A Funky Throwback

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. 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 streetlevel corrective to the glamour-and-guns hip-hop fantasies of Empire.

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. 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.

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.

That’s an extremely high bar, but at its best, Awaken, My Love! recalls many of those virtues. Have Some Love and Stand Tall pick up the messages of countless soul and R&B predecessors, calling for solidarity and self-reliance. And Boogieman, over a funky fuzztone riff, confronts racist assumptions that lead to rising violence.

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. Glover, born in 1983, never heard the music in its original time frame. But he inhabits it like an actor who’s done his homework to get fully immersed in a role.

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. And luckily, Glover can sing passably enough. He knows he’s not the one to put across a full-throated love ballad; he doesn’t try. But he’s wellsuited to more cartoonish 1970s approaches: yowls and cackles, grainy screams, squeezed-out falsettos, zany swoops between speech and song.

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 Childish Gambino generally makes good use of what it borrows. Zombies deploys its P-funk-style synthesizers to ooze along nicely as it sets up a slowcreeping horror-movie scenario that doubles as a warning about exploitation. Redbone and Terrified, two falsetto ballads laced with paranoia and fear, stay poised between plush vocal-group soul and synthesizer subversion.

The songs don’t hide their second-generation status. Glover often sings about lessons from elders and the responsibilities of parenthood. But Childish Gambino doesn’t invoke the comforts of nostalgia. The songs recognise, instead, that for all the changes in styles over the decades, other conditions persist — human needs and weaknesses, societal pressures — and that music still strives to face down the problems without stopping the party.

Glover, born in 1983, never heard the (1970s R&B) music in its original time frame. But he inhabits it like an actor who’s done his homework to get fully immersed in a role