On the one hand, there's Donald Glover: the writer, actor, comedian, and director extraordinaire best known for his work on the sitcom Community and his original series (and homage to his hometown) Atlanta. The result is an experiment in time travel: Through sounds of the past, he captures the tensions of the present. 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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