urgencytobleed | Song of the Day #100

Song of the Day

Janelle Monáe - Many Moons

100! Finally! Only took, what, three years? Wow. But it's true! It's been more than three years since my first post here. Craziness.

Anyway, I'm admittedly not much of a hip-hop or R&B fan; those genres of music just don't really do anything for me. For this reason, I never thought much about giving Janelle Monáe a listen even though I've seen nothing but rather unanimous praise for her all over the Interwebs for the past couple of years. But her new album just came out on Tuesday and that pushed me to finally give her a shot. And, yes, there's a lot of R&B and hip-hop to her sound but there's also a lot of pop and funk and jazz and, well, basically a little bit of everything. And she mixes all of these genres with such deftness and inventiveness and fearlessness that it's almost impossible not to fall immediately in love with her. Janelle's music is honestly some of the most refreshing, fun and completely individual pop music I've heard in recent years. This song I'm especially head-over-heels in love with; I think it's completely fucking brilliant, to put it bluntly. It's not from her new album so I'm not going to spend too much time talking about her music in general because I'll probably post some more recent stuff in the near future. All you need to know is that I can't get over how crazy and infectious and creative this particular song is. The backing vocals are especially inspired and the fact that the song goes off in about a million vastly different directions but in a very focused way. This girl clearly knows exactly what she's doing and what she wants every second of her music to sound like. And that's rather inspiring considering the quasi-mainstream space (she's not quite indie - after all she's signed to, of all people, Diddy's [is this what he calls himself these days? I honestly have no idea] record label - but she's not exactly a marquee-topping name yet either) she resides in.

Have a look at the music video too because it's half the fun. Janelle is an extremely enigmatic performer and fucking gorgeous to boot.

Watch on YouTube