Janelle Monae

One Liner: Funky, freaky bad ass melting styles into great pop soul grooves.

Wikipedia Genre: Funk, R&B, psychedelic soul, hip-hop
Home:  Atlanta

Poster Position: 5
Day: Sunday at 4:00
Both Weekends.

Thoughts: Hot damn.  I don't know what I expected from this.  Well, that isn't entirely true, I was expecting some pop R&B stuff - fluff, empty, soulless.  This ain't that.  Sexy, cool, lyrically interesting, and with varied sounds of soul, rap, rock, R&B, all-the-above-at-once.  You hear snippets of Stevie Wonder ("Ghetto Woman"), Madonna ("Screwed"), Prince ("Make Me Feel," and many more), Beyonce ("I Like That"), some Jackson 5 era Michael Jackson ("It's Code"), Kendrick Lamar ("Django Jane"), Erykah Badu ("I Got That Juice," among others) - all over the map of people with distinct voices that she channels at different times.  In fact, "Americans" sounds like just about all of them at once.  I had zero expectation of enjoying this, and yet now I'm still listening to these albums three days later.  She is legit good.

Well, I won't say that I love all of the older stuff as much as the new album.  The new album is excellent.  2018's Dirty Computer is some cool future funk stuff born of her love for Prince but reaching out way beyond that music.  She's got weird collaborators, from a Beach Boy to Lenny Kravtiz's daughter to Pharrell.  But I fully enjoy it.  All ten of her most popular songs on Spotify are from this album.  I'll give you the top one, the highly cool "Make Me Feel."  29 million streams.

You feel that Prince/Janet Jackson shit right there?  I love it.  Funky, groovy, bold, badass.  This is the only album where she doesn't seem to have a concept going on behind the music.  Older albums have a theme/concept, usually based on android/humanoids as allegory to those who are different in society (I think, anyway).  But I mean, come on.  That song is good.  And "Pynk," "I Like That," "Django Jane," and "I Got that Juice" are also good stuff.  It's not all perfect, but overall I like it very much.  Oh, and her voice is killer.

Parts of the older albums are also good, but they are a little uneven.  Like, for example, 2010's The ArchAndroid has a few fun songs like "Tightrope" and "Cold War," one of which features half of Outkast, the other of which cribs the drum breakdown from Outkast's "Bombs over Baghdad." But then "Come Alive [War of the Roses]" and "Mushrooms & Roses" are respectively screamer doowop and psychedelic-autotune-Lenny-Kravitz-dropping-acid-in-the-Yellow-Submarine shit.  So, no one is perfect or anything, but I just have to note how uneven these can be.  Here is "Cold War," for your enjoyment, which is the standout from that 2010 album.

Strangely powerful video right there.  Just focused on her face.  Damn good song.

Her 2013 album, The Electric Lady, is pretty solid too.  Unfortunately, the Prince collaboration on it is blanked out on Spotify (I assume because his family is still refusing to license his music for streaming), but the Erykah Badu collaboration rules.  11.8 million streams.

The fact that this song isn't a huge hit is a travesty.  If you don't want to boogie when it is playing, then you dead inside.  The groove, the beat, the intricate measured vocals (and great voice).  So good.  AND then you get to the rap at the end, and she full on brings it there too.  Hell yeah.  I've been singing this around the house for the past few days, and although my youngest has no clue what I am singing, I heard her making up her own lyrics to the chorus cadence the other day.

Her first album (Metropolis: The Chase Suite) starts the weird android thing, with an album opener of her speaking like a dystopian world announcer, calling on all bounty hunters to find an android who had the audacity to love, in order to dismember it and win a prize.  "Many Moons" was the hit from that one, although it only has 1.7 million streams.  Here is the "official short film."

Once again, sounds like she has been listening to a lot of Outkast, and especially the drumbreak in "Bombs over Baghdad."  But a fun track.

Rolling Stone had her on the cover a few weeks ago, and it was a pretty interesting read.  The obvious titillating tidbit in there is this:

And she has another rumor to confirm. "Being a queer black woman in America," she says, taking a breath as she comes out, "someone who has been in relationships with both men and women – I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker." She initially identified as bisexual, she clarifies, "but then later I read about pansexuality and was like, ‘Oh, these are things that I identify with too.' I'm open to learning more about who I am."

But also a number of other factoids that I didn't know about her:

• She appears in both the Oscar-winning Moonlight (as the girlfriend to Mahershala Ali's character) and the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures (as one of the three main ladies).  Cool.
• She is a CoverGirl model.
• She grew up in Kansas City with like 50 cousins, living on the same street as several other family members in a row of houses her grandmother owned.  How cool is that?
• Talented from childhood, she covered Lauryn Hill's album to win three talent shows in a row.
• She moved to NYC to study music, but then relocated to Atlanta because of a friend, where she turned some little gigs at college quads into getting noticed by Big Boi and signed to his label, which then connected her to Puff Daddy and getting signed to Bad Boy.
• My favorite part of the interview is the discussion of her Dad, fresh off getting sober, goes to a show doubting that Puffy will actually show up to watch his girl, gets made fun of by his daughter for creasing his jeans, but then has a cool realization that his daughter is bad ass.

She seems like a genuinely cool person, and her music is genuinely awesome.  One more track before I move on, here is the legit rap from her new album, "Django Jane."  Get some.

I'd absolutely sign up to go see this in person.  Why not?  It isn't my normal musical region, but I've loved listening to these tracks.  I'm not saying that she can carry forward Prince's freak funk into another lifetime, but she definitely has the fun and chops to make something in the same neighborhood.  Let's do it.