Sound Bite: Janelle Monáe
By Alex Wolf
May 17, 2010 10:13 p.m.
“I’m just another weirdo, oh better yet, you can call me your hero,” Janelle Monáe sings on her first full-length album, proudly crowning herself R&B’s nerdiest diva with the aesthetic of André 3000-esque social consciousness and sci-fi love metaphors by way of Amerie’s go-go funk and throat singing.
“The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III of IV)” continues the story of her android alter ego Cindi Mayweather (model No. 57821) that began with her 2007 EP “Metropolis Suite I of IV: The Chase.” (See what I mean by nerdy?) Fans of Monáe’s work will recognize continuing themes from her EP in “Neon Valley Street,” “Neon Gumbo” and “57821” (and more that likely flew over my head). And while “Metropolis” was too short and at times pretentious, it packed a deal of earnestness and promise for an interesting follow-up.
Despite Monáe’s previous lack of Billboard buzz and the fact that she boasts the pipes to be just as bossy or fierce as Kelis or Beyoncé, “The ArchAndroid” runs with the kooky theme and quirky persona she had created for herself but not yet mastered.
And if that isn’t confirmation enough that Monáe has no interest in conforming to what a modern female R&B singer should be, she flips a big middle finger to your iPod’s shuffle mode by making each track segue into the next with very little breaks. Even at 18 tracks, the album moves quite fast by smartly shifting gears just as songs feel as if they’re about to lose momentum.
The first 15 minutes is a mostly fast-paced sequence of ear candy hooks that risk going nowhere until they end up in the fantastic funk breakdown, first single “Tightrope,” featuring Big Boi, with scatting, turntables and horn solos to boot.
The album reaches its climax in “Come Alive (The War of the Roses),” the neo-swing track that finally lives up to the big bowtie and even bigger pompadour Monáe often sports onstage.
The second suite ends on “Mushrooms & Roses,” sounding like Hendrix doing “Strawberry Fields” through a vocoder. (Note: not Auto-Tune.) By the third suite, things start to mellow out, and apart from stylized silliness from Of Montreal on “Make The Bus,” it’s more slow burn psychedelia than the rest of the album.
Apart from the aforementioned use of a vocoder, “The ArchAndroid” has more of a live band arrangement that counters the futuristic “Metropolis”-inspired album artwork. She also reminds us that the album is set in 3005 in “Locked Inside,” suggesting the timelessness of the musical styles her work has been influenced by.
But what really drives Monáe’s work is her singing, and not just her vocal abilities but also her delivery. Lines like “When you step outside, you spend life fighting for your sanity” and “These dreams are forever” would verge on triteness without Monáe’s disarming approach that makes every life lesson of “The ArchAndroid” sincere.
With “The ArchAndroid,” Monáe has shrewdly taken on a persona and a project that isn’t bigger than herself, not because the project isn’t big but because Monáe is a smart artist.
She knows that it’s not enough to sing about love, war, street crime, consumerism, drugs, slavery and imprisonment without critiquing these subjects poetically. She can subtly sample Debussy or Star Wars themes without sounding contrived or affected. She dispels the notion that in order for female singers, especially black R&B female singers, to be eccentric and thought-provoking, they must also be overtly sexual. This weirdo’s presence is certainly welcome, and “The Archandroid” is certainly triumphant.
