Janelle Monáe – Tightrope (feat. Big Boi)

The never less than amazing Jacky from Take It To The Chorus reviews a song called Tightrope by Janelle Monáe.

Despite signing to Sean Puffy P Diddy Coombes Daddy’s Warner imprint, Bad Boy Records, Atlantan wunderkind Janelle Monae is yet to blow up. If 2010 isn’t the year of Ms Monae, everything I know about the world will have been a lie.

Like Lady Gaga, Janelle doesn’t just do songs. She does concepts. Bold, Fritz Lang-influenced concepts. Her debut, Metropolis, narrated the travails of Cindi Mayweather, a 28^th Century pleasure-borg dressed in monochrome brogues. Tightrope is the first cut from her forthcoming second full-length record, The Arch Android, which promises to continue the tale as “a self-realisation album”. Cindi Mayweather will recognise her android powers and become a messiah-like figure. Crikey. It all sounds like Blade Runner with brass sections.

Are you keeping up? It doesn’t matter if you are, because Tightrope is a standalone swirl of light-headed space funk. A crazy-in-love Janelle has a more soulful and more controlled voice compared with earlier singles Many Moons or Sincerely, Jane. And this idiosyncratic chick is still only 25. In the verses, she spins through tight couplets, confidently pairing rhymes like “rattlesnakers” and “alligators” (Big Boi, meanwhile, classes up his breakdown with “NASDAQ” and “ass crack”). For the outro, she’s meditative, cooing “’cause I play my ukulele / just like a little lady”. With saucy horns and beats to get those brogues shuffling, Tightrope is a superbly dizzying track.