FEATURE:
What An Experience
Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady at Ten
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ON 6th September….
PHOTO CREDIT: Victoria Will/Invision/Associated Press
Janelle Monáe’s second studio album, The Electric Lady, turns ten. Her most recent album, The Age of Pleasure, came out earlier this year. There is debate as to which Monáe album is the very best. I would say that The Electric Lady is her finest work. The nineteen-track album serves as the fourth and fifth installments of her seven-part Metropolis concept series. Reaching number five in the U.S., I am excited about the upcoming tenth anniversary. I wonder whether there are any anniversary plans in terms of reissues. Before I get to a couple of reviews for this mesmeric and magisterial brilliance of The Electric Lady, this Wikipedia article gives us some background to the album’s themes and creation:
“The Electric Lady is the follow-up to Janelle Monáe's debut album The ArchAndroid (2010) and debut EP Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) (2007), and consists of the fourth and fifth installments of her seven-part Metropolis concept series. Partly inspired by the 1927 film of the same name, the series involves the fictional tale of Cindi Mayweather, a messianic android sent back in time to free the citizens of Metropolis from The Great Divide, a secret society that uses time travel to suppress freedom and love.
Monáe debuted tracks from The Electric Lady at the 2012 Toronto Jazz Festival. The Electric Lady was made available for pre-order through the iTunes Store on July 2, 2013, with "Dance Apocalyptic" as a pre-order bonus. The album features nineteen tracks, although only "Dance Apocalyptic" and previously released single "Q.U.E.E.N." were revealed.
Thematically, The Electric Lady continues the dystopic cyborg concepts of its predecessors, while presenting itself in more plainspoken, personal territory in addition to experimenting with genres beyond conventional funk and soul music genres such as jazz, pop punk and gospel, as well as woozy and sensual vocal ballads. As stated on July 30, 2013, by Monáe on Twitter, The Electric Lady are the fourth and fifth suites of her Metropolis concept series. Monáe also stated in an interview with Billboard that The Electric Lady is a prequel to her critically acclaimed 2010 album The ArchAndroid.
The album features guest appearances by Miguel, Erykah Badu, Solange, Prince and Esperanza Spalding with production from previous collaborator, funk duo Deep Cotton, as well as soul music composer Roman GianArthur”.
I am going to come to some hugely positive reviews of the tremendous The Electric Lady. One of the best albums of 2013, it is arguably the pinnacle of Janelle Monáe’s extraordinary career. I know that there will be new articles and inspection of The Electric Lady before 6th September. For the fist review, I want to source AllMusic’s view for a truly memorable and unique record:
“Prince, Erykah Badu, Esperanza Spalding, Solange, and Miguel contribute to the fourth and fifth Metropolis suites, but it's not as if Janelle Monáe and their Wondaland associates were short on creative energy. Equally as detailed and as entertaining as The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady is likewise a product of overactive imaginations and detailed concept engineering, and it also plays out like a sci-fi opera-slash-variety program with style and era-hopping galore. Suite four is the album's busier and more ostentatious half, more star-studded and less focused, highlighted by the bopping "Dance Apocalyptic" and the strutting Badu duet "Q.U.E.E.N." Suite five is considerably stronger with a handful of firmly R&B-rooted gems. The inspiration for its overture is noted in the liners as "Stevie Wonder listening to Os Mutantes on vinyl (circa 1973)," but shades of Stevie's '70s work are heard later in more obvious ways. "Ghetto Woman" is impeccably layered soul-funk, fluid and robust at once, with chunky percussion and synthesizer lines bounding about as Monáe delivers a performance as proud and as powerful as Stevie's "Black Man." It contains an autobiographical 30-second verse that is probably swift and dense enough to make early supporter Big Boi beam with pride. The enraptured liquid glide of "Dorothy Dandridge Eyes," featuring Spalding, recalls "I Can't Help It," co-written by Stevie for Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. Earlier, on "It's Code," Monáe channels the yearning Jackson 5-era MJ. "Can't Live Without Your Love," presumably a paean to human love interest Anthony Greendown has Monáe -- or Cindi Mayweather, aka Electric Lady Number One -- yearning like never before. The album is sure to astound Monáe's sci-fi/theater-geek following. Its second half cannot be denied by those who simply value creative R&B that owes to the past and sounds fresh. Anyone can appreciate the phenomenal interludes, which are close to 3 Feet High and Rising level. Power-up to the Droid Rebel Alliance and the Get-Free Crew indeed”.
I am going to finish off with a glowing review from Pitchfork. I am wondering whether anyone has written a feature about The Electric Lady that explores its creation and legacy. I hope that this is rectified before its tenth anniversary, as it is an album worthy of fonder and closer investigation:
“Janelle Monáe opens her second album the same way she did her 2010 debut: with a sumptuously recorded studio orchestra tossing off flourishes with abandon. When the smoke clears, the first full song features a guest vocal from...Prince. Monáe is not the kind of entertainer who takes prisoners; she operates at the locus of generosity where "generous" shades subtly into "aggressive." The song is called "Givin Em What They Love", but the feeling is a little more "take you home and make you like it."
The facts of Monáe's emergence have occasionally made it difficult to embrace her music: She arrived so thoroughly anointed by so many key figures in the entertainment industry that it has sometimes felt pointless to try and touch her. At the heart of her ornate, impressive music, a hint of chilliness kept us at arm's-length; she was a conqueror, undoubtedly, but maybe she glossed over the whole "winning the hearts of the people" thing.
With The E**lectric Lady, she finds a way to give us more of herself. Together with her tight-knit Wondaland collaborators-- Kellindo Parker, a magnificent guitarist who singlehandedly gooses several songs into transcendence; her college friends Nate “Rocket” Wonder and Chuck Lightning, and Roman GianArthur-- Monáe supervises and synthesizes a parade of golden touchstones (Sly, Stevie, Marvin) into a show-stopping display of force and talent. And at the heart of it, she embeds some of the most personal pain she's allowed to leak into her music.
Many of her lyrics here telegraph a desire to break away, to "find a way to freak out," as she puts it on "Dance Apocalyptic", which is the closest the album comes to an immediate calling card like "Tightrope". The album is overall looser and more physical than its predecessor, more concerned with dancing, sex, love, and abandon. "I wanna scream and dream and throw a love parade," she sings, in a creamy mid-register, on the moonlit Miguel duet "Primetime". The song rides a cerebral whine into an "I Only Have Eyes For You" glide, with a "Purple Rain" solo cascading over the top like an MGM waterfall”.
On 6th September, we will celebrate a decade of Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady. Coming a few years after her phenomenal – and even higher reviewed and considered – debut, The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady showed both her consistency and ability to evolve and shift between albums whilst retaining quality and focus. It would be five years after The Electric Lady that we got the magnificent Dirty Computer. I am looking forward to, on 6th September, offering my salute and love to…
A wonderful album.