Janelle Monae

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.

I think "Listen" was a secret track on B'Day maybe? It sounds out of place in that context mainly because it's Beyonce's most anti-stage-diva record.

"Outkast, Me'Shell, Janelle... who else?"

mint conditions's liefs aquarium album.

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

i dont hear meshell here either. meshell doesnt want to/cant really write or sing these sorts of melodies. solange is kind of the closest of your 3. but brooke valentine?! janelle vocally reminds me a lot of early 70s pointer sisters, various 50s/60s doo wop/rock n roll and screamin jay hawkins, esquivel etc, soundtracks, and stevie (specifically rocket love, though never derivatively like say, glenn jones) on say youll go. the diff between something like 'listen' and 'and i am telling you' is that they sound so BIG whereas janelle resists any of those big j hudson/beyonce-isms, and well most R&B stadium-gospel 'cliches' in general in her singing style. its a very 'pure' style that she has. and its prob no coincidence that janelle first got featured on call the law, which is idk, some ragtime/gospel type thing, cos she sings like singers used to sing back then.

i mean some of the 50s/60s stuff i hear in places on this album reminds me of a lot of those detroit bands like the cobras, etc, just less retro and more R&B sounding production-wise.

I think this has been said already in here, but JaMo is better on-paper than in-practice.

I love about 1/4 or so of the record, though, so as long as this isn't her ceiling, I'd imagine the hype'll be vindicated.

Were "Listen" and "And I Am Telling You" on albums besides the Dreamgirls soundtrack?

they were on b'day (hidden track on original edition, listed track on the re-release) and the j-hud album respectively - i wouldn't expect them to stand out stylistically on the soundtracks!

Tim, to sidestep the whole genre issue (I don't know enough about R&B to argue this), I'm just not sure to what extent I typically listen for the character-of-the-song," but I suspect it's not how I usually listen to things. I'm generally not having trouble making a satisfactory emotional connection with these songs (if I may put it so clinically), although I suppose they don't typically flood me with emotion as some music does. Lyrically there is plenty to latch onto that is not so android-epic specific that I can't relate to it. I hate to say it (since it sounds narcissistic or something) but I almost think I tend to leap right into identifying with the emotions in a song, rather than looking for a person-in-the-song. As if I make it about me, or some projected version of me. I'm sure I don't do this all the time though. (I don't know, it's pretty hard to generalize across so much listening.)

(I usually stress the importance of emotion and the immediacy of my emotional response to music, when talking about how I enjoy music, but in the past several years I find myself liking a lot of albums that don't quite fit that mold, or that start out being unemotional experiences, but become more emotionally satisfying over repeated listens. I'm not sure what to make of this. A change in my taste? Something that's always been there but hasn't fit with my "official" account of enjoying music? Aging? Don't know. It's not as if I no longer respond strongly emotionally to any music.)

Incidentally, I have to agree that the chorus on "Locked Inside" is particularly weak, if not outright bad. It doesn't ruin the track for me though, because there's enough going on that I like, plus it's supported by the momentum of the previous two tracks. But it seems like a tossed off chorus, almost a parody of some sort. (Maybe it is and we're missing it?) I don't agree that there's a problem with her choruses in general though.

Against my better judgment I am going to say that I have always found Beth Gibbons's vocals to be really unconvincingly bad acting. I haven't listened to Portishead much, for the simple reason that I haven't liked what I've heard (though that has included I think at least a couple albums), but I did check out some songs on youtube to refresh my memory of what Portishead sounds like. One connection I was probably thinking of is that Portishead seemed to me to make an attempt at some sort of elegance and sophistication (fitting in pretty well with the whole 90s cocktail revival thing in mood). I could obviously be way off one what they were going for since I haven't listened much and never followed them, but Janelle Monae nails elegant and sophisticated better (when she wants to), to my ears, and some so in a way that I find satisfyingly expressive. I know there is much love for Portishead here and I'm not just bashing them, or Gibbons specifically, in order to troll.

I don't quite understand this:

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

I do think there is a similarity (between Aerial, esp. disc 2, and The ArchAndroid), but I'm not sure I'd describe it that way. Just purely lyrically there is plenty of interaction (with a child, a street artist, a husband sort of implied, etc.). Or would you say they are there present, but they remain shadowy? It is sort dominated by Kate Bush (or this Kate Bush-like character) and her inner world, not a lot of exchange. Then again, some of the other characters even get to talk (the son and the street painter at least), which isn't the rule in songs.

If anything, I think I'm a little more interested in looking for an actual person (singer or songwriter, typically), or at least actual persona, in a song, than in the narrator constructed in the particular song. (That would probably be a big weakness in a critic.)

Lyrically there is plenty to latch onto that is not so android-epic specific that I can't relate to it. I hate to say it (since it sounds narcissistic or something) but I almost think I tend to leap right into identifying with the emotions in a song, rather than looking for a person-in-the-song. As if I make it about me, or some projected version of me. I'm sure I don't do this all the time though. (I don't know, it's pretty hard to generalize across so much listening.)

I hadn't intended to suggest some sharp distinction here.

With song-based vocal music generally (as opposed to R&B specifically) I suspect there are basically the following ways of "identifying with" the music:

1) Identify with the character of the song - "this is a convincing song about heartbreak and it either reminds of that experience or forces me to imagine myself experiencing it." Implied in this is a certain refusal (or at least absence) of separation between "song" and "performance". You can't really say whether it's the song or the performance of it that move you because the two are so inextricable.

2) Identify with the sound/performance itself - "the song itself is just a vehicle for me to experience something really moving in the music or the singing." Archetypal example here maybe is jazz interpretation of "standards" where the emotional impact is secreted inside the variations and departure's from the song's standard. But this is also linked in with the emotional impact of other, non-song-based music, where the idea of song or story falls away entirely. In other words, enjoyment of music qua music.

(most music that can be defined loosely as "pop" involves at least a mixture of (1) and (2))

3) Identify with the creator/performer in a manner separate (or at least distinguishable) from the song - this could be desire for the performer (they look hot in that video clip) or respect for their intentions or motivations or background or whatever.

I don't think that (3) is illegitimate, but I think leaning on it can be a weakness in writing/thinking about music because it encourages you to skip over working out how (1) and (2) work, except in some really blunt deterministic manner that flows from (3). Ultimately in the act of listening to an album, only (1) and (2) are actually grounded in the music, whereas (3) is something you apply to (and use to shape or articulate) your reactions.

Your distinction between narrator and persona is actually being more specific than what I was thinking of. I can see how it might be important in terms of Janelle and Kate - and I'm now assuming that where you see the resemblance between them is both essentially play dress-ups in their songwriting: Janelle is no more an actual android than Kate is actually Cathy, and the character-of-Kate and the character-of-Janelle transcend any particular pose in any particular song.

But that notwithstanding, the emotional impact of Kate's music in part derives from the fact that she makes the issue of her not actually being Cathy irrelevant - and "Wuthering Heights" isn't only moving if you think Kate does a good job of inhabiting the consciousness of Bronte's character. Likewise, you don't need to know what "Cloudbusting" is about to find it moving. "Identifying with the character" simply means "identifying with the single appearance-of-consciousness who is performing and emoting." I don't see how Kate's music does anything other than fall squarely within that rubric.

If Janelle's music occasionally doesn't allow that, it's less because of the subject matter or even the songwriting generally and more to do with certain performative choices she makes. The relationship between Kate herself and her characters is not dry at all; she invests herself in her characters in a very emotional way. Janelle chooses not to do this, I think, but the lyrics are pretty much irrelevant to this distinction one way or another.

I do think there is a similarity (between Aerial, esp. disc 2, and The ArchAndroid), but I'm not sure I'd describe it that way. Just purely lyrically there is plenty of interaction (with a child, a street artist, a husband sort of implied, etc.). Or would you say they are there present, but they remain shadowy? It is sort dominated by Kate Bush (or this Kate Bush-like character) and her inner world, not a lot of exchange. Then again, some of the other characters even get to talk (the son and the street painter at least), which isn't the rule in songs.

On a literal level this is of course correct, but ultimately A Sky of Honey is "about" the enjoyment of nature, the painter and the child really just pass through as characters who are also communing with nature.

"Cold War": much better than I'd initially given it credit for.

(I will come back later to try to deal with whatever has been posted in response to my last post. I am not ready at the moment.)

Oh, this is pretty nice, although I kind of hate the philosophy of this song (Janelle Monae--why do I feel I need to use her full name every time--covers Charlie Chaplin's "Smile"--a Billboard studio exclusive or something):

http://www.billboard.com/column/mashupmondays/janelle-monae-makes-mj-fave-by-charlie-chaplin-1004099335.story?tag=hpflash1#/column/mashupmondays/janelle-monae-makes-mj-fave-by-charlie-chaplin-1004099335.story?tag=hpflash1

Gotta love YouTube comments:

mikhkos
4 days ago
woah woah woah... contemporary R&B that is not shit? but actually really good? what is happening to this world

I'm an idiot. I just realized where else I heard "Smile" covered recently: on India's new album Unica (yes, the Latin freestyle/salsa India). (In fairness, I hadn't actually heard the full recording, just a snippet.)

Tim, that seems like a reasonable breakdown.

On a literal level this is of course correct, but ultimately A Sky of Honey is "about" the enjoyment of nature, the painter and the child really just pass through as characters who are also communing with nature.

This isn't the place to argue about this, but I don't really agree with this. I think the presence, however shadowy, of a lover is pretty crucial. The more I think about it, it's a "we" that's immersed in nature (albeit, it's a we that seems comfortable existing for the moment in some sort of mutual introversion--which could make you go, "See!" but it still seems different to me than truly being alone).

the fact that I couldn't in a million years imagine having ^this^ sort of discussion about this album goes a long way toward explaining why it's not working for me and i swear i don't mean to be smarmy or mean-spirited by saying that.

she guests on two songs on the new of montreal album

which may debunk our "barnes just sent her some leftovers" theory

Oddly enough, "Make the Bus" has become one of my favorite songs on this album.

Janelle does Prince:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp2mzRf6_mU

shes good but prince covers never really work without well, prince.

yeah you're completely wrong (Sinead? Chaka Kahn? TLC?)

TLC one is kinda bland tbh.

I debated about adding that one

Figure now is as good a time/place as any to repost this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgwfsi9yzww

that version of 'let's go crazy' is pretty slammin' imo, good fit for her