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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