Janelle Monáe opens her second album the same way she did her 2010 debut: with a sumptuously recorded studio orchestra tossing off flourishes with abandon. When the smoke clears, the first full song features a guest vocal from...Prince. Monáe is not the kind of entertainer who takes prisoners; she operates at the locus of generosity where "generous" shades subtly into "aggressive." The song is called "Givin Em What They Love", but the feeling is a little more "take you home and make you like it."
The facts of Monáe's emergence have occasionally made it difficult to embrace her music: She arrived so thoroughly anointed by so many key figures in the entertainment industry that it has sometimes felt pointless to try and touch her. At the heart of her ornate, impressive music, a hint of chilliness kept us at arm's-length; she was a conqueror, undoubtedly, but maybe she glossed over the whole "winning the hearts of the people" thing.
With The E**lectric Lady, she finds a way to give us more of herself. Together with her tight-knit Wondaland collaborators-- Kellindo Parker, a magnificent guitarist who singlehandedly gooses several songs into transcendence; her college friends Nate “Rocket” Wonder and Chuck Lightning, and Roman GianArthur-- Monáe supervises and synthesizes a parade of golden touchstones (Sly, Stevie, Marvin) into a show-stopping display of force and talent. And at the heart of it, she embeds some of the most personal pain she's allowed to leak into her music.
Many of her lyrics here telegraph a desire to break away, to "find a way to freak out," as she puts it on "Dance Apocalyptic", which is the closest the album comes to an immediate calling card like "Tightrope". The album is overall looser and more physical than its predecessor, more concerned with dancing, sex, love, and abandon. "I wanna scream and dream and throw a love parade," she sings, in a creamy mid-register, on the moonlit Miguel duet "Primetime". The song rides a cerebral whine into an "I Only Have Eyes For You" glide, with a "Purple Rain" solo cascading over the top like an MGM waterfall.
The emotional core of the album, and its unique loneliness, derives from how Monáe both fails and succeeds to connect. She wants to scream and dream, she's found a way to freak out. The most pleading passages on Electric Lady-- gorgeously tender soul ballads like "It's Code" and "Can't Live Without Your Love"-- feature some of her most emotionally bare, strikingly abject singing. But for all of the sex-positive, queer-friendly utopianism of her music (one between-song skit advertises a "bouncing electro booty contest"; on the title track, she pictures "all the birds and the bees dancing with the freaks in the trees"; and on the Erykah Badu-featuring "Q.U.E.E.N.", she asks playfully, "Is it weird to like the way she wears her tights?"), her music has always been about the the exhilaration coming from the sensation of total control.
Attention to detail is nothing new for the admittedly obsessive Monáe, but man, there are some knockout details here: the rusty poking bedspring of a guitar that powers "Q.U.E.E.N."; the percussion loops on "Electric Lady"; the manic clean-toned jazz guitar skittering behind the vocal breakdown on "Ghetto Woman". The strings carry some of the most heart-tugging melodies, and the most beautiful moments come when songs melt from an amped-up funk groove into a glimmering, soul-revue orchestra, like "We Were Rock and Roll", "Give Em What You Love", and "Q.U.E.E.N". Gorgeous soul ballads like "Can't Live Without Your Love" are built on the kind of rich, finely managed melodies and jazzy modulations that haven't been the sound of the radio since the late 70s.
Taken as a whole, The E**lectric Lady is a convincing argument for the virtues of micromanagement, but some of the most powerful, tender moments come from acknowledging limits. On "Sally Ride," she admits defeat, of sorts, declaring she's "packing my spacesuit, and I'm taking my shit up to the moon." On "Victory," Monáe offers, "I'll just keep singing until the pain goes," and there's something humbly stoic in her voice. She's not singing to exorcise pain, which will hang around until it's good and ready to go, she's just passing the time until it does doing the thing she does best.
