Janelle Monae

shes coming to london next month apparently. but its sold out, some BS industry-only schmoozer. no matter, this album is actually great (listening now). better than ciara, jazmine, the preposterously overrated teedra moses and even erykah id say, judging by that lazy last effort she turned in. all the stuff i wasnt sure about wrt her emotional conviction etc is kinda right in terms of it being quite stagey at times - it is a PERFORMANCE - but its also kinda bullshit cos some of the melodies are actually gorgeous and the contours and purity of the grain of her voice is just wondrous. janelle>>>>>>

its not industry only, it just sold out really fast. tiny venue too, but annoyingly i'm out of the country.

even erykah id say, judging by that lazy last effort she turned in

You need to relisten to this. It's much more relaxed, laid back, comfortable in its own skin... not lazy. Very nuanced, subtle.

also: unfinished/padded out songs/generally below par songwriting.

Obv titchy's failure to get teedra pretty much undermines his credibility w/r/t passing judgement on R&B albums.

It sounds like people would be better off not listening to this so much as an R&B album.

I wanted to listen to the album again before I put my vehement disagreement with this on record, but... this is totally an R&B album. In fact once you remove the interludes it's no more boundary-blurring than Solange's last album (this is not a criticism btw!). Guess what: most R&B albums already are pretty diverse! It's not like the territory Janelle covers here (in the actual songs) is obviously broader than the space between, say, "Disappear" and "Radio" on Beyonce's last album.

I love "Faster" by the way. "Tightrope" bugs me though, and I reckon it's because there seems to be no relationship between the music and the vocals in the chorus, they almost feel out of tune with one another. The verses are fine. Actually it's pretty consistent for me to like Janelle's verses more than her choruses.

I'm not saying I think it's not a R&B album, but based on many of the complaints I've seen on this thread some people seem to not be enjoying what she's doing partly because she is failing to do things they expect of R&B performers. Seriously, I remember a bunch of comments like that upthread. (At least that's one of the reasons they are giving.) Bunch of comments deleted (nothing incendiary), because I need to be careful what I say about R&B (because I don't listen to a whole lot of it, even the older stuff I tend to like more--although I expect to come around to that at some point).

"Obv titchy's failure to get teedra pretty much undermines his credibility w/r/t passing judgement on R&B albums."

teedra has like, ONE great song, and a load of filler elsewhere, despite being in possession of a great voice. teedra is def *not* an albums artist.

I'm looking forward to the new lease of life this thread will get when Geir turns up and proclaims it the best R&B album ever.

xpost sure, beyonce has a few pop rock songs like if i was a boy, but beyonce makes unashamedly commercial music. *pop songs*. JM doesnt. shes sort of on that edge, like say, bilal, various songs that could possibly get urban radio airplay, but mainly songs that wouldnt/couldnt cos her sound is quite different (she in particular ahs a lot more of a strange 60s influence throughout i think, not ronson-ish, but one that sort of reminds me of old film soundtracks, noir, or sci fi, not sure). tim do you listen to non-commercial R&B?

Didn't Maxwell get a load of airplay?

when? when he first came out? probably. most of these guys have 1 or 2 songs with wider appeal (i could even see a couple of the ballads on JMs album getting R&B radio airplay). but basically, beyonce is gonna get on pop radio. maxwell isnt. usher will get on pop radio. bilal wont. and so on.

xpost sure, beyonce has a few pop rock songs like if i was a boy, but beyonce makes unashamedly commercial music. *pop songs*. JM doesnt. shes sort of on that edge, like say, bilal, various songs that could possibly get urban radio airplay, but mainly songs that wouldnt/couldnt cos her sound is quite different (she in particular ahs a lot more of a strange 60s influence throughout i think, not ronson-ish, but one that sort of reminds me of old film soundtracks, noir, or sci fi, not sure). tim do you listen to non-commercial R&B?

Titchy you're being silly. Of course Janelle isn't pop-R&B in the order of Beyonce, I never said she was. What I'm saying is:

1) she's basically in the same R&B tradition as, say, Solange; and

2) rudipherous is over-stating its genre-smashing diversity and understating the diversity of R&B generally. There's no direct comparison between Beyonce and Janelle but my point is that R&B as a genre already encourages artists to cover a lot of ground and saying "you shouldn't think of this as an R&B album because it covers so much ground" is as wrong w/r/t Janelle as it would be w/r/t Beyonce.

Compare/contrast with, say, Me'Shell N'dgeocello's last couple of albums, which are much more tenuously connected to contemporary R&B (of the mainstream or post-neo-soul varieties) than Janelle, but which I still think of as "R&B albums".

I guarantee that if I played any track on this (except possibly the Of Montreal track) to someone in my office they would identify it as R&B without thinking about it.

better than ciara, jazmine, the preposterously overrated teedra moses and even erykah id say

lol stop trollin, titchy

rudipherous is over-stating its genre-smashing diversity and understating the diversity of R&B generally. There's no direct comparison between Beyonce and Janelle but my point is that R&B as a genre already encourages artists to cover a lot of ground and saying "you shouldn't think of this as an R&B album because it covers so much ground" is as wrong w/r/t Janelle as it would be w/r/t Beyonce.

I can completely understand where you would get the idea, but I really never linked the not thinking of this as an R&B album with the whole genre-smashing thing. I can see where you would think that's implied, but it's not exactly what I have in mind.

If I had to be more cautious, I could have said something like: "It sounds like people would be better off not listening to this so much as a contemporary, mainstream R&B album (with the stylistic expectations that brings)."

I think titchy is thinking along similar (but better informed than me) lines in the comments you quote.

Actually, I forgot how much that comment was in response to what you had written. This is exactly the sort of thing I have in mind:

I've listened to this twice. Always starts very exciting but everything starts to blur after a while? I think it's maybe Janelle's technically well-done but emotionally blank vocals that makes this a "challenging" listen for me (at this stage at any rate), much more than the arrangements which mostly seem pretty gregarious and outgoing and fun.

― Tim F, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 5:49 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah the voice is amazing, but there's no real sense of an actual person behind it (and this has zero to do with the whole android thing). I had the same stumbling block with her earlier material. It reminds me somewhat of Kelis's "Little Suzie", a tune which I always felt I should love more than I did.

― Tim F, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 6:26 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"sense of an actual person behind it"

oh, that's usually a lie anyway.

― exuding an aroma of lolz (Hunt3r), Tuesday, June 15, 2010 6:30 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I know, but it's a pretty important lie in R&B!

― Tim F, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 6:36 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I don't mean "who is Janelle Monae really", but rather that her vocals usually don't make me care about the singer, the character-of-the-song.

― Tim F, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 6:37 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

From what you are saying, this seems like a specifically R&B-related expectation that's getting in the way of your enjoying the album. This is more of the sort of thing I was thinking of than the genre-smashing theme. I could swear there were other comments along these lines earlier, but I admit I'm not finding them (maybe searching under "R&B" is not bringing them up). It's possible I simply creatively mis-remembered based on some speculations HI DERE made earlier (which definitely come close to the issue I think I'm dealing with here):

I don't know, maybe it's a little too self-satisfied/inward-looking to properly reach out to people, at least in the way they expect from something under the R&B umbrella? (ie, no one is going to complain about Portishead navel-gazing all over Third because that's kind of why you buy Portishead albums; they are pulling you into their little world and blowing your mind on their terms, whereas most R&B/hip-hop seems to move along the axis of blaring out into your world and taking it over, so maybe something like this that is so determinedly inward-looking with all of these normally outward-facing signifiers is confounding people because the two approaches cancel each other out and you're left with something that comes across more clinical than you think it should be? Kind of making up stuff here but maybe that's part of what's happening when people listen to this?)

Those comments really caught my attention partly because I had already been thinking of Janelle Monae + trip-hop but keeping that to myself. Like, some of Monae's vocals on the ballads seem like what I wish Portishead vocals sounded like. (But maybe that's beside the point.)

Also, this thing I said earlier is worth repeating, I think:

Given the list of artists Monae has the most praise for, and especially the inclusion of Lauryn Hill on that list, why would it be noteworthy that this doesn't appeal to someone who really likes Electrik Red or Cassie? This album has more in common with something like Kate Bush's Aerial or Tokyo Jihen's Adult (or Shiina Ringo's failed Sanmon Gossip) than with a lot of the R&B I see getting praised on ILM.

(Although, I admit it's odd to question whether this is an R&B album in one breath (edited out here) and then mention Monae's drawing on Lauryn Hill in the next sentence. Duh.) I think if I could better put into words the comparison I'm making here between the ArchAndroid and Aerial and Adult (I know the latter is a little bit of an esoteric example, but it's an important album to me personally and TJ are pretty high-profile in their native Japan), it would be clearer that the "genre-smashing" thing isn't the main point.

I think you're arguing against a position that no one's taking here.

That's usually safest.

I'm not comparing Janelle to Electrik Red. But I think it's preposterous to suggest that "Tightrope" et. al. aren't R&B songs and don't in basically every sense intentionally shroud themselves in the affectations of R&B* - so if I'm thinking of Janelle in those terms I think she's really brought that on herself. She hasn't departed from R&B enough to simply do away with the conventions of that genre. And it's not the case that I'm saying "oh this isn't as good as x other R&B"; rather that, if you take a song like "Locked Inside", which is trying to be this big bittersweet celebratory soulful 60s-meets-disco R&B song, it's the kind of song which is gonna "work" more easily if you end up investing in the character-of-the-singer (as I do with Solange's similar but more successful "Sandcastle Disco"), and there's a distancing effect with Janelle which makes this more difficult. In the case of "Locked Inside" I think it's, again, largely an issue with the chorus - I think multitracking the vocals at that point diminishes the emotional effect.

*certainly more so than those of Portishead or Kate Bush! Also I cant imagine wanting to fuck with Beth Gibbons' vocals, but anyway.

I mean it's actually totally weirdly counter-intuitive that you'd raise Portishead and Kate Bush here, given Kate and Beth's stocks-in-trade are vocals that are bursting with emotional over-investment, semiotic material that cannot be reduced to the lyrics. Whereas with Janelle (and this is occasionally a very charming quality) her vocals are always so precise and narrativist.

Agreed that the ballads here ("Sir Greendown", "57821", "Say You'll Go") are largely lovely, these are actually the moments when the album gets most Broadway and I think in a general sense they're the album's strongest moments (though I still love "Faster" most I think).

x-post

I can see your point, but I still think the album creates this sort of overarching context which diffuses those R&B expectations (or should?). This is inadequately brief (or just inadequate maybe), but I have to get to work.

(I still don't agree that Janelle Monae's vocals are as emotionally blank as you say they are.)

cant imagine wanting to fuck with Beth Gibbons' vocals, but anyway

I don't like them at all.

Haha I can see that re Kate Bush. I wasn't even particularly thinking of the vocals, oddly enough.

when? when he first came out? probably. most of these guys have 1 or 2 songs with wider appeal (i could even see a couple of the ballads on JMs album getting R&B radio airplay). but basically, beyonce is gonna get on pop radio. maxwell isnt. usher will get on pop radio. bilal wont. and so on.

― truffle-flavoured french fry (titchyschneiderMk2), Thursday, June 17, 2010 1:43 AM Bookmark

Dude. "Pretty Wings" was #1 on the (pretty much airplay-only) R&B charts for 14 weeks.

titchy has horrible & totally wrong opinions so often its kind of O_O

real heads will know that it's titchyschneider that is actually ilx's premier subliminal chinese water-torturer - geir is but childs play in comparison.

― r|t|c, Thursday, 22 October 2009 13:20 (7 months ago) Bookmark

honestly one of the most sublimely irritating trolls in internet history imo

i almost wanna respect the hustle but

u right tho, geir is so easy to get a bead on by comparison

the problem with calling it R&B is that you say R&B and you think of ciara, beyonce, cassie, keri hilson, you get the idea. of course you can say lauryn hill, alicia, solange, and erykah are all R&B too, and yes, of course they are, but its a totally different side of it (even if alicia and solange and well lots of artists are now blurring with much poppier stuff than before). i mean world wide underground vol 1 has next to nothing in common with beyonce does it? (give or take maybe a few similar samples here and there). its like saying idk, green day is the same as black dice (to use an extreme example). i think ive already said this upthread already, not sure why people have to take it as an insult to think that this is MORE than just a standard, commercial pop R&B record, when thats exactly what it is. comparing this album with a beyonce album is insulting. (even if on stage, in a live setting, there are more similarities - the R&B tradition of showwomanship being in much evidence etc)

Titchy this boils down to you saying "I have an unnecessarily and unreasonably restrictive notion of R&B and this album sometimes falls outside of that."

or, it boils down to you saying "i have a large umbrella definition of R&B in which there is no room for nuanced definition other than it all being R&B. i do not believe in there being sub strands or sub genres and i refuse to believe that such a thing as neo soul ever existed and bilal and usher are all cut of the same cloth"

I'm not saying this is "just" an R&B album, I'm saying for the most part it falls within established R&B traditions (just not Usher's - as if Usher exhaustively defines R&B!). If anything, the fact of neo-soul's existence is a large part of why saying "this album shouldn't be thought of as R&B" makes little sense. Umbrellas can be made of more than one cloth, titch.

Did you experience almost unbearable cognitive dissonance when listening to Lina and Tweet's albums?

tears for fears are not a rock band. they are not within the traditions of little richard

http://i46.tinypic.com/2r7c1h4.gif

She's someone I respect and like the concept of more than the actual experience. Her David Letterman performance was amazing though.

i never said it wasnt R&B, just that it wasnt the same type of R&B as the cassies and ciaras of this world. so its still r&b, in the same way black dice and green day (or whoever) can still both be rock.

ok, theeeerrre you go

anyway, bored of this strand of the discussion. the 'i dont care for her music as much as the concept' makes sense if you havent really spent much time with the music. cos faster and locked inside, never mind say youll go, are all so gorgeous, i dunno how their ability to really emanate strong emotionalsim - in the way all good R&B is - could be denied. the bridge of locked inside is so lovely.

BUT

you couldnt really blame someone for wanting something else to call it, cos it is so different from what is recognised as R&B. something like art-R&B would be fine. sci fi R&B is a bit ott. its just theatrical R&B really. which is at once what R&B has long been about (the sense of there being a performance at work where the performer and audience are both in on the 'joke' but also taking it totally seriously too) but also not (the distance is... colder?).

just when you started to get things right

aRt & B

Serious answer: I think insisting on categorising Janelle as some kind of unprecedented aRt&B one-off makes it kinda difficult to talk about why/how she succeeds or falls short in certain areas (beyond meaninglessly vague statements comparing her favourably to other artists who purportedly she's not even comparable to anyway). As basically any attempt to void or deny a given piece of music's synchronic or diachronic context will tend to do...

Thinking about Janelle in terms of other R&B artists who chart their own course somewhat helps me to crystallise how I feel about this stuff... Like, I think that one area in which The Archandroid feels closer to Tweet's debut (or Teedra for that matter) than Solange (or Lina) is that her musical/stylistic choices feel less deliberate than Solange's, less like she sat down and thought about writing a song in a particular style or with a particular sound and then did so. With Tweet/Teedra there's a sense in which the songwriting plots the journey, that the song starts off as a song first and then accumulates sonic/stylistic signifiers around it as it develops, like fairy-floss accumulating around a stick. What The Archandroid shares with Southern Hummingbird is a sense that the song's external trappings have been chosen intuitively based on what feels "right" for the song (this realisation is surprising given how theatrical and narrativist and "auteurist" Janelle comes off at times).

Where Tweet and Janelle differ is that Tweet is essentially a classicist songwriter - you could imagine great cover versions of even her most insular, distant-from-commercial-R&B material like "Always Will", "Complain", even "Drunk" perhaps (which is her most Janelle moment arguably). With Janelle this is much harder, the songs resist universalisation for reasons not limited to their concept-driven lyrics; they carry a certain persona-stamped eccentricity that makes them never seem anything other than the work of Janelle Monae(TM), which is maybe the point Dan was getting at with his Portishead comparison (though I'd compare them in pretty much no other fashion). That resistance-to-universalisation isn't a neo-soul trait really - it's true of Erykah at times, and certainly Me'Shell, but it's obviously not true of Jill Scott or Bilal or or Angie Stone or Musiq Soulchild or Maxwell... But it does remind me of Brooke Valentine's album (which was undeniably commercial-r&b). In fact if I wanted to describe this album in a compressed artistic equation I'd say Me'Shell X Solange X Brooke Valentine.

(Solange splits this down the middle - you can imagine cover versions of her deliberately classicist songs like "I Decided", less so her sci-fi-ish moments like "This Bird")

Rudipherous raised Kate Bush as a point of comparison - specifically Aerial. I think Kate doesn't really work as a reference point per se, but (the second disc of) Aerial does in some specific senses, perhaps if you think of Kate Bush's entire career as standing in for R&B and Aerial standing in for Janelle - i.e. the relationship between Aerial and the rest of Kate's work is similar to that between Janelle and R&B. I think what the second disc of Aerial tries to do is to tell a story without human interaction or even strong human emotion which remains moving (arguably The Ninth Wave did this as well, but the story in that case is filled with loneliness and nostalgia and fear and is almost unbearably emotive at times). Janelle actually foregrounds that this is kinda the point of The Archandroid, though telling the story of a robot is obviously different in terms of its capacity-for-human-emotion than telling the story of earth passing through a single day (see Bladerunner as exemplar exploration of android emotion). But I think some of the songwriting does aim for that same goal of inciting an emotional response to a narrative situation that itself rigorously rejects the hooks of human interaction which we expect from R&B (whereas Kate's entire preceding career is very much squarely in the R&B camp in this regard). Again the main difference (and what prevents Aerial from feeling cool or arch or self-satisfied (to use Dan's excellent but perhaps a trifle harsh term w/r/t Janelle) is that Kate's voice is so emotive, instinctive, untrained, whereas Janelle's is so precise, though exquisite definitely.

Considering music in terms of genre doesn't have to be about shutting down its complexity, or relationship to music outside the genre for that matter. It all depends on how complex your notion of the genre-in-issue is to begin with. By contrast, trying to hypostasize and isolate some piece of music as "art" with little precedence is almost always a misguided and ultimately anti-critical move IMO.

Also want to come back and talk about deej's comparison of the album to Basement Jaxx, which I think also merits unpacking...

if I wanted to describe this album in a compressed artistic equation I'd say Me'Shell X Solange X Brooke Valentine.

idk I think describing it only in terms of R&B artists, even from across the R&B spectrum, ignores the extent to which Janelle draws on non-R&B - I'd sooner compare her style of songwriting and arrangements to Andrew Lloyd Webber than to Meshell Ndegéocello, whose focus on mood and feeling instead/at the expense of stylistic range is pretty much the opposite of what Janelle does. I'd say Nellie McKay x Brooke Valentine, but brought up on more James Brown and Wanda Jackson than either.

More Me'Shell circa The World Has Given Me The Man Of My Dreams than Bittersweet.

I see the Broadway stuff but I think there's an undercurrent of that in R&B that Janelle is really drawing out rather than inserting for the first time (see Beyonce "Dangerously in Love", ha and Dreamgirls for that matter). Though I guess the difference is usually R&B goes for Broadway that emotes ("And I Am Telling You") rather than that Rice/Webber tradition of songs that are ultimately there to drive the plot along and which make up for lack of emotional centre with big gestures - Evita springs to mind here. And not surprisingly there are aspects of this album that remind me of Ray of Light somewhat.

One of the things that makes me think of Me'Shell is that Janelle reminds me of an idea I once had of doing a mix that combines together all examples of self-consciously experimental R&B/hip hop artists doing at least one track using drumming that boasts "drum & bass is actually the same as live funk drumming played fast!", as some kind of riposte to post-Timbaland rhythm programming - Outkast, Me'Shell, Janelle... who else?

But surely the thing with "Listen" and "And I Am Telling You..." is that they're both huge outliers in Beyoncé and J-Hud's discographies (and listening to them in their respective album contexts really illustrates this) - this is even the case for a singer like J-Hud who's pretty inclined to sing as though she was a musical lead anyway.

I just don't think Janelle's as interested in mood or "soul" as Meshell or any other "sideways r&b" artist like Amel Larrieux, Bilal etc...

I don't think "Listen" is that different to "Stand Up For Love" (or whatevs it's called) or "Dangerously In Love" or "The Story Of Beauty"... And, you know, let's take a step back, way back, to songs like "And I Will Always Love You" or "I Have Nothing".

The bigger difference is that Janelle doesn't actually resemble that part of the Broadway tradition. I could see her doing some Sondheim maybe, but she'd never do Fame or Rent say.

A succinct way to put it is that the archetypal notion of the Broadway/R&B connection is embodied (in cliche form obv) in the Mercedes character on Glee - who sings Whitney, Beyonce, Jill Scott, Jazmine Sullivan and "And I Am Telling You"... I wonder what the common factor is??

Whereas Janelle, when she is trending Broadway, is closer to Rachel singing "Don't Rain On My Parade" (but even then, much less big-note-ish).

Of course you could excise 90% of the Broadway resemblances on this album by simply taking off a handful of cuts. The entire stretch from "Dance or Die" through "Tightrope" doesn't evoke Broadway at all for me. "Sir Greendown" is basically "Moon River" more than it is a Broadway ballad.

Oh yeah Mercedes sings "Proud Mary" too, unsurprisingly.

Were "Listen" and "And I Am Telling You" on albums besides the Dreamgirls soundtrack? Because they don't stick out at all on that soundtrack.