Janelle Monae

I gotta keep my balance

And just keep dancin on it

We gettin funky on the scene

Yeah you know about it

Like a star on the screen

Watch me tip all on it

(“Tightrope”)

2010 doesn't just mark the beginning of one of the most socially accelerated decades in human history. It's also the year in which a mutation – or an eternal return, take your pick – of so-called black music takes shape in its most sophisticated form. Soul, funk, disco, hip-hop. Everything gets blended daily, in the wake of an admiration for the unforgettable Eighties that sometimes borders on fanaticism. A widespread tendency to remix wonders – in the best cases with all the skill and imagination of Roger Donaldson's Douglas “Doug” Coughlin – carried out by young musicians born in those very years, and therefore de facto posthumous admirers, which in a few cases ends up constituting not just the umpteenth rebirth of a timeless sound and mood, but an entirely new trail to follow.

The comet in question is a promising singer-songwriter from Kansas, born, as it happens, in 1985 – right in the heart of the decade mentioned above – with just one EP to her name, “Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)”, dated 2007, later folded into what still stands today as one of the most dazzling debuts of the new millennium: “The ArchAndroid”.

Raised in Kansas City, the twenty-five-year-old Janelle is exuberant and artistically multifaceted. She dances, acts, sings like a Motown star, and harbors a deep passion both for the futuristic yet apocalyptic visions of Philip K. Dick and for the cinema of Fritz Lang, paid tribute to precisely with the aforementioned Ep "Metropolis" – so titled only at a later stage, after she signed a deal with Bad Boy, the label run by Sean "Diddy" Combs. A visionary, in short. An extroverted talent like few others, blessed on top of that with vocal and rhythmic gifts well out of the ordinary. The young Kansas City musician's natural inclination to fuse the funky exuberance of her friends Outkast with the universal love of the queen Aretha would become a distinctive trait from her very first compositions. As would her ability to hold the stage and set it ablaze at every show. Just ask an ecstatic Obama after a performance at the White House that calling perfect would be an understatement. Just to name one.

What drives her, first and foremost, is a brazen dynamism. An ambition that would initially lead her to New York and to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy theater, chasing the dream of a shining career on Broadway. All before packing her bags again and moving to Atlanta, to found the Wondaland Arts Society, an artistic research hub aimed at young people like herself. But it would be her encounter, shortly after, with Big Boi, and her presence on the album "Idlewild" as a vocalist on "Call The Law" and "In Your Dreams", that would finally carry her fully into the world of music.

From the very start, the embrace between Janelle and songwriting proved promising. "Metropolis" was in fact met with more or less thunderous applause from much of the critics, earning Monáe a nomination at the 2009 Grammy Awards in the "Best Urban/Alternative Performance" category for the single "Many Moons".

These were merely the first fireworks of a career as multifaceted as it is singular. On May 18, 2010, "The ArchAndroid" saw the light of day, and it's sparks flying from the first second to the last. Monáe folds in the second and third suites of the "Metropolis" project, giving life to an unprecedented concept album in which she employs her cybernetic alter ego Cindi Mayweather, a figure halfway between Antiope and Cleopatra, tasked with illuminating and saving the android-populated world of Metropolis. There's room, then, for a concise narrative of events that are, in their own way, dystopian. The Maria of Metropolis is, in this case, the figure embodying evil, ruler over the working class and an inconsolable tyrant, while Cindi represents a sort of female John Connor leading a rebel minority, caught up moreover in an impossible love thwarted by the constraints of a bigoted society. A woman, then, symbolizing a necessary uprising in a 2719 that, deep down, isn't so different from today's world.

Quantifying the eclecticism of "The ArchAndroid" isn't an easy task. There are Funkadelic dancing with Erykah Badu. There's Sade sitting at a nightclub table with Marvin Gaye. And a James Brown poster hanging on the wall. There's a fascination with Mother Africa that clashes, almost magically, with a sci-fi microcosm serving as the backdrop. At 25, Janelle already has crystal-clear ideas. She sets her sights on the summit and reaches it with ease, staging a musical whose acts transcend convention and soar past decades of pop music like a rocket ship.

There isn't a single weak spot or filler track on the record. The little Chic-style guitars ("Dance Or Die" featuring Saul Williams, or the propulsive "Faster") splash about weightlessly, flooding everything with joy. They're the quintessence of happiness in musical form. Meanwhile, that thing called groove keeps racking up points in its favor with every passing instant. Because the former Broadway dreamer knows exactly whom to entrust with the keys to rhythm. And so Big Boi delivers the knockout blow on "Tightrope" – the album's lead single, nominated for Best Urban/Alternative Performance at the 2010 Grammy Awards – working through its various phases in an unrelenting electric rumba. On tracks like "Sir Greedown", one pauses to contemplate the universe. While on "Come Alive", a sudden rock frenzy unexpectedly bursts through.

There's no respite in sight. The flights keep getting higher, leaping from one magic carpet to the next like the finest Bulgarian trapeze artists. The inexhaustible solo of the erotic ballad "Mushrooms & Roses", this time in the style of Roger Nelson – who would soon become an admirer and mentor to Janelle, as well as a prestigious collaborator on "Givin Em What They Love" from the subsequent "The Electric Lady" –, and the muffled soul-motion frequencies of "Neon Valley Street": these are "just" some of the most intriguing moments on an album that would almost instantly become a beacon for fellow musicians and peers, such as Solange, and future stars of the electro-r'n'b firmament like Kelela, two years older than Janelle by birth but not making her recording debut until 2017. Or for underground names like Abra and fulfilled promises like Kali Uchis.

"The ArchAndroid" is a total work of art. There's a sample of Michael Jackson's "Rock With You" ("Locked Inside") and the theme from Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" ("Say You'll Go"). While on "57821", a Celtic invocation blended with folklore aims once again to shuffle the deck. As does the theatrical symphony steeped in retro humor that is "Babopbyeya".

In short, "The ArchAndroid" is the manifesto of a retroactive pop futurism with roots sunk deep into the most inspired black music. It's the first great record of a decade that would see the Kansas queen at her peak on the Prince-indebted "The Electric Lady" and in the crowd-pushing ambitions of the flirtatious, pansexual concept album "Dirty Computer". And which, from 2016 onward, would also see her behind the camera as a promising actress, in acclaimed, award-winning films such as "Hidden Figures" and "Moonlight". For the latter, Monáe would receive a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Satellite Award. A parallel career to her musical one – as if that weren't enough, between takes she also founded the Wondaland Arts Society label in partnership with Atlantic – which confirms, if there were still any need to, the flair of one of the most exciting r'n'b phenomena of recent years.

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19/09/2021