On Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid

“Bring wings to the weak and bring grace to the strong/May all evil stumble as it flies in the world.”

Whether it’s the bubblegum pop of The Jackson 5, the quiet storm of Smokey Robinson, or the spectral falsetto of The Weeknd, R&B always has had one thumb on popular culture. Even the best selling album of all time is, at its core, an R&B record. However, great R&B has always had another thumb on ambition, and sometimes this goes against popular culture. When Frank Ocean released Blonde last year, there truly was no analog on radio, both sonic and lyric wise. His willingness to explore abstract sounds, such as on Pretty Sweet, and his stream-of-consciousness writing style was a foil to his contemporaries. Likewise, Janelle Monáe is an artist that is constantly trying to push the envelope of R&B. She possesses the musical eclecticism of Prince, the pop-making sensibility of Michael Jackson, the fun-loving spirit of James Brown, the talent of Lauryn Hill, and the disposition of Stevie Wonder. Her songs are a coalition of the pastiche of these influences and, as Willy Wonka would say, pure imagination. They ooze of personality, funk, and at times eccentricity, producing a rich palette of colours. While Monáe’s influences are clear, she is an auteur, able to build upon the music of her antecedents, and channel her own vision and ambition to create songs that, like Ocean, has no analog. For an artist like this, I’m sad to not hear her name brought up as often in debates around modern R&B savants as much as it should.

Monáe had released a critically acclaimed EP before her debut album, but the first time I listened to her music was through the video for her breakout single, Tightrope. The video’s plot is a cross between Footloose and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, as Monáe attempts to escape an asylum that detains dancers due to dancing’s psychologically ill effects. The music video’s premise is intriguing, though the song was what hooked me. It opens up with an electrified holler from Monáe and ensues into a bass and percussion-heavy funk track with a great assist from Outkast member Big Boi. It’s a jovial and animated song with Monáe displaying her vocal brio. I knew I had to hear more, especially in a 2010 landscape where most R&B songs were saturated with bland Dr. Luke-esque synths and cheap drum machines. In fact, what I find the most fascinating about Monáe is her refusal to sheepishly follow the modern paradigm of R&B and the notion that it should be confined to certain sounds and melodies. Case in point: Monáe’s debut album, The ArchAndroid, is a two-suite odyssey that deftly explores R&B, neo-soul, rap, funk, jazz, hip-hop, chamber pop, punk, psychedelic, folk, film scores, and more within its 70 minute timeframe, without compromising its scope once to cater to radio audiences. Its an album that laughs at the idea of playing it safe and points a bold finger at formulaic music. You would think that waltzing between all of these genres would make the album feel fragmented, like a greatest hits compilation, or cause dips in quality at times. However, what’s astonishing is that Monáe manages to zip between all of these genres without diminishing the quality of the compositions or fracturing the thematic feel of the album. The ArchAndroid is a concept album that continues the story conceived in her debut EP. Partially based off of Fritz Lang’s 1927 magnum opus film Metropolis, it loosely tells the tale of an android named Cindi Mayweather as she struggles with both her role as a messianic figure to free other androids, and with her forbidden romance with human Anthony Greendown. Watching Metropolis or fully studying the narrative will only strengthen your listening experience, though it isn’t necessary. I have still fully appreciated the album without watching the film or fully grasping the storyline. And I think that Monáe wanted this on purpose. She paints broad tales, which allows the stories she portrays to be re-contextualized in our culture, such as on the funk-rap monster Dance or Die, where Monáe swiftly raps “Ghettos keep a crying out to streets full of zombies/Kids are killing kids and then the kids join the army.” While she is trying to illustrate the futuristic Orwellian environment of the city that Cindi is in, you could easily frame them as the lyrics from a conscious rapper looking outwards at their own.

The ArchAndroid opens up to the warm murmurs, chuckles, whispers, and instruments tuning, as she transports the listener to a concert hall. Suddenly, a grand, sweeping orchestral overture begins. I’m still marvelled by this bold introduction, especially the mixing. You can hear every instrument, every embellishment, from the angelic harps to the war-ready cellos. Just listen to the drums in this song; you can literally feel how heavy they are. It’s truly an auditory experience. Additionally, by the two minute mark, these quaint vocals come in, filtered to sound as if they were coming out of an antique phonograph — a charming touch. The album then seamlessly transitions into the aforementioned song Dance or Die. Even while rapping, Monáe demonstrates poise, skillfully stacking rhymes upon one another. This is also demonstrated later in the album, on Neon Valley Street’s second verse, albeit a bit robotic, like if she were imitating Janet Jackson on the opening of Control. The album then again seamlessly transitions into Faster and then into Locked Inside, where Monáe sings over a Rock With You-esque drum break and performs a calypso flavoured hook. With all of the fluid transitions from song to song, it subdues the stylistic shifts and genre-hopping that Monáe so loves, allowing these shifts to seem more organic than dissonant. The following track, Sir Greendown, is an intoxicating ballad for Cindi’s target of affection. Monáe syrupy vocals drip and lather over a dreamy instrumental, with choruses and a light bass drum that perfectly complement the medieval-style imagery: “Sir Greendown, come wake me in the night/The dragon wants a bite of our love.” Cold War is the emotional zenith of the album. As she belts over pacing percussion with Beyoncé Knowles levels of panache, Monáe, as Cindi, questions and fights to find comfort in her identity as a revolutionary. In a broader sense, however, as Monáe has admitted, it’s her trying to seek solace in being a black woman. The song is a frenetic yet melodic tune that utterly spotlights Monáe the vocalist. I could try and find some fancy way to write this, but put simply, Janelle Monáe is a phenomenal singer. Another example of this: Oh, Maker. It’s a pastoral folk prayer to her maker — some seraphic figure or automaton engineer — about the torment that comes with love (“Oh Maker, have you ever loved/Or known just what it was?”). And on the hook, Monáe’s honey-drenched singing allows the pain from her loneliness to bloom into a real palpable feeling. Her voice is clear and naked, stripped of any effects or vocal manipulation. When there are vocal effects, like on Mushrooms and Roses, it isn’t just tacked on mindlessly, but is used to add to the complexion of the song. Much of the success of this album is owed to Monáe’s vocal versatility. She has equivalent finesse in manufacturing ecumenical harmonies as it comes to delivering a rap or punk-influenced scowls and screams [see: Come Alive (War of the Roses)]. However, Monáe, as amazing as she is vocally, never uses her singing as a crutch for poor production. Her go-to co-producers, Nathaniel Irvin III and Charles Joseph II, deserve equal credit for being the architects of the lush and vibrant soundscapes that occupy the album. I am taken aback by their aptitude of producing great songs of such tonal variety.

While Suite II is more straightforward in nature with subtleties of experimentation, Suite III is progressive and is where Monáe unveils her idiosyncratic side. Moreover, while Suite II is more existential in content, Suite III is more focused on romance. With an introductory symphonic overture that sounds like it’s playing an old Disney score (à la Bambi), the album quickly deviates into the left-field Make the Bus, a psych-funk jam that could have been a jarring song, especially due to its kooky feature from Of Montreal. However, it avoids this pitfall by keeping the song simple and irresistibly sugary. Likewise, 57821, a song that appears later in the LP, is also quite odd when juxtaposed to the other songs on the album. Its Sound of Silence with reverb-accentuated gospel and R&B zest, and exhibits the Mayweather-Greendown romance from Greendown’s side: “I will show you the ways that I love you/I saved you so you’d save the world/Cause you’re the only one.” The last two songs on the album amount to fifteen minutes in run-time. The penultimate song, Say You’ll Go, is rich with allusions to Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Stevie Wonder — its a novel recipe for concocting the most beautiful song on the album, especially as the song veers into a rendition of Claude Debussy’s Clair De Lune with the energy of Moon River. Babopbye Ya, the last song on the album, is a three-part epic backed by a orchestra that sounds like it just helped Shirley Bassey record a James Bond movie’s opening song. Its a progressive work that could rival any composition off of Dark Side of the Moon as it traverses cinematic scores, Latin rhythms, spoken word poetry, and violin solos. Abundant with some of Monáe’s most evocative writing yet (“Like a lonely matador at night/Fighting in the darkness for the light/I won’t stop until I hear the call of love,”), its a testament to Monáe’s craft and artistic genius. Only a song like this could have ended a grand statement like this album.

7 years later, time and time again I find myself still listening to this album. Contrary to a lot of other R&B albums released around 2010 (Raymond V. Raymond, Passion, Pain, and Pleasure, Thank Me Later, etc.), it has aged extremely well. With each repeated listen, I find myself noticing more minutiae in the production that I haven’t heard before, making each listen more rewarding. The details, like her iconography, are meticulously planned out. The blemishes become endearing singularities. At the album’s simplest, its infectious pop tunes that hook you in for multiple listens. At its most challenging, its genre-bending songs that stretch the imagination. There are songs that will want to make you dance, and others that will make you want to grab a scotch and sit pensively by your fireplace. Nonetheless, the metamorphoses that Monáe goes through on The ArchAndroid are too exciting to waver idly on the sidelines and not get caught up in the thrill of the journey. There truly has not been a piece of recorded music that matches listening to The ArchAndroid, and its an album that is dearly important to me. For me, it resides a space in my pantheon of immortal R&B/soul albums (What’s Going On?, Songs in the Key of Life, Voodoo) that future artists have to measure their output against. Ironically, at the beginning of the album, the world Monáe attempts to render is bleak. But as the music continues, it begins to shed its layers, and reveals itself to be a rosier and merrier place, a land bubbling with love, adventure, and engrossing characters. If this is what the future is like, I wouldn’t mind it.

Listen to the album here: https://itun.es/ca/ACLew