From All Angles: Janelle Monae’s ‘The Electric Lady’

With her cool pompadour, fancy suits and impressive 2010 concept album The ArchAndroid, Janelle Monae has pretty much instantly become everyone’s second-favourite R&B superstar, even though no one can probably name any of her songs (fine, maybe ‘Tightrope’).

Her incredible performance on David Letterman the other night pretty much confirmed her radness, as she stomped around the stage doing some James Brown-esque crazy-feet dances and ferocious mic-stand moves that led Letterman to call her “the hardest-working woman in show business”.

She continues the nutso sci-fi/postmodern pastiche of the Grammy-nominated The ArchAndroid with her new album, The Electric Lady, out today. Does it deserve your hard-earned dollars, though? We’ve rounded up the critical reactions so far to help you decide.

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The author: Holly Gleason 

The publication: Paste 

Crux of article: After outlining its ambitious opening (“an Ennio Morricone sonic vista”), Gleason praises the album as a loving evocation of youth and individuality, comparing its raison d’etre to Fun’s ‘We Are Young’, which Monae also sang on. “She celebrates love and uniqueness, especially for outsiders — whether gay, bi, transgendered, emigrated or androids,” she says, before nicely summing up the album as “a little religious, a little rapturous, a little reggae.” That’s probably also a good description of your pot-smoking grandma.

$2-per-word sentence: “[The] eclecticism is euphoric on the steroidally vaudevillean ‘Dance Apocalyptic’, employing a ukele, a farfisa and a variation on the Bo Diddley beat that suggests if it’s the end, we may as well bust a move.”

Appropriate dance move: The Carlton dance.

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The author: Mosi Reeves

The publication: Spin

Crux of article: Reeves paints Monae as an artist perhaps too keenly aware of the elephant in the room: the ‘sophomore slump’, looking to strike following the breakout success of her 2010 debut, The ArchAndroid. “At this point, she doesn’t need any conceits to convince us that she’s a strange, wonderful bird. But she’s sticking with the conceits anyway.”, he says, before proceeding to break down the album’s nutso allegorical streak — y’know, that whole business about Monae being a rebellious android named Cindi Mayweather and falling dangerously in love with someone named Anthony Greendown while simultaneously battling an authoritarian secret society.

“She’s just too lovably eccentric to distill her futurist fables into bite-size, Bruno Mars-ian crossover smashes,” says Reeves. Is that a bad thing? I can’t tell if that’s a bad thing.

$2-per-word sentence: “Anyone who dreams she’s a black Morrissey weaving an Afro-Futurist allegory on cracking open the closet will treasure the girlish playfulness of “Givin’ Em What They Love” (“She followed me back to the lobby / Yeah she was looking at me for some undercover love”) and “Dance Apocalyptic” (“Smoking in the girls’ room / Kissing friends”).”

Appropriate dance move: Whatever this thing is called.

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The author: Jayson Greene

The publication: Pitchfork

Crux of article: “Just tell me the decimal score!”, I hear you scream. Fine. The Electric Lady was well-received by Pitchfork, earning an ‘8.3’ and the site’s coveted ‘Best New Music’ label. Green specifically highlights Monae’s attention to detail (“a convincing argument for the virtues of micromanagement”) and her eagerness to get personal and vulnerable: “The album is overall looser and more physical than its predecessor, more concerned with dancing, sex, love, and abandon.”

He also brings our attention to the Miguel duet ‘Primetime’, which apparently samples the Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind?”, and which we all probably wanna listen to RIGHT NOW.

$2-per-word sentence: “The emotional core of the album, and its unique loneliness, derives from how Monáe both fails and succeeds to connect: she wants to scream and dream, she’s found a way to freak out.”

Appropriate dance move: The loneliness shuffle.

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The author: Jody Rosen

The publication: Vulture

Crux of article: Rosen’s article is sub-titled ‘An Intermittently Thrilling Failure’, so, uh, yeah. He finds a disconnect between Monae’s eclectic ideas and her musical execution, comparing the singer’s conceptual ambitions to those of her “interstellar spirit guides”: Parliament-Funkadelic, Sun Ra and David Bowie. Unfortunately, he concludes, the “riot of sounds and signifiers” are “not enough”.

Although he praises Monae’s “brand of third wave feminism… less beholden to, ahem, the male gaze”, Rosen criticises her fussy po-mo pretensions and “muddled” use of Afro-futurism, “in which artists use science fiction to work through black history and policy” (according to him, the album lacks the “eerie tragi-comedy of Sun Ra and P-Funk’s space explorations”).

Still, reading this article will probably make you wanna listen to the album about 800 times more than you wanted to beforehand (which is, coincidentally, about the number of times Prince is referenced within the review, too).

$2-per-word sentence: “Whatever you think of Janelle Monáe as a singer, songwriter, and performer, this much is undeniable: She is an excellent concept, a 27-year-old artsy-fartsy feminist Afro-futurist who has brought Cab Calloway’s saddle shoes, Little Richard’s pompadour, and James Brown’s dance moves back into popular culture.”

Appropriate dance move: The robot.

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Janelle Monae’s ‘The Electric Lady’ is out now through Warner Music Australia/Atlantic US.