Janelle Monáe was an artist you knew about but never truly knew. She was the Grammy-nominated Prince protege who cloaked her experimental R&B in layers of Afrofuturist myth under an android alter ego, Cindi Mayweather. She was famed for her live shows. But who was she, really? This was the year Monáe answered that question, stripping away her mythos on Dirty Computer, a searing concept album that drew comparisons with Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. It was a unique coming-out record by a black, queer woman and a state-of-the-nation treatise on American identity in 2018.
A day prior to its release, Monáe came out as pansexual in Rolling Stone, dedicating her new record to anyone who felt “ostracised” or “bullied”. As such, there’s a vital message of self-acceptance at the core of Dirty Computer. Sometimes this comes veiled in Prince-like synths and ribald lyrics about trysts on shag carpets (Make Me Feel). At others – such as on Pynk, featuring Grimes and sampling Aerosmith – it comes in the form of intimate whispers about “the lips around your … maybe” that give way to an indomitable groove. Cindi Mayweather is not entirely forgotten, however. On the punning Take a Byte, Monáe infuses her sci-fi canon with queerness, dismissing the confines of robotics she had set out on previous albums The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady: “Your code is programmed not to love me, but you can’t pretend,” she coos.
It’s also a record about womanhood, and black womanhood in particular. “Remember when they used to say I look too mannish?” Monáe asks on Django Jane, a song that celebrates “black girl magic”, while also acknowledging that she has been treated as less-than in a Eurocentric industry. Having starred in two acclaimed, black-led films (Moonlight and Hidden Figures), and been a vocal proponent of the Black Lives Matter movement, this was not new territory for Monáe, but it was more overt than ever in her music. See also Crazy, Classic, Life, which opens with a Martin Luther King-style speech and closes with a rap about inequality and wanting to “break the rules like you”: to be considered on a par with white society.
On the hedonistic Screwed, she further widens her view to take in the contradictions of post-#MeToo sexuality. It’s an ode to sexual liberation and a takedown of men “telling me cover up my areolas / while they blocking equal pay, sippin’ on they Coca Colas”. The song’s standout line – “everything is sex, ’cept sex which is power” – may have been cribbed from Oscar Wilde, but in the current US political climate it takes on new significance.
Monáe explained her former love of artifice in the Rolling Stone interview, revealing that she had created an alter ego so she “didn’t have to talk about the Janelle Monáe who was in therapy”.
In letting it go, she has created her best work yet.
