Childish Gambino’s New Album Is A Deplorable Act Of Treason
Because Childish Gambino’s just-released new album Awaken, My Love is merely only reactionary musical pastiche-ist Donald Glover play-acting with the most incendiary soul records in American history in the era of Donald Trump, he’s committed an unforgivable act of Black treason. Moreover, because this album involves the best of the worst in black-on-blaxploitation, it’s a deplorable 49-minute travesty couched in note-perfect excellence that narrowly misses the point of offering Black folks (and our white, brown, yellow, and red friends) healing salvation to close a truly troubling 2016.
Let’s discuss the importance of tonality and context in order to unravel this very good, yet also somehow nearly entirely terrible thing.
In all things everything, context is important. Donald Glover is releasing Awaken, My Love in the midst of his most critically-acclaimed and commercially successful period as a creative, as between his smash hit FX Network comedy Atlanta and being cast as young Lando Calrissian in the next installment of the Star Wars saga, he’s NBA Jam levels of on fire. Of course, the same can’t be said for Sly Stone and Funkadelic in 1971.
Compare this success to Glover inspiration Sly Stone in the era preceding the release of his 1971 album There’s A Riot Going On. The context for Stone’s creativity that fueled Donald Glover in making his latest album is almost tragically different than the life that Glover currently leads.
Wikipedia notes the following:
Relationships within the band were deteriorating, with friction between the Stone brothers and bassist Larry Graham. Epic executives requested more product, and the Black Panther Party, with which Stone had become associated, was demanding he make his music more militant and reflective of the black power movement, that he replace Greg Errico and Jerry Martini with black instrumentalists, and replace manager David Kapralik. After moving to Los Angeles, California in late 1969 Stone and his bandmates began to use cocaine and PCP heavily rather than recording music.
As well, the cover of Awaken, My Love is an almost direct rip of another 1971 instant classic, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Again, there’s VERY little that’s similar between Glover in 2016 and any of the many members of Funkadelic 45 years ago. Nearly five decades ago, Wikipedia notes that the P-Funk movement was concerned with the following:
themes from science fiction and afro-futurism, elaborate political and sociological themes, and an evolving storyline with recurring fictional characters.
There are people in the world who may find my critical take on this album to be too severe. From Kendrick Lamar to D’Angelo, A Tribe Called Quest, and more, retro-tinged funk opuses that delve into the sociopolitical ghettoization of the futures of American Blacks are pretty much dominating music right now, and this could be cast as merely yet another album in that line. However, this is not the case.
What makes Awaken, My Love such a divergent pain in the ass of a listen as compared to the aforementioned artistic triumphs is that contextually, while there are similar sounds, Gambino’s seemingly cross-cultural pleas for unity, love and relationships are oblique as compared to Kendrick Lamar’s direct appeal to modern socio-politics. “Riot’s” “No good fighting/World, we’re out of captains/Everyone just wants a better life” isn’t “we gon be alright.” This isn’t to say that it *needed* to be that type of moment. However, if Donald Glover is going to make an album that steals from albums made by Black artists in the throes of uniquely Black depression during yet another era of Black manic depression, then Donald Glover saying anything other than the most profound Black-first statement feels much less than apropos.
As for tonalities, this is where Awaken, My Love truly becomes a recording that deserves to be critically taken out behind the woodshed and shot between the eyes. So much of the early success of Childish Gambino was directly related to his ability to method act the careers of full-time rappers including Drake and Lil Wayne with seamless tonal perfection.
Ultimately, so much of mainstream pop is based around aping zeitgeist-leading aural and instrumental tonalities. From Future and Desiigner not being dissimilar to Bobby Caldwell not actually being a black soul singer, there’s a long history that Donald Glover, by virtue of being a trained thespian, can slide into with ease. However, it’s when he decided to slide into the role of Sylvester Stewart and family imbued with the vibe of P-Funk guitar god Eddie Hazel that he made a step too far.
The album’s only great moment is “Me And Your Mama.” This nearly seven-minute long master class in soul music does a retro-tonality reclaiming futuristic funk thing that, if it were consistently done on this album, would make it the instant classic that clearly so many people (The Roots’ Questlove included) want Awaken, My Love to be. Quite simply, in taking back some unique (maybe terrible?) things that brown and white people did to Black soul, it’s 2016’s best song.
In 1970, Eric Burdon, the one-time lead singer of British Invasion darlings The Animals, merged with poly-ethnic Long Beach, CA-based Chicano soul meets psychedelic funk outfit WAR and released a slew of songs including “They Can’t Take Away Our Music,” which is a never-ending crescendo of a soul ballad that aims for a transcendent plane. As well, in 1978, rock impresario Robert Stigwood cast Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees as a Beatles-eque quartet for a film take on the band’s 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The bizarre cinema that resulted (let’s call it “coke binge verité”) includes a prog rock-meets-P-Funk take on “I Want You/She’s So Heavy” featuring the foursome that purrs and growls in equal measure. In one modern song mashing up both of these brilliant moments and throwing Glover’s seductive soul croon into the mix, “Me And Your Mama” makes a path that has been crooked for nearly four decades into a straight and majestic path, re-setting the left-of-center soul expectation.
In electing Donald Trump on November 8, 2016, America ends easily one of the most depressing years in history by metaphorically turning its back on Black excellence. Glover’s album is the first great Black thing to emerge in America since Trump’s election. Maybe in Glover perceiving that the Orange Terror couldn’t win, this album was conceived with a message that in Hillary Clinton’s America, an album that is a note-perfect recitation of a funky call for peace and love would’ve been perfect. However, Donald Trump is the President, and thus, this record just dredges up ALL of the bad feelings of 45 years prior that are literally bad feelings that Black Americans are feeling right now. In this album feeling more like a retro-futuristic dirge than Afro-Futuristic surge of hope, it’s beautiful, yet deplorable treason.
This was the worst year ever, and Donald Glover had the opportunity to meet to the level of his calling as the next best Black man ever to do the greatest thing. However, Awaken, My Love feels like a call for the undertaker that buried Black America in a coffin of drug abuse, depression and confusion in the 1970s and not the promise for something better that Black people and America in general desperately deserve.
Thus, I’m pained to state, that on the count of Black treason committed against America, I, the jury, find Childish Gambino guilty as charged.
