Childish Gambino – “Pound Cake Freestyle”Ī big part of what kept Gambeezy at the margins of music until “Awaken, My Love!” was our culture’s “There Can Only Be One” problem. “If we were kids/ I’d want to give you everything that you would want,” Glover coos on one of the best hooks of his career at that point, only to have it gorgeously doubled by a violin throughout.Ĩ. This late Camp cut lightly swirls tinkling xylophone with soft strings to juxtapose the complications of adult love and the pure simplicity of childhood crushes. It stays on topic from there, mulling and dreading isolation, rejection and two-faced Hollywood minions, while gifting us with the gem, “They laughed at my rise like my motion was funny/ Ashy to classy, my lotion is money.” Syrupy synth underscores a killer Royalty mixtape collab between the Houston hero Bun B and Atlanta outcast-turned-idol Gambino, while an airy sample from French house DJ Kavinsky adds a layer of fun.įears and insecurities have been standard in hip-hop for a long while now, but opening an EP by falsetto-belting “I don’t wanna be alone” with this level of anguish and earnestness just wasn’t something hip-hop heavy hitters did in 2011. “I never ever thought that I would be scared,” he admits, “Of living in a world where you are not there.”ġ3.
His sophomore drop Poindexter arrived in 2009, the same day NBC’s Community premiered, and with it came this genuinely anguished, fantastically rapped plea to an ex. The result is an experiment in time travel: Through sounds of the past, he captures the tensions of the present.Glover’s pre- Camp work was marked by an ultra-nasal voice and a lot of flows nakedly cribbing from Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, but once in a while the DNA of the artist he’d become bubbled up.
Coming from an artist known for taut wordplay and manically constructed similes, the broad strokes of Awaken are a shift: You’ll think eventually, but mood comes first.Īnd in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that followed the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and so many more, Glover’s choice to echo a period in Black music when artists took on an explicitly revolutionary cast is a canny complement to albums like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Solange Knowles’ A Seat at the Table, both of which explored Black identity with new urgency. It makes for a tonal fluidity that also marks his work on the television show Atlanta, which he created. Like a funhouse mirror, he stretches his influences into weird shapes: The freak-outs are exaggerated to the point of comedy (“Me and Your Mama”) and the ballads romantic to the point of creepy (“Terrified”).
Glover said he’d started with childhood memories of his parents playing Funkadelic and The Isley Brothers on the stereo: specific sounds and songs, but more importantly, a general feeling-one that Glover wasn’t quite old enough to grasp. On the face of it, Donald Glover’s “Awaken, My Love!” is a museum-quality rip of early-’70s funk and soul: the faded vocals, the fuzzed-out guitars, the collective sense of chaos and exuberance.
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