Childish Gambino’s Awaken, My Love!, Sh*tty Thinkpieces & Microwave Critics
I’d like to preface this entry by saying that any review you read in the last two to three days regarding Childish Gambino’s Awaken, My Love! album will totally be full of sh*t.
It will be, at best, a music review masked as a sh*tty thinkpiece. It will undoubtedly conflate or compare projects that are in no way bedfellows complete with a bunch of SAT color words that go nowhere. It will be full of bombast and an insider’s sneering jab of having faster access to Wikipedia than you. It will, almost surely, be more about everything but the goddamn album, which is why I read those sh*tty things and I’m let down every goddamn time.
Now that I’ve gotten my disgust of microwave music criticism and sh*tty thinkpieces out of the way (that’s a phrase I’ve been using for a while, don’t steal it), it’s fine time we examine the reaction to Mr. Donald Glover’s latest sonic offering.
A lot of people whose music tastes I generally respect hated it. I’m still going to listen to the album and I’m still going to respect my peers and associates’ music tastes. But each crack at Glover’s album was whiny, pointing to the not-so-obvious, harshly aimed at the man’s perceived character and not his art, and made to be an extension of everything he’s done in times past whether acclaimed or not.
My review: I pressed play. I liked what I heard. I played the songs I liked more than once. I skipped the songs I didn’t like. Then I listened to it again. And lo and behold, I still liked it.
I stopped doing music reviews a while ago because, one, I don’t know why anyone gives a sh*t what I think about an album or single, and secondly, the pay is sh*t and I have a lot of bills. So you can I imagine I cringe in both recoiling disdain and a respectable amount of pity of anyone trying to review Awaken, My Love! and expect to be taken seriously.
Most of the naysayers are right: Glover is in full P-Funk Karaoke mode and the results will be impressive to those untrained to the Funk genre. Even further, there are some self-indulgent moments of art present on the record but we should expect this from the paper-thin core some creative millennials disguise as high art.
It’s an homage, but trying to make it anything other than Glover having access to a budget and paying some cats to back his strained falsettos and lyrical noodling is trying too hard. Glover, like any other Black artist in recent time or history, owes us nothing. He heard some P-Funk records, maybe some Pink Floyd and thought, “I can do that.”
This album isn’t a gift. It isn’t meant to be a bookend to the current Black struggles of our day. It wasn’t recorded to change the world drastically. It doesn’t have any life lesson to provide.
It is a piece of music, one that should be absorbed a bit longer before we try to pretend to know what Glover is expressing. Nobody knows but Glover, his band mates, and maybe a handful of confidants. The rest of us are guessing at it and doing it poorly at that.
You’re going to see a few key words or terms in recent Childish Gambino reviews: derivative. pastiche. reach-back (a really sh*tty one there). multi-hyphenate (that one is getting some new burn among sh*tty music critics).
If you see any of the above in the reviews, it’s going to most likely be sh*t. A steaming pile of dung that flies wouldn’t even touch on the warmest of days. That’s not to say that reviews praising the records have it right either. There’s no way in hell people should attempt to attach Awaken, My Love! to D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, or to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly.
It’s an unfair expectation that Black artists must provide an immediate soundtrack for the movement. It’s not on Gambino to create a project that makes you feel Black again and if you need music that badly to remind you of that fact, your issues are deep. I’ve seen peers and reviews mention those previous releases and I’m failing to see why Gambino would be in that strata in any way.
Once again, this is no defense of Glover as Gambino. Prior to the ROYALTY mixtape in 2012, his music was pretty awful to me. He really turned into his own artist from that point on. I didn’t really absorb much of the other media he was involved in but I hear he was great in that. None of that transferred to or had an effect on my interest in his music.
I also enjoyed the FX series, Atlanta. That was brilliant television and made people cozy up to Glover again after disowning him time and again for whatever offense the Internet felt like making up that week.
Maybe that’s just it. They made the mistake of loving Glover again and hoping that the music of his latest project would reflect the sway, quirkiness and wit of the TV series. Instead, they got a super-serious nod to late 60s and 70s funk and soul with cues taken from greater past recordings yet managing to sound somewhat current.
Awaken, My Love! hasn’t been out a week and already it’s dividing homes, Facebook walls, Twitter feeds are in shambles and folks are sending angry SMS and MMS mesages to each other over their disagreements. Or at least it feels that way.
Perhaps when the smoke clears and folks actually sit with the album like we used to do back before Soulseek and Napster will there be thoughts that form about what the music made them feel, made them see, instead of making up sh*t about what it is.
Write About The Music. Dammit.
Peace,
D.L. Chandler, semi-retired music critic and full-time content superstar.
