The way Afrofuturist singer Janelle Monáe talks about balance, you'd think she was an acrobat. For example, when discussing the meaning behind her single "Tightrope" (featuring Big Boi), she touts the importance of avoiding emotionally detrimental extremes. Monáe says the single is similar in spirit to James Brown's late-'60s anthems of inner confidence, one of which she quotes from, citing the message as "I don't want nobody to give me nothing/I'll get it myself."
"I wanted to have an inspirational song that dealt with something I hadn't heard talked about recently," she explains. "And that's how we need to have balance. Especially if you're a leader, [you should] never get too high or too low."
But Monáe isn't an acrobat per se, though she has plenty going on in her life to weigh and harmonize. The 26-year-old Kansas transplant operates out of Atlanta, where she initially found success with the help of OutKast's Big Boi, who welcomed her into his Purple Ribbon camp. She is a businesswoman and leader within the Wondaland Arts Society, an independent collective that hosts Salvador Dalí-inspired painting parties, performance-art showcases, and meditation sessions, and houses a studio and label Monáe shares with her executive producers, Nate Wonder and Chuck Lightning, AKA funked-up duo Deep Cotton.
As the art-fueled spitfire will tell you, though, she mainly works on balance because she's an unswerving android. But not just any android. She's the ArchAndroid, according to the name of her full-length debut, released last month. Monáe describes The ArchAndroid as an "emotion picture" and a continuation of a work she began several years ago. The album gathers Suites II and III of the four-suite story line of Monáe's cybernetic alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, who was introduced on her self-released Metropolis Suite I of IV: The Chase EP in 2007. That EP was re-released in 2008 after Monáe signed with P. Diddy, who first heard her material through Big Boi and MySpace.
"Tightrope" is ArchAndroid's centerpiece, showing off a funky clatter that balances classy brass and ukulele flourishes within one of the album's 18 torrents of jam-generated, hip-hop-augmented R&B. The single's B-side, also on the album, is the more overtly OutKast-esque slap-back robofunk caper "Cold War."
Other tracks sound like calliopes of wailing soul pulled from the title themes of secret-agent cinema, with thrown-wide guitar trills, string swells, and churning organs. The record also features combinations of emulsified "Crimson and Clover"-style melodies, fidgety percussion, and plucky bass. Monáe threads strong feminist themes and utopian pleas throughout varying tempos and hallucinatory hypersoul arrangements.
Her abstract conceptual streak has attracted sonically kaleidoscopic patrons such as Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes. Last year, he took the nattily dressed singer on tour, produced one ArchAndroid track, and had her perform on his band's tenth album, False Priest.
Monáe calls her adventuresome, creatively unfiltered contemporaries such as Barnes "thrivals" and says of their talents: "We want to use our superpowers for great things, especially pertaining to art."
