“Stay woke, niggas creepin’/They gon’ find you, gon’ catch you sleepin’,” Glover sings on the chorus, wielding the lyrical brevity he uses throughout the album into a clear and conscious message. “Redbone” is a similar triumph, conjuring Shuggie Otis-Glover’s other consistent touchpoint on this album-and the melody from Outkast’s “Roses” its wah-wah guitar and slap bass, distant chimes, and pitch-shifted vocals are robotic and soulful at once. Glover’s wigged-out delivery is a tight match to the song’s abrupt chord shifts and campy instrumentation, turning what could have been a piece of kitsch into a captivating and curious ballad. It’s on the paranoid slow jam “Zombies” where Awaken, My Love! trips into something truly exciting and unique. Considering their scattered and extemporaneous lyrics, these songs can even seem frustratingly coy and evasive, like Glover is obscuring his own identity by way of impersonating others, and sidestepping the momentum he’s built as a wordsmith on previous Childish Gambino releases.
This trio of songs is a riotous start to the album but hardly reveals anything besides Glover’s reverence for Funkadelic (the tracks are sequenced almost identically to the opening three from Maggot Brain). Following the epic “Me and Your Mama,” which shifts from celestial hymn to greasy soul-rock to lounge jazz, the next two tracks on Awaken, My Love! continue Glover’s giddy revivalism: “Have Some Love” is a sunny singalong undercut by an aquatic bassline, and “Boogieman” features frenetic riffs and vocal gymnastics. Instead of rapping, the ever-chameleonic Glover acts as a yelping bandleader and groovemaster, and the album tests whether his reinvention of 1970s funk is sophisticated or merely secondhand. The cosmic atmosphere and winking title of lead single “Me and Your Mama” make the association even clearer: Awaken, My Love! is heavily indebted to and inspired by Maggot Brain, at times a disturbingly close read of Funkadelic’s loose-tempo funk, full-family choruses, and winding song structures. It’s hard to look at the colorful cover art of Awaken, My Love!, Donald Glover’s third release as Childish Gambino, without seeing the screaming female head of Funkadelic’s apocalyptic masterpiece Maggot Brain.
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