The ArchAndroid

Have y'all bought the album yet?  It's just absurdly good.  I'm running another one of Ye Olde Atlantic.com roundtables on the subject, and I'm totally in trouble because Brentin Mock, reporter extraordinaire and Friend of This Blog wrote pretty much everything I wanted to say in the first installment, and got us some totally awesome pictures from her performance at Voodoo Fest.  He writes:

Monáe has given pop music its first Toni Morrison moment, where fantasy, funk, and the ancestors come together for an experience that evolves one's soul. It's been attempted before: Janet Jackson'sRhythm Nation, I think, but that failed because it lacked the courage to carry its struggle to the finish, too often interrupted by gooey songs ("Escapade") that reminded us she's still a mere mortal who believes girls just wanna have fun, just like you. Listening to Monáe, I felt a chromatic charge, likeAunty Entity laughing while pointing a crossbow at my heart in the middle of Thunderdome. Yet I still recognized it as blues and funk—a smothered funk, though perhaps at times too thick, too inaccessible, but not so much I didn't want to shake my ass. It was like the first time I read Beloved, or better Song of Solomon—I didn't quite know what to make of it, but I knew I felt 100 feet taller after reading it. 

And so it is with The ArchAndroid, which is something of a jitterbug between Prince's 1986 movieUnder the Cherry Moon and the 1977 Watts movie Killer of Sheep, and Daughters of the Dust, an exploration of Gullah society in the Southern sea islands. You really don't know whether you want to diagram it, dance to it, or just be dumbstruck. It owes as much to Parliament-Funkadelic as it does to Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler. She is finally doing what a number of artists—particularly black artists—have not been able to do in years, and that's move pop music forward. Kid Cudi couldn't do it. Kanye thought he was doing it, but I'm confident that 20 years from now people will recognize 808s and Heartbreak as an unpleasant side effect. Gaga can't possibly think she's doing it by packaging mediocre dance music in krewe costumes. 

The album is amazing, and so is Brentin's piece.  Seriously.  Read it.