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Rating: This album didn't just come out; it happened. In the sense that it occurred and in the sense that it became one of those instant classics.
You understand the occurrence factor if you know who Childish Gambino, Donald Glover, was before «Awaken, My Love!» came out: the funny black kid with his musical moments on a teen sitcom called Community; a mediocre rapper with two inadvisable albums to his name. In short.
Then last year, in December, Awaken came out and devoured everything. It didn't simply shift his career into high gear; it completely scrapped a 2011 Rav4 and got him an hovercraft, in spite of the caimans lurking and preying on anyone below a certain threshold of street cred.
It's as if Will Smith in ninety-nine, instead of Willennium with Wild Wild West, had released something like, I don't know, D'Angelo's Voodoo. You understand it's peculiar.
The status of instant classic, in 2017, is mostly conferred by the number of memes it inspires. I'm not putting it in quotes, I'm giving you a link in case you've been living in Tibet with Tiscali's DSL until yesterday, and I won't mention it again. Search Redbone on YouTube and see how many damn mashups have been made, are still being made, and how many different people wear the folk-postmodern headdress on the cover. Joe Sudano sang All Star by Smash Mouth over it. Anthony Fantano gave the album a decent 7.
Even just for Redbone, the single that even Prince would've liked to write, this is an instant classic; what do you want me to tell you.
Aaaaah, Redbone. Imagine me saying it like Mughini when he was about to talk about Del Piero. The perfect song, the one that even appeals to those who just listen to Radio D&J and nothing else. That if you ask your uncle, a metalhead since the eighties, he says it's nice, but how can you compare to Pantera?, and yet that wicked, super easy riff, smooth and glossy, with the damn vibraphone, you'll hear him whistling it for the rest of his life. Because in the end, he's not Phil Anselmo, he doesn't have racial preferences.
Redbone is a miracle of bpm and a wonder of arrangements. It's got the slap that you know by now is alive and kicking with us. It has the gaseous guitar distortion, the kind that removes all the bass and goes with the synth like strawberries with cream with nipples. It has Childish Gambino singing bare-chested, in glittering pants and pushed falsetto, soul meowing. The vague lyrics buffet. It has an instrumental tail full of inlays, with instruments entering one by one, and it's so surprising how everything sounds so easy, light yet crispy at the end.
Make mashups, make love, because no matter where you put Redbone, it fits.
There's also the rest of the album. Do you know who blessed it? George Clinton. And indeed, compared to other major contemporary black works, which owe so much to the preservation of r&b and soul canons updated to new production glories, here you find much more '70s funk: at times near-philological imprints of the P-Funk, more on the Funkadelic side. Essentially pentatonic full throttle.
Just listen to the intro of Boogieman, come on.
The composer, producer, is a multi-instrumentalist named Ludwig Goransson. He's whiter than me.
He used to do the music for Community and he caught this, very openly declared, infatuation for P-Funk. Did you do that wah solo on Zombies? Genius.
Childish Gambino dives in, doing everything with his voice. He's a screamer, the strong whisper of Michael Jackson, the sobbing, powerful flood, the feeble falsetto, and the intense falsetto. He doesn't rap, because I think he understood.
Listen to the first track, Me and Your Mama. It starts slow, with choirs and whistle synth, dark; you think there's a bass and then the bass comes out, and then a slow one sustained by the pentatonic riff, with CG having this kind of dirty scream that can break through the radios - Lenny Kravitz when he acts tough, to speak of a contemporary, but with more style and talent - that suffering cuts panties with scissors. Gospel choirs as garnish.
Even California, the worst, is still the best song that Vampire Weekend could possibly afford to write. Vocoders never too flashy.
Terrified sets the mood. The bass line of Baby Boy and the synthetic harpsichord that deals out groove. The Night Me and Your Mama Met. The half-naive old-school funk of Have Some Love. Stand Tall finally tells you that flute and vocoder is okay.
What more do you want.
Donald Glover, with Sorrentino, never.
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