Janelle Monae
The ArchAndroid
Atlantic, May 2010
Here’s something I should like, right? Science fiction you can dance to! The ArchAndroid is part of an ambitious concept multi-album project inspired by Fritz Lang and involving outfits out of Klaus Nomi’s wardrobe, channeled through the idiom of contemporary R&B yet looking and sounding like basically nothing on the radio, sung by a woman with enough confidence to make even her deal with Diddy sound like “I say frog, Puffy jumps.” I stuck this record on expecting to celebrate my way through it.
But something happened on the way to Metropolis. Making my way through The ArchAndroid–which I’ve now studiously done several times, convinced I must be getting something wrong–wasn’t the Ziggy Stardust Meets the Mothership dance party of my dreams, it was an endurance test. Right up front, a big part of that’s Janelle Monae’s voice, strident and sharp any time she goes for the big loud sound, which is often. Vocals play the same role in pop music for me that a cursory flip-through of the art alone does for comics: If my ear/eye bounces off or glazes over, then to heck with it, life’s too short. That was hard to get around. So too was the lack of simple, solid melodies, hooks, or grooves. It was as if Monae didn’t trust the basic stuff of pop songwriting as a sufficient demonstration of the breadth of her interests.
And that points to the big problem with The ArchAndroid: It’s practically a case study for the perils of the maximalist aesthetic. Monae slides song into song, collides genre into genre, and just keeps adding adding adding adding adding in a fashion that creaks and growns with its effort to be Intelligent And Entertaining!!!, ultimately revealing her to be a jack of all trades but master of none. So I’m taking The ArchAndroid song by song below, an approach practically demanded by the sheer volume of stuff inside….
* “Suite II Overture”–A melodically inert orchestral introduction that serves no purpose other than to say “Look, it’s an orchestral introduction”
* “Dance or Die”–That “BadabadabadabadabadabadaBA” emceeing wears out its welcome within the first verse; Saul Williams, who knows from overlong draggy albums, is much more flattered by the pummeling production Trent Reznor lent the first few songs on Williams’s own Bowie-indebted album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust! than he is by this boho dinner-party hip-hop.
* “Faster”–What if you hurried “You Can’t Hurry Love”?
* “Locked Inside”–Here’s where the sharp vocals really started throwing me. A perfectly pleasant chorus, and I like the MJ bridge quite a bit, but we’ve heard that a million times. Britney Spears did it! Meanwhile the verses’ real estate is just squandered.
* “Sir Greendown”–Very mellow.
* “Cold War”–“Hey Ya”‘s rhythm with “B.O.B.”‘s drum sound. That’s definitely not a complaint. For the first time, the album conveys urgency without edging into stridency. Not a knockout, but the strongest so far.
* “Tightrope”–Very tough to argue with this one. But, well, okay. That opening “whoa!” is a little much–I’m guessing that how you feel about that will determine how you feel about the whole album. As an funkateer of some 12 years’ experience I was very excited by that horn section–it’s a horn section!–but calling attention to its funkiness by just straight-out calling it funky should be my job, not Monae’s. And whoop, here comes more maximalism–funny voices for the backup vocals, a goddamn ukelele. Edit!
* “Neon Gumbo”–The “played backwards” portion of the album. Prince by numbers.
* “Oh, Maker”–AM-radio chamber pop with a beat and a melodically meandering chorus, fade, some synth-psychedelia at the end.
* “Come Alive (The War of the Roses)”–Sounds like an outtake from I’m Breathless: Music From and Inspired by the Film ‘Dick Tracy’. And not like “Vogue” or one of the Sondheim songs, either. Then there’s some screaming.
* “Mushrooms & Roses”–Lenny Kravitzian psychedelic slow jam with “Hurdy Gurdy Man” vox. For people who wished The Love Below were even longer, I guess.
* “Suite III Overture”–Mostly a piano/orchestral cover of the previous song. I prefer it! Then it winds off into a Disney/exotica thing.
* “Neon Valley Street”–Is that a mellotron? I hope so. I dig the laid-back big beat and comparatively restrained vocals here. This also reminds me of Kravitz, specifically * “Sugar” from Are You Gonna Go My Way? Again, that’s not a complaint. The chorus’s repetition of “May this song reach your heart” leaves me kind of cold, though. I think the Andre 3000 distorted-vox rap section is fun.
* “Make the Bus”–Note salad from Of Montreal. It’s goofy!!! Zany!!!
* “Wondaland”–This is cute and has a great chorus. I keep hoping she’s saying “because she left her underpants.” An underwater feel to it. Let’s throw an Alleluia in there for no reason.
* “57821”–Parsely Sage Rosemary and Yawn. The chorus harmonies are lovely though, nice echoey production you don’t normally hear on this sort of thing.
* “Say You’ll Go”–1997 dinner-party music.
* “BeBopByeYa”–1961 dinner-party music.
Trust me, no one hates that this brought out the dismissive snark in me more than I do. It doesn’t even really deserve it! Whatever she lacks in execution, Monae’s ambition is praiseworthy, and provided she doesn’t let the plaudits she’s earned for this record go to her head, there’s every reason to believe that an artist of her obvious ravenous intelligence will learn to write stronger melodies–learn to relax and rely on stronger melodies, that is to say, learn to get out of her own way and edit a bit. But what happened here is that her whirlwind sci-fi tour of a million pop traditions just left me trying to find 18 ways to say I’m unimpressed.