It's the best wild card entry in pop music this year. It's an epic album with a theatrical story that has a long musical reach across the varied genres, including electronic, hip hop/soul and indie rock. Janelle's ArchAndroid touring ensemble has about as many musicians, singers and dancers as the Sun Ra Arkestra in it's early 70s hey day. I counted nearly 100 musicians, singers, studio techs, arrangers and producers on the log of album credits for studio recording.
Janelle Monae was a graduate of the prestigous Academy of Dramatic and Musical Arts in New York and was on the fast track to a successful stage career on Broadway early on. Janelle said she thinks of herself as more a performance artist than a pop music artist in a recent NPR interview I heard.
I'm impressed by the scope ambition of her musical vision and nearly all of the songs on the album hold up well both as part of the ArchAndroid song cycle and as stand-alone songs that could be released as singles. In the interview she said was suprised at the rousing reception for ArchAndroid at the various indie music summer festival venues across the United States. It isn't that suprising because indie music fans are a build in audience for a quirky, exotic, left-of-center performance artist types like Janelle.
I'm not sure if her cross cultural approach will translate into a broader mainstream audience. A listener with a short musical attention span may well be baffled by her quirky theatrical approach and place her album in the discard pile. ArchAndroid requires more than a passive listener to work it's magic.
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