Sign O The Times: Janelle Monáe’s genius Dirty Computer is 2018’s pop masterpiece
I’ve been a #Fandroid for eight years. For me, the most exciting thing about Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe’s masterfully drawn, vividly executed third album, is that the wider world is starting to get on board with a certainty that’s proven truer over time: Janelle Monáe is a genius.
Half-a-decade on from releasing The Electric Lady and leaving her ArchAndroid saga dangling to pursue careers in film, fashion, and activism, Monáe now arguably has the larger public profile and springboard necessary to become the blockbuster music act she’s always threatened to be. Poised to potentially snatch 2018 the way Kendrick Lamar did last year and Beyoncé’s Lemonade did in 2016.
For one, she’s got greater visibility than ever before, courtesy of big screen roles in Hidden Figures and Moonlight, two films led by black casts with potent political subtexts. They each took risks by telling stories historically ignored by Hollywood but landed as powerfully resonant and widely acclaimed hits.
It’s no surprise that material appealed to Monáe, who’s been paying close attention to the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements and taking serious notes. She’s lent her voice too, speaking powerfully about both topics, at the 2017 Women’s March and her ‘Time’s Up” speech at the Grammy’s. She’s also an outspoken advocate for women in the music industry with her Fem The Future organisation.All of which is an important, agenda-setting prologue to Dirty Computer, which seizes Monáe’s moment with a sexy, celebratory artistic statement that moves you in all the right ways: the head, the heart, the booty.
Thus far, Monáe has been more critically adored than commercially dominant. She’s tasted the top of the charts (back in 2011, featuring on fun.’s ‘We Are Young’) but operated closer to the spheres of folks (and previous collaborators) like Miguel and Solange. Artists with credibility to spare but seen as ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ in comparison to blockbuster counterparts like The Weeknd or Bruno Mars.
Monáe’s first two fiercely eclectic and clever albums, 2010’s The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady, weren’t exactly inaccessible but their cinematic ambition and Broadway-shaded fusion of RnB, soul, jazz, psych rock, lounge exotica, funk-pop and beyond wasn’t exactly Top 40 chart-bait either. But all that conceivably changed with Dirty Computer.
It’s her most cohesive and concise set yet (clocking in at 48min to its predecessors’ hour-plus lengths). But more importantly, it’s her purest expression of pop than anything before. Monáe has proven her potential in the album format but Dirty Computer pitches a convincing case for her as a singles artist — a set packed with more potential hits than her first two albums combined.
Much has been made of the advance tracks already, from ‘Make Me Feel’ and ‘Pynk’ being hailed as the year’s best celebratory queer jams, to the poetically pointed rap boast ‘Django Jane’ and luxurious ‘I Like That’. But there’s more.
‘Crazy, Classic, Life’ and ‘Screwed’ are destined for high rotation, and the Pharrell-assisted ‘I Got The Juice’ is raring for any radio willing to flaunt its raunchy innuendo. Meanwhile, ‘Take A Byte’ packages Monáe’s sonic callcards into an instantly accessible four-minute stomp. The album is festooned with earworm melodies and helium hooks you’ll find lodged into your brain days after first hearing them.
After revisiting The ArchAndroid and Electric Lady, the evolution to Dirty Computer is logical but some of the ambition and convention-be-damned attitude appears to be reined in. At first, it’s a little disappointing that the sweeping, proggy ambition that characterized those first two albums has been curbed. The instrumentation too — warm drums and brass traded for trap beats and flashy synths; Nate ‘Rocket’ Wonder’s flashy guitar excursions hemmed into neater, catchier hooks.
Regardless of if these changes are a concerted press into the mainstream, a product of current musical fashions, or both, it helps make Monáe more palatable to an audience who might have previously found her too self-indulgent. If the aim is to sell her fruity, genre-defying goods to a larger market: mission accomplished. The result is a focus that helps the album rather than hinders it, enfranchising it to do what it does best: shining, and strutting like a modern pop blockbuster should.
While it’s sonically pitched to bother the charts, Dirty Computer is far more than just style over substance. Beneath its youthful, gleaming surface beats serious heart, mind, and a subversive streak. It’s certainly not an overly political album — it’s more concerned with issues of race and social justice than defined by them — but it’s clearly a defiant response to the right-wing conservative America that it’s born into. Much of its gaudy contents doesn’t sound burdened by the anxiety and unrest of Trump-era America — it’s giddy, bright, fun — but outrage bubbles to the surface in defiant lyrical proclamations like “I’m not the American nightmare/I’m the American dream” (‘Crazy, Classic, Life’) or “This pussy grab you back/give you pussy cataracts” (“I Got The Juice”).
The most explicitly militant track is ‘Django Jane’, which proves Janelle absolutely glows when she’s unchained. It’s an empowering hip hop dissertation with a distinctly feminine flavour.
She’s shown her talent as a singing-rapping double threat to rival Lauryn Hill in the past, and Dirty Computer is dotted with these moments but ‘Django Jane’ is the new gold standard. Over a beat that positively breathes and sways, she spits bars that commemorate black excellence, and the recent swell in award-winning members of a traditionally disenfranchised and undervalued community. “We ain’t hidden no more/Moonlit, nigga,” Monáe boasts in a nod to her own screen success (“box office numbers and they’re doing outstanding”).
She’s also angry, going ham as she bites back at centuries-long patriarchy and the bullshittery of the sexist career putdowns she’s had to endure, but without succumbing to their masculine, hard-nosed aggression. Instead, cradling her frustration in slow-mo synths and strings. Like she’s above punching back, her words clear and distinct — none of the current trend of mumble rap. Just all class.
Lit with the fires of a rebellious spirit and conviction but delivered with stately grace, like a slap from a velvet glove as she shuts down mansplainers with the heroically deadpan retort: “hit the mute button, let the vagina have a monologue.”
Then, she pretty much does with ‘Pynk’. A pristinely constructed utopia of hooks, ‘Pynk’ is far more than just a rousing anthem to female anatomy. It’s a celebration of body, mind, health, and feminism in a form so progressive, it reclaims the ‘girly girl’ ownership of pink from gender norms in an utter “hood down” bop.
Sex as rebellion is a recurring thread, woven into the caffeinated punk pop of ‘Screwed’: “You fucked the world up now/we’ll fuck it all back down.” It’s kind of a saucier rewrite of the message Monáe sent in ‘Dance Apocalyptic’: if the world really is going to hell in a handbasket, why not eke out some enjoyment, carnal or otherwise, while we can.
Dirty Computer recites the timeless tropes of pop music and sci-fi as a form of pure escapism — offering an ecstatic release from the problems of the world while holding a black mirror up to it. Few understood or articulated this idea better than Prince, who saw the ‘Sign O’ The Times’ and partied against it ‘like it’s 1999’. Heck, his 1984 magnum opus Purple Rain begins with him preaching: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called ‘life’.”
One of Monáe’s heroes, admirers, and collaborators, Prince reportedly shaped what would become Dirty Computer — offering feedback and suggesting specific equipment to Janelle before recording began. Brian Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Grimes, and Pharrell all show up on Drity Computer to lend their endorsement but it’s His Purple Presence that is felt most heavily on the album. Even the most casual fans picked up on the similarities between ‘Make Me Feel’ and the lean groove and come-ons of ‘Kiss’, but there’s plenty other nods great and small. From the bejeweled curtain mask on Dirty Computer’s sleeve recalling the late, great musician’s ‘My Name Is Prince’ funk bandito get-up, right down to the closing track ‘Americans’ closely evoking Purple Rain opener ‘Let’s Go Crazy’.
Two years on from Prince’s death, these moments come off more as loving tribute than callous mimicry and though he’s one of the more obvious influences, the Purple One isn’t Dirty Computer’s only defining touchstone.
You’ll find an orgy of diverse inspirations in the album’s accompanying 45-minute “emotion picture”, a colourful explosion of eye-grabbing symbolism that draws from a mood board including Afrofuturism, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Black Mirror’s San Junipero, Jodorowsky, Kendrick, Blade Runner, St. Vincent, Solange, Blood Orange, Black Panther… (Honestly, I could do this all day.)
Observe how she plays with masculine and feminine energy, shape-shifting like forebears David Bowie, Michael Jackson, and Grace Jones did, with a duplicity of vibrant looks and personas. See how her visuals illicit the songs’ meanings with minimal effort but maximum effect. For instance, the moment she darts playfully back-and-forth between a female and male partner in ‘Make Me Feel’ pretty much encapsulates her pansexuality in a single bit of choreography.
The point is, Monáe rises above this milieu of pop culture references to create something that’s uniquely her own. She exhibits the creativity and dynamism of someone with a confident grasp of what’s come before but adds her own distinctive voice to the ongoing cultural dialogue. She preserves radical art traditions while splashily inking electric new chapters.
Janelle’s never been a slouch in the music video department but it’s worth pointing out that it makes complete sense for Monáe to go the ‘accompanying short film’ route given her music’s been so cinematic and visual from day one. By housing her conceptual narratives into the “emotion picture” distinct from the 14-track album is a smart, logical move. It makes Dirty Computer a more accessible listen (the faux pirate radio sequences of Electric Lady tend to grate on repeated spins) yet also allows Monáe to double dip across mediums.
This division also speaks to the other major shift Monáe has undergone for her third album: pulling back on the artifice to deliver more of her humanity and singing about herself. Quite literally, by discontinuing (or hitting pause) on her alter-ego Cindi Mayweather — the messianic android protagonist at the centre of the Metropolis Suite, the epic sci-fi narrative stretched across the canvas of her discography.
Monáe told Rolling Stone that she recognised Cindi was an artistic device to deal with “the fear of being judged”; of avoiding the expectations of the “stereotypical black female artist.” But admits it became a crutch, a hurdle to expressing deeper truths about herself.
To compare apples and oranges (well, lemons), the album and film may not seem as intensely a confessional work as Beyoncé’s Lemonade — the ‘are-they-aren’t-they?’ rumours around Tessa Thompson should serve to show how little we really know about Monáe’s private life compared to the public Jay/Bey narrative. But by her own standards, Dirty Computer is as close to ‘the real Janelle’ as we’ve been allowed. And that’s significant in a body of work that, until this point, has been framed by the distancing Cindi device.
“This is not my most vulnerable or honest album. I’m being more vulnerable and more honest, but I knew that it was going to take another level,” she tells Vulture. Dismantle the sci-fi trappings and clean-cut production of Dirty Computer and she’s reached a strikingly new personal depth.
She might’ve proffered clues about her sexual fluidity in ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’ and Janelle has always flaunted her outsider status, dating all the way back to ‘Tightrope’, but she’s never before shown us the scarier side of what it means to be a radical.
In the album’s slower tail-end of ‘Don’t Judge Me’ and ‘So Afraid’, she does just that. Revealing the fear and vulnerability in truly expressing herself and the angst of opening up to a public that might not accept her true self. “I’m afraid you just love my disguise”, she sings. A vulnerability that was, in fact, right there under our nose all along in the central disclaimer of ‘Make Me Feel’: “I’m powerful with a little bit of tender.”
But she also finds peace in the sensual, spirited of celebration of self that is ‘I Like That’. It chronicles her first encounter with beauty standard body shaming, at the hands of a fellow schoolmate; “you rated me a 6/I was like damn.” But then backflips in the knowledge of what she’s confidently selling us now, “I’m the shit.”
Instead of yearning for acceptance from others, ‘I Like That’ finds inner beauty; self-love for a “walking contradiction” that’s worth celebrating — a revelatory appreciation of her own complexities and contradictions.
“Guess I’m factual and fiction” Janelle coos with a calm pride “I’m always left of centre and that’s right where I belong/I’m the random minor note you hear in major songs.” It’s a love song about loving owning your otherness. Or, as she declares in the refrain of album closer ‘Americans’, “Love me for who I am.”
By laying herself bare and embracing her own differences so directly, Janelle hopes listeners can find the same comfort and attain the same self-truths. She tells Rolling Stone “I want young girls, young boys, nonbinary, gay, straight, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracised or bullied for just being their unique selves, to know that I see you. This album is for you. Be proud.”
Dirty Computer is Janelle’s most important album because it reprograms its creator in a way that’s both a personal and artistic triumph. A colourful celebration confirming Monáe’s very identity, like her music and sexual preferences, won’t be contained. It won’t be categorised. It isn’t black and white, it’s a spectrum, and as with all things, the more diversity the better.
Ultimately, it distills what Janelle has always done so well: making music that encompasses pop revelry, black identity, female empowerment, sexual liberation, and sci-fi auteur vision into a rich sonic dialogue that recalls what’s gone before and what comes next.
She could, nay should snatch 2018 because Dirty Computer delivers what might have been Janelle Monáe’s aspirational mission statement all along: an unbridled soundtrack for people living in a world they don’t recognise as belonging to them and encouraging them to build their own instead. And if they don’t have the strength? They’re always welcome in Janelle Monáe’s Wondaland.
