The Electric Lady is the second studio album by American singer and songwriter Janelle Monáe, released on September 6, 2013, by Wondaland Arts Society, Bad Boy Records and Atlantic Records. It is the follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut studio album, The ArchAndroid (2010), and likewise, received universal acclaim from music critics. This album serves as the fourth and fifth installments of her seven-part Metropolis concept series. Musically, The Electric Lady incorporates influences of hip hop soul, funk, gospel, jazz, rock, pop, and reggae.
Background
The Electric Lady is the follow-up to Janelle Monáe's debut album The ArchAndroid (2010) and debut EP Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) (2007), and consists of the fourth and fifth installments of her seven-part Metropolis concept series. Partly inspired by the 1927 film of the same name, the series involves the fictional tale of Cindi Mayweather, a messianic android sent back in time to free the citizens of Metropolis from The Great Divide, a secret society that uses time travel to suppress freedom and love.
Monáe debuted tracks from The Electric Lady at the 2012 Toronto Jazz Festival. The Electric Lady was made available for pre-order through the iTunes Store on July 2, 2013, with "Dance Apocalyptic" as a pre-order bonus. The album features nineteen tracks, although only "Dance Apocalyptic" and previously released single "Q.U.E.E.N." were revealed.
Writing and lyrical themes
Thematically, The Electric Lady continues the dystopic cyborg concepts of its predecessors, while presenting itself in more plainspoken, personal territory in addition to experimenting with genres beyond conventional funk and soul music genres such as jazz, pop punk and gospel, as well as woozy and sensual vocal ballads. As stated on July 30, 2013, by Monáe on Twitter, The Electric Lady are the fourth and fifth suites of her Metropolis concept series. Monáe also stated in an interview with Billboard that The Electric Lady is a prequel to her critically acclaimed 2010 album The ArchAndroid.
The album features guest appearances by Miguel, Erykah Badu, Solange, Prince and Esperanza Spalding with production from previous collaborator, funk duo Deep Cotton, as well as soul music composer Roman GianArthur.
The music video for "Dance Apocalyptic" illustrates many of Monáe's artistic ambitions. The centrality of dance to Monáe's aesthetic reportedly led to obsessing over "how the human body might respond to [her music]", so much so that her musical team "brought early versions of [The Electric Ladys] tracks to Atlanta's fabled strip clubs to see what the women there would dance to."
According to Philadelphia Weekly's Kennedy Allen, Monáe's "Dance Apocalyptic" also takes the dance styles of minstrelsy, which featured "smiling, wide-eyed black performers in shiny livery, their talents on display in subordinate and subservient roles for the enjoyment of white audiences," and repurposes this Sambo imagery into an allegory to "alert a generation to the decaying infrastructure of the urban community." This repurposing fits within a larger history of African-American music and culture developing the art of "signifying, recontextualization, collective memory and resistance" by fashioning icons of opposition to harmful stereotypes and racial conceptions. For Monáe in "Dance Apocalyptic", dancing operates on both a physical and a cerebral level that fits within the historical context of black popular music while also altering how race and gender are conceived and performed.
Artwork
The cover art was painted by Sam Spratt, a New York-based illustrator. Because of the many iterations and revisions made to both the standard and deluxe covers, Monáe herself never actually sat and posed for the artwork. Instead, Spratt was given "thousands of photos from every possible angle, both professional and candid, so [he] had plenty of references to make any possible pose". The cover art was produced in about two months.
The standard edition cover, subtitled Concerning Cindi and Her Sisters and the Skull of Night Thrashings, depicts Cindi Mayweather and her five sisters. Clockwise from left to right: Andromeda, Andy Pisces, Catalina, Morovia, Polly Whynot, and in the front and center, Cindi Mayweather. The artwork pays homage to the work of photographer William Klein, and in particular, the graphic sensibility of his 1966 film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?. The deluxe edition cover, subtitled Concerning Cindi and the Glow of the Drogon's Eyes, displays Cindi Mayweather alone, proudly showing her Digital Auction Code that shows she is no longer for sale. In this painting, she is an E1 Class android superstar, with full manumission papers.