finished, I went for seconds.

I’m still trying to figure out what to call this experience, fighting the urge to call it a movie. There’s no saying if other artists will follow suit with the trend, or if they even can. But at this time, I think it’s necessary to point out that Childish Gambino, like Kanye West, may have just started to change the way we experience music. –Keith Reid-Cleveland