![]() But Childish Gambino doesn’t invoke the comforts of nostalgia. Glover often sings about lessons from elders and the responsibilities of parenthood. The songs don’t hide their second-generation status. “Redbone” and “Terrified,” two falsetto ballads laced with paranoia and fear, stay poised between plush vocal-group soul and synthesizer subversion. “Zombies” deploys its P-Funk-style synthesizers to ooze along nicely as it sets up a slow-creeping horror-movie scenario that doubles as a warning about exploitation. But Childish Gambino generally makes good use of what it borrows. Sometimes Childish Gambino shares the songwriting credits directly with its influences, like the Funkadelic members behind the frantic funk of “Riot!” Other songs hold obvious echoes “Baby Boy,” a ballad that worries over fatherhood and custody, directly models its sparse arrangement on “ Just Like a Baby” by Sly and the Family Stone. ![]() But he’s well-suited to more cartoonish 1970s approaches: yowls and cackles, grainy screams, squeezed-out falsettos, zany swoops between speech and song. He knows he’s not the one to put across a full-throated love ballad he doesn’t try. Glover’s longtime collaborator in Childish Gambino, the Swedish musician and producer Ludwig Goransson, realistically reconstructs the greasy guitar tones, sliding synthesizers, eager backup vocals, snappy drums and chattering clavinet of 1970s-vintage production. But he inhabits it like an actor who’s done his homework to get fully immersed in a role. Glover, born in 1983, never heard the music in its original time frame. The album shares the perils of all revivalism: that it’s an emulation and pastiche rather than an invention, that it’s nostalgic rather than contemporary. It’s at once a homage and a parody, equally aware of that era’s excesses and its glories, of the way that the most memorable 1970s R&B merged sensuality, activism, humor, toughness, outlandishness, futurism, soul roots, wild eccentricity and utopian community spirit. The music directly recalls the 1970s R&B before hip-hop - the era of Parliament-Funkadelic Earth, Wind & Fire Stevie Wonder the Spinners the Chi-Lites the Ohio Players late Sly and the Family Stone and early Prince. ![]() “Awaken, My Love!,” his third album as Childish Gambino, takes a sharp turn: from rapping to full-time singing and from contemporary production to unabashed throwback. He has done that on albums under his musical alias, Childish Gambino, and also as the driving force of “Atlanta,” the superb TV series on FX on which he is an executive producer, writer and actor, presenting a street-level corrective to the glamour-and-guns hip-hop fantasies of “Empire.” Donald Glover - actor, comedian, writer, producer, rapper, songwriter - has set himself a complex cultural project: to both embody current African-American culture and reveal it to the wider world.
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