Janelle Monáe – What is Love

Well, I don’t know. Please tell us!

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[6.33]Alfred Soto: She’s gaining the compositional skills to match her confidence, as the first third of The Electric Lady records. This soundtrack throwaway boasts flamenco strumming and a hyperactive choir that listened to “Happy” earlier that morning. Don’t trust a rhetorical question without a question mark — it adduces confusion.
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Will Adams: The percussion bumps politely, the choir interjects politely, and the chorus lands politely. This is the most accessible Janelle has been to me, but the net result sounds limp nonetheless. I hope those facts are not related in any way.
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Brad Shoup: Soundtracks for kiddie films must be a relief for capital-A artists: you can play around with a preset musical theme, explore the tension between mass appeal and your idiosyncratic tendencies, all without inviting the scrutiny level of, say, a single leak. My favorite example is “Lose Myself,” Ms. Lauryn Hill’s contribution to the Surf’s Up soundtrack. Hill’s lays heartcracking, obsessive analysis over a squelchy, percolating surf-pop beat. It’s like watching someone completely clown a Six Flags music-video booth. I’d like to propose a trial separation for the words “crazy” and “love”, but everything else here is animated with a playful, yet all-encompassing, devotion. The Brazilified track doesn’t shake the earth — Lucio Battisti summoned stronger grooves than this — but it shimmies. And when she goes into a Mike Jackson voice for the final seconds, shouting from the sidewalk… dang.
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Megan Harrington: This is delightfully close to being a Jackson 5 hit, especially when Monae shouts her closing salvo, “what is love if it’s not with you?” a reflective counterpart to Michael Jackson singing “sit down girl, I think I love you!” on “ABC.” It’s a perfect piece of soundtrack work, and no one deserves the runaway success associated with a multi-platform movie theme song more than Monáe.
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Juana Giaimo: Her charisma is always abundant, but the lack of feeling in “What Is Love” makes all the tricks she uses to charm us fall flat.
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Mallory O’Donnell: A rolling, exuberant beat injected with carnival percussion and Afropop touches, dense but not weighty. Monáe projects her rhetorical love questions with a keening enthusiasm that never really overwhelms, even when she hits the highs. Little apart from its formal simplicity clues you in to the fact that the track is for a children’s movie.
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