Janelle Monáe
The ArchAndroid
More than a concept album, Janelle Monáe composed The ArchAndroid as a piece of theater. There are two acts and an intermission. It begins with an overture and ends with a curtain call. There are characters, conflict, and narrative, if you choose to follow them. Aristotle would be proud. Monáe is plugged in to history—both musically and culturally—and The ArchAndroid immediately takes its place at the near end of a rich lineage of Afrofuturism. It carves out a steam-punk niche in that family tree by sounding, at once, rooted in the future and the past—as if DJ Kool Herc had invented hip-hop with Cab Calloway 78s. It contains multitudes. It was built for dissertations. And annotations. It was built for reference-spotting record collectors who love The Beatles and The Kinks and OutKast and Etta James and Carlos Santana. Also, for the opposite of that. It was built for people in love with the possibilities of music by someone clearly herself in love with the possibilities of music.
When we talk about The ArchAndroid, we talk about who Janelle Monáe sounds like. We talk about the rich vault of musical styles she draws upon. We talk about her as an anachronism, someone who is both of and outside of our time. We talk about her vision, her use of science fiction. We talk about her intellectually, because she makes ferociously intelligent music—music that is sentient enough to recognize itself as intelligent. We talk about her intellectually because that’s how we talk about all music these days, once we get beyond “I love this” or “I hate this.” It’s not enough to love or hate but you must prove its worth with words, and the thing about The ArchAndroid is that, with the Afrofuturism and the breadth of sounds and the definitive talent of Janelle Monáe, The ArchAndroid wins those intellectual discussions. It wins them so fucking hard.
But Janelle Monáe composed The ArchAndroid as a piece of theater, designed to gently guide you through an experience, tenderly drifting from song to song, using a rare quality in pop music: grace. Above all, it requires a softly opened mind and the suspension of disbelief. Though it is a Bullfinch’s Mythology of an album, containing a rich history that could be traced around in circles, The ArchAndroid is not an intellectual work; it is simply a piece of work that was achieved intellectually. What is distinctive about The ArchAndroid is the level of physicality and emotion it contains—and these are the very things that the brain is wired to impede. To achieve this, Monáe uses rhythm (a mix of jazz, salsa, and hip-hop), speed (her songs are either dizzyingly fast of syrupy slow; there’s no middle ground) and an innate knowledge of beauty (what you might intellectually recognize as charm, though that word slightly diminishes it.) She literally imagines herself as a conduit for experience and vitality—the heart. Because of that, and her intellectual capability to achieve it, The ArchAndroid is able to touch something transformative and primal.
Janelle Monáe composed The ArchAndroid as a piece of theater; and theater and music are not so different.
-Marty Brown, 2010
"The ArchAndroid is not an intellectual work; it is simply a piece of work that was achieved intellectually..."
Very nicely put!
Who knew that the mediator between heads and feet would turn out to be really awesome pop music? It's all very conceptual, yes, but nothing this year made me want to get up and do something like the one-two of 'Cold War'/'Tightrope'.
"This is a cold war/Do you know what you're fighting for?" Well, I do now!
Posted by: Illogical Volume | 2010.12.17 at 07:24