Janelle Monáe likes to hover outside categories, with a sound and a look that are both visionary and retro, steeped in OutKast-style hip-hop while hearkening back to Cab Calloway and Fifties doo-wop and James Brown. Her full-length debut — about a robot-populated utopia based on Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film Metropolis — is so ambitious, so freighted with sounds and ideas and allusions, it threatens at times to sink under its own weight. But on ferocious songs like "Come Alive" and the manic neojump blues "Tightrope" (featuring Big Boi), Monáe's charisma and energy are so forceful that the jumble makes perfect sense. Whoever else — whatever else — Janelle Monáe is, she's a star.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."