![]() 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. Some catalogs are emblems of polished order and cohesion, but his is a rabbit hole of tangled genius and surprises well worth falling into.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. 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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