You've got to admire an artist who can cut through the weight of her own pretensions. And with Janelle Monáe, the pretensions are pretty impressive. Her 2010 full-length debut, The ArchAndroid , was a head-spinning album conceived as parts II and III in an ongoing suite based on Fritz Lang's expressionist silent-film classic Metropolis . This album is parts IV and V, and it weaves hiphop soul, Seventies funk, gospel, jazz and rock while dropping references to sci-fi author Philip K. Dick and ghetto-revolutionary politics. Prince shows up for some Hendrixian soloing on "Givin Em What They Love," and Erykah Badu spreads butter around Monáe's fierce rap freestyle on the sumptuous hater-hating "Q.U.E.E.N." There's radio skits and cinematic overtures, too. But Monáe holds it together through sheer force of freakadelic will and a radical feminist's sense of self-exploration that makes lines like "I'm packing my spacesuit/And I'm takin' my shit and moving to the moon/Where there are no rules" seem like cosmic salvation and excellent travel advice.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”

One of the of the songs most identified with the Band even though it was never a big hit for them (Joan Baez took it to Number Three two years later), “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” appeared on The Band and as the B side of the “Up on Cripple Creek” single. This ode to a South deeply scarred by the Civil War was written by Canadian Robbie Robertson when the group was living up in Woodstock, New York, although Arkansas native Levon Helm sings lead on it. “I remember taking [Robertson] to the library so he could research the history and geography,” Helm told Rolling Stone .