Whoa ghost town all up in here. Here is a new thing I wrote. Sorry if it's a bit slapdash--I just wanted to write something because I hadn't in a while.
Janelle Monae is everything right with music today and if you care at all about originality, creativity, and enthusiasm in music then you must support her as soon as possible. Her latest album, The Archandroid, is one of the most ambitious, unpredictable albums in recent memory. If you’ve heard it, you likely understand me and love it; if you haven’t, you really should.
Monae’s music is thankfully worlds away from the standard, commercialized, easily categorized R&B the music industry expects from black female artists. The Archandroid accomplishes a startling feat for an album of 18 tracks lasting nearly seventy minutes: it is never once boring, repetitious, ordinary, or redundant. To say that every track works would not be true—but the mere fact that every song is different is mind-boggling in modern music.
The industry would much prefer all artists to produce exactly the type of music they would most easily be identified with based on their appearance. White dudes with glasses? Indie rock, please. Black guy? You better be a rapper. Black guy with glasses? Your raps better reference comic book characters. This way makes it much easier for the industry to classify music, and cater to specific audiences, giving them exactly what they want and what they expect. Some people might love getting a steady stream of the familiar, and it certainly makes money, but it also stifles artistic growth and creativity. Janelle Monae is amazing and defies expectations like it’s her job.
For example: she releases a 70 minute, 18 track concept album about how she was sent from the future and had her genes stolen to make an android named Cindy who has superpowers and is the only one who can help some oppressed masses and some other stuff. It’s all very hard to follow and poorly explained. She’s heavily influenced by Fritz Lang’s Impressionist film classic Metropolis, both in the style of the cover art and in the lyrics themselves. These themes don’t exactly cohere or anything—but good lord, man, when was the last time you could say that there was so much excess meaning in an album of frigging pop music? How often does a pop musician even take the effort to put something strange or out of the ordinary in their work? One of the most complimentary things one could say about The Archandroid is its all-too-rare quality of never being the same. The listener isn’t numbed by 70 minutes of the same style repeating over and over. Monae’s schizophrenic mishmash of influences, themes, and styles is welcome even with its flaws, because what else is there in music today? When we have musicians like Ke$ha who seem almost willfully ignorant of good taste, every little bit of originality is a blessing.
And dang if Monae is ever original. She opens the album with an orchestral overture, moving into a slow, understated, bass-heavy groove, then an upbeat, peppy piece of guitar funk, into a classic piece of soul wondrousness that would make Stevie Wonder proud, then a languid, ambient ballad, then a drum-destroyingly propulsive rock-soul banger, and caps it with “Tightrope,” an impossibly funky horn-assisted masterpiece whose repetitive yet ripe-with-emotion vocal performance recalls the best of James Brown. The eleven songs following are no slouches—highlights include a folk-styled hymn with a standard R&B chorus showcasing Monae’s traditional vocal strengths, and a diabolically sleazy slab of punk guitars and funk bass over which she shows she can screech and scream with the best of them—but man, those first seven songs are all five-star instant classic winners. The Archandroid demands repeat listening, if for no other reason, than to re-experience that opening stretch, one of the most exhilarating you’ll encounter from any album, in any genre, in any era. Yes, I’m serious.
Some later songs misfire, but at least they do so in interesting ways. Monae isn’t perfect—her voice is perfectly acceptable and versatile, but she’s not on her way to being the next Aretha Franklin. What she is, however, is brilliant, ambitious, and unhindered by what she thinks she has to do as a musician in her genre. If I had to compare her to any musician, the only choice that presents itself, honestly, is Michael Jackson in his prime. Like Jackson, she breaks barriers of genre, has an ineffable charisma, and is quite simply producing dance music completely different from everyone else. I know MJ is an untouchable icon to many—even more so after his death, when people stopped making pedophile/plastic surgery jokes and realized, man, this guy made some unimpeachably brilliant music—and I don’t mean to say that Monae, a relatively new artist, is on the same level as he, but she is doing something monumentally rare in modern popular music. It’s something Jackson did and something hardly anyone else does (Andre 3000 seemed like he was going to, but then I guess he decided to stop for some reason): she is making music completely fearlessly, with no regard to real or imagined constraints, discontent to stay in one place for too long. Technically, experimental groups like The Residents or whatever do this, but I’m speaking about pop music specifically here, the kind of stuff meant for “the people,” the stuff that gets stuck in your head and gets you on the dance floor.
So you can keep your bland, samey singers wailing cookie-cutter lyrics over a manfactured electronic dance beat polished to a mirror sheen by Pro-Tools wielding producers. I’m sure Monae isn’t going to dispel all the Britneys, Ke$has, and Gagas in the world overnight. But if you want something more out of your music—effort, ingenuity, insight, creativity—there’s Janelle Monae waiting for you. She offers something you’d be hard pressed to find in her peers. Specifically, her music isn’t something you’ve heard before. It’s influenced by the great musicians of yesteryear, but it’s changed, interpreted, flipped, made new. In an industry content to tread water, Monae moves forward into the unknown. She is everything right with music and art in general and if you care at all about creative expression spread the word and give her your money.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc
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