![]() READ MORE: 'Because The Internet' Album Review Lover who proves that rapping runs in the family.Īll seven songs bring something different to the table in Gambino’s newest project to date. The album also features Gambino’s younger brother Steven G. It is almost as if he compiled all of his tweets into a journal and read them one after another. Smith does not sing or rap on any of the songs but he speaks over the music as if performing spoken word poetry. His singing chops are on full display as he barely raps throughout the seven songs.Ī surprise on the album is the inclusion of the ever-pondering Jaden Smith. The seven-track album highlights the versatility of the artist as he shows off that he is much more than just a rapper. ![]() Some catalogs are emblems of polished order and cohesion, but his is a rabbit hole of tangled genius and surprises well worth falling into.Kauai Album Cover (Twitter)Rapper Childish Gambino recently came out with a new EP titled “Kauai,” which debuted a new sound for the artist. Some of Gambino's biggest hits, from the nimble display of "3005" and psychedelic soul of "Redbone" to the blistering raps of "This Is America," share little in common aesthetically, yet he executes each with aplomb. Ever since, genre descriptors have grown increasingly useless-he shrewdly treats genre like more of a suggestion than a limitation-but terms like hip-hop, R&B, funk, and indie electro-pop, all pushed to their experimental bounds, are good jumping-off points. But Childish Gambino's earliest mixtapes, from the late 2000s, are the reflections of a cultural sponge who simply desired to create on his own terms. Glover's first recordings-which he once said sounded like a “decrepit” version of Drake-predate the name change and never formally saw the light of day. While not exactly the kind of backstory many rappers and singers would readily admit to, it's a fitting place to start in order to understand his idiosyncratic approach to music, which manages to strike a delicate balance between artful and whimsical. Glover was born in 1983, at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, but Childish Gambino came into existence, famously, with the aid of an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator, sometime around 2008, when he decided to use the moniker so that fans of his comedy wouldn’t think his music was just a bit. Shirking definition is key to his allure, a superpower of sorts that keeps onlookers entertained, intrigued, and altogether baffled in turns. Then there's Childish Gambino, the Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate musician and producer who's not as easy to describe-but that's also kind of the point. ![]() 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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