Paak and producer Knxledge’s Yes Lawd! embellishes the tropes of ‘70s soul to great effect you laugh and smile while listening to it. Why not bring some levity to funk in 2016? That worked for Bruno Mars on his recent album of retro R&B, 24K Magic. (To that end, because Glover is a new parent, the sentiment of "Baby Boy" works.) But sincerity alone isn’t an end in and of itself you need to have something interesting to say. I think Glover realizes he doesn't have the gravitas of D'Angelo, so you have to wonder at his decision to play it utterly straight on “Awaken, My Love!” It’s as if he’s convinced his sincere sentiment is enough.
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For instance, on his album, A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, he went rogue against the wishes of his label and recorded nothing but standards with the backing of a full orchestra-they’re played totally straight, which might’ve been the joke. He played the music of Randy Newman, Irving Berlin, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Herman Hupfeld he often stunted with the material. His playful, catholic taste and sense of humor (perhaps inherited from his circus performer grandparents) seasoned the flavor of his original material, in addition to complicating his covers. Nilsson had a magic, shape-shifting voice he did characters, in addition to being one himself. (Compare ‘Kast’s delivery of “Don’t go away” to Glover’s “Don’t take my.”)īut the weird ghost I hear in this haunted house of derivative sounds is Harry Nilsson, the sometimes self-sabotaging singer-songer who built a cult audience in the ‘70s, pickpocketing his way through the American songbook with a perpetual sly grin affixed to his face. “Redbone,” the best song here, is reminiscent of Bootsy Collins’ gem “I’d Rather Be With You.” You can hear OutKast, too-“Baby Boy,” one of the other standouts, bears a striking resemblance to “Toilet Tisha,” which is itself a child of Funkadelic. The influence of Funkadelic, and its offspring, is unmistakable on “Awaken, My Love!” The choruses of earthy voices, the knotted guitar riffs, the jammy outros and intros. In the Billboard interview, he mentioned Funkadelic by name when explaining the roots of this new project, and said, “There’s something about that ’70s black music that felt like they were trying to start a revolution.”
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Instead, “Awaken, My Love!” is a miscalculation, an anticlimactic coda to a year that saw him making the best, most vital work of his career with the TV series Atlanta. That would’ve been the best case scenario here. It’s possible to roll your eyes at an artist’s articulated intentions and marvel at the finished work all the same.
He referred to it as “a shared vibration for human progress.” He told Billboard that he’d been pondering the contemporary moment, specifically, “How do you start a global revolution, really? Is that possible with the systems we’ve set up?” Glover debuted songs from “Awaken, My Love!” at a multi-day musical event he dubbed Pharos at Joshua Tree in California. D'Angelo didn't suddenly try to fit his protest music into the context of a disco album. The album sounds like it wants to do some of the hard, sincere work of artists like D'Angelo and Kendrick Lamar, but both of them put out their finest political art after years spent sharpening their abilities in their respective genres.
Glover explained to Billboard that these 11 songs are “an exercise in just feeling and tone.” The lyrics, sung by Glover in as many voices as there are tracks, gesture broadly in the direction of parenthood, white fear of blackness, and the complexity of love, romantic and brotherly. It’s called “Awaken, My Love!” (all punctuation is Glover’s), and if we take the artist at his word, this is an earnest offering. On Thursday night, Donald Glover-as Childish Gambino-released a community theater production of a funk album.
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