The ArchAndroid

The 'plot' of Janelle Monáe’s The Archandroid revolves around Cindi Mayweather; a character embodied by the staggeringly varied talents of Monáe herself. Cindi is actually cloned from the DNA of Monae, who had been kidnapped, cloned and then sent back to our time in the 21st century. The Archandroid is snippets of Cindi’s effort to realign the wrongs made in the year 2719 in the city of Metropolis by the Great Divide, 'a secret society which has been using time travel to suppress freedom and love throughout the ages'. It’s Cindi’s duty to bring them down. And, by default, Monáe’s to formulate an idea of the error of their ways.

That Janelle Monáe is from a drama background comes as no surprise after even the most cursory listen to her music. The young singer and dancer originally moved to New York from her Kansas hometown to study Theatre, before making the switch to music that seems inevitable given her evident talents. The love of the dramatic, though, and sense of storytelling in her work, remain as markers of her previous direction.

Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid immediately dazzles you with its ambition. It's a 70-minute, 18-track epic comprising two suites, each beginning with an overture, telling a futuristic story starring a messianic android. It's not even the beginning of the saga-- the first sequence was her debut EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite. The songs zip gleefully from genre to genre, mostly grounded in R&B and funk, but spinning out into rap, pastoral British folk, psychedelic rock, disco, cabaret, cinematic scores, and whatever else strikes her fancy. It's about as bold as mainstream music gets, marrying the world-building possibilities of the concept album to the big tent genre-m utating pop of Michael Jackson and Prince in their prime. Monáe describes The ArchAndroid as an "emotion picture," an album with a story arc intended to be experienced in one sitting, like a movie. It most certainly works in this way, but at first blush, it's almost too much to take in all at once. The first listen is mostly about being wowed by the very existence of this fabulously talented young singer and her over-the-top record; every subsequent spin reveals the depths of her achievement.

There’s a perfectly good reason why I never thought of Michael Jackson as the “King of Pop”. It’s not because I’m a hater. It’s not that I thought he was undeserving of the title. It’s that I always thought of Michael Jackson as an entire category unto himself. How, I wondered, could he be “of” anything? He was his own genre. Same thing with the Beatles. James Brown. Ella Fitzgerald. Aretha.