Janelle Monáe is a great one, who can traverse a breathtaking range of musical palates in a single album, but of course my favorite song of hers is her most pure pop production, "Wondaland." (But seriously, go check out the entirety of her brilliant 2010 album The ArchAndroid.)
"Wondaland" is cybernetic baroque.
It's theatrical as well as song. In other pieces, she wails and screams. But here, it's her android alter-ego in a crazy little meep voice, singing complex classical-based melodies.
The production is so full, a mix of sci-fi futurism and timeless "hallelujah" chorales. The bass guitar playing is elite, melodic but modest enough to hold the song together. My favorite touch has to be the syncopated, percussive chimes pinging softly in the supporting soundscape during the bridges. The "hallelujah" melody is also weirdly affecting - so beautiful and sincere, such a spiritual ghost this android's guts.
Lyrically, ideas are fixated on creativity, spirituality, and inhumanity. Why do I think of Yoda's line, "Luminous beings are we"? There is validity to this idea that the creative mode, the trance we enter when these things come, has less to do with humanity and more to do with a spiritual condition beyond our base, animalistic presets.
I mean, are angels (whether you consider them real or fantasy) Earthly residents or alien? If a soul does exist, it is something non-physical and thus completely free of this slippery rock. When the soul/whatever contacts what it contacts to divine its inspiration, it's an extraterrestrial process. It's a luminous connection. And maybe in that aspect, the creative mind is something closer to the Otherness of the cyborg than when the mind is engaged in the default "eat, compete, survive" setting.
There may be something racially implied in Monae's theme of android perfection, too. From Diana Ross to Tina Turner to Michael Jackson to Tiger Woods to Barack Obama, you see many examples of Black Americans who earned mainstream respect by creating not just brands for exacting perfection but ultra-perfection. That Michael Jackson's manic precision eventually fell out of favor for the slacker rock of mostly white musicians is telling. There is no way Michael Jackson could've ever made slacker sounding music and "earned" a place in our zeitgeist. Look at the genius-level intellect and charisma of Barack Obama, then look at the slovenly disarray of his privileged successor. To be Black and successful carries, apparently, a pressure to be perfect beyond perfect. It requires almost android qualities. We apparently expect this level of perfection from Black folks even at police traffic stops.
When will this end? Will it only end when the rise of sophisticated artificial intelligence (and presumably intelligent androids) puts us all in our place and lays bare the fallibility in all of us? That day is coming faster than maybe you realize. Will we then stop praising superiority in all forms and learn to cherish the impurities that truly define us, all of us? Will Wondaland then finally come back to Earth?