WOKE: "The Lavishments of Light Looking" [ft. George Clinton]

If you were to assemble a roundtable of Afrofuturist icons, you couldn’t do much better than Steven Ellison, Stephen Bruner, Ishmael Butler, Tendai Maraire, and George Clinton. (Janelle Monáe and Grace Jones could round out the ensemble.) These five men appear together on “The Lavishments of Light Looking”, the first release from WOKE, which comprises Ellison (Flying Lotus), Bruner (Thundercat), and Butler and Maraire (Shabazz Palaces).

The group’s name is a shibboleth for a form of political awareness, and the music here invokes broader consciousness, spiritualism informed by a perception with doors thrown open. This is maximalism imbued with meaning, the groove layered like the levels of the atmosphere. Thundercat’s grounding, deep funk rises into the kind of organized chaos FlyLo started to sort on Cosmogramma and mastered on You’re Dead! Butler skips through this nigh-unparseable music with his signature grandmaster’s touch, navigating thermals and sudden gusts, the “anti-square” in the center of the circle, the third eye of the storm.

The capper: Clinton telling listeners to free their minds, something that he’s been doing for more than 40 years. As always, he rejects any kind of separation between the mind and the body. The music is moving because it moves you—mentally, spiritually, and physically—and each element is part of a synchronized and beautifully coherent whole.

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