This Fresh Music Friday is a pretty interesting one. Mostly because neither of the releases written about below actually released on Friday, but were spontaneously dropped in the past week. Dropping music so suddenly isn’t a new phenomenon amongst big name musicians and this week is no exception; with new singles from Childish Gambino and a much-anticipated album by Jaden Smith; let’s see if we get an answer to some of his famous Twitter wonderings.
Childish Gambino - "Feels Like Summer":
Actor. Writer. Director. Producer. Musician. Childish Gambino AKA Donald Glover is all of those things and much more but recently he added Viral Sensation to the list. With the music video for “This Is America’”, Donald Glover not only bought life back to his Childish Gambino project after some years of silence, but made sure everyone knew about it. Subtlety was the key of the video’s success, illustrating the point of how big a part distraction, whether through social media or mainstream media, plays in our understanding (or lack thereof) of the world. In his new song “Feels Like Summer”, that subtlety continues although more subtly than “This Is America”.
“Feels Like Summer” is something that could be described as an auditory oxymoron. This is because, after a few listens, behind the track’s lusciously summery beat you notice a deeper message intertwined within its verses where Childish voices his thoughts on Generation Z’s ever-increasing reliance on tech, climate change and a sense of existential paranoia. These deep themes are nothing new for Childish, particularly when taking into account his 2013 album Because The Internet which dealt with subjects both distant and personal to him. After the fairly pop-like chorus, “You can feel it on the streets / On a day like this the heat / it feel like summer”, Childish talks about “men who made machines that want what they decide / They’re just tryna tell the children please slow down”. In a similar way to Because The Internet and recent Atlanta episodes, Childish voices his distaste for social media’s user-based gratification, the artificiality in platforms like Instagram and painstaking algorithms to favour big names over rising stars. The second half of the lyric resonates toward younger generations growing up with accelerating technology and how their fixation on iPads, iPhones, apps, games and social media diverts their focus on real world issues. To write lyrics with such subtle meaning that can be unpacked to essay-like form is quite something and provides the sort of subtlety that differs Gambino’s style of “conscious rap” to the overtly foreboding styles of artists like J Cole and Logic. Especially when those lyrics are in the guise of a summer anthem.
The track’s instrumental, produced by Gambino and longtime collaborator Ludwig Göransson feels like a blend of the styles Gambino experimented with in his EP “Kauai” with hints of “Awaken, My Love!”. While there’s a sense of the natural sound Gambino experimented with “This Is America”, in using various tribal and African instruments, I can’t help but feel like there’s not a whole lot new here, especially when compared to “This Is America” and “Saturday”. However this doesn’t stop me from liking it. As I listen more there’s one element of the instrumental that I find myself enjoying more, its cohesion. The guitar riff that perfectly matches up with Kauai-like keys, the faint flute plays in the background and the vocal effects on the track all work in creating a signature summer-esque sound. At points some elements of the track are taken away, but that distinct sun-kissed sound is still there. It gives the feeling that each instrument was picked not on the basis of its use in a “summer song” but in relation to other instruments to capture that sound, a unity between individual instruments that works beautifully. On the whole I’m still excited for the album, this is Childish Gambino after all, but hopeful that Gambino will be able to focus on blowing us away with a new sound as he did with This Is America instead of providing us with a faint sense of familiarity and nostalgia for his final musical outing.
Jaden Smith - "B (Electric)" from "SYRE: The Electric Album":
After watching 2010’s Karate Kid and listening to him rapping alongside Justin Bieber on “Never Say Never”, I felt as if I had a good enough impression of Jaden Smith. However, seven years later, as he rapped the chorus in Tyler, The Creator’s “Pothole”, it changed my perception of him. Not just because of how good the chorus was, but because of his future potential as a rapper after finding foundations in collaborating with an artist as well-known and talented as Tyler. His debut album SYRE, released in the November after Flower Boy, proved this potential to be true. Tracks like “ICON” and “Batman” finished what Pothole started, solidifying Smith’s status as a rapper and not just an ‘icon’ with fame stemmed from a particular viral song or controversy. So after dropping an album as defining as SYRE, the idea and announcement of him dropping something that, in his own words, is “Not A Rap Album” is a fair juxtaposition, and simultaneously quite a gamble. Although with SYRE: The Electric Album, the odds are in Smith’s favour.
“The Electric Album” is a strange title considering just how acoustic and gentle it is compared to it’s predecessor. Although, no track embodies this stripped back sound better than its opener, “B (Electric)”. It opens with a bliss combination of synth and guitar that’s fairly reminiscent of the ambient work of Brian Eno, especially in creating an ambience that’s unique not just for Smith’s work but hip-hop as a whole. Once his vocals come in, it’s surprising how new and distant they feel from anything else Jaden has done. This isn’t solely because he’s singing them either, but how much he’s modulated them. In pairing autotune with harmonisers there’s a particular melodic mellowness that Smith creates that adds a real sense of depth to the track and it’s whole structure. The only issue I have with the track is that at times the lyrics, with all the effects on them, can be hard to understand. Although by its nature as a remix album and it’s focus on style and instrumentation as opposed to lyricism, it’s highly subjective dependent on taste.
On the whole, however, I’m pretty impressed. It’s a very bold move by Jaden to remix his own work in a way that doesn’t simply add a verse, but rewrites the tone, style and mood of SYRE as an album. It’s a first for an artist who seems to specialise in “firsts” and upon reflecting on it, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it done. With the single, and the album, Jaden Smith finds a genre gap in ambient for some of his music to comfortably fit into, in very much the same way Kanye West and Kid Cudi found psychedelia to fit Kids See Ghosts into. I’m excited for whatever Smith experiments with in the future and can’t wait to see what “first” he achieves next.