‘Dirty Computer’: the album that defines Janelle Monáe
Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: whether an artist as mercurial, exciting and dynamic as Janelle Monáe can be “defined” is one hell of a question. Monáe has all the pop star credentials you can possibly ask for—a singer, dancer, writer and producer beyond compare. However, they are also a published author and a phenomenal actor, evidenced by her star turn in Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc mystery thriller Glass Onion, among many others. So, what could it possibly mean to define an artist like that?
Monáe has made it clear that they are, in their words, “a free-ass motherfucker”, and their art reflects that. They came onto the scene as a legitimate dynamo. A genuine, once-in-a-generation pop star who brought us The Archandroid. Monáe presented themselves as a cyborg James Brown, tux immaculate, quiff in place, absolutely storming late-night talk shows with firestorm versions of ‘Tight Rope’. On The Age Of Pleasure, you get Monáe, the radical hedonist, a prophet preaching a free love utopia over slinky afrobeat and reggae-infused carnal jams.
This is all to say nothing of her chameleonic acting abilities. This is a person who can effectively portray the kindly wife of a drug dealer in Moonlight, a rebellious NASA mathematician in Hidden Figures and is set to play Josephine Baker in an (at the time of writing) upcoming TV series called De La Resistance. It’s no secret that Monáe was a protégé of Prince, but ‘His Royal Badness’ was never as good away from music as Monáe has been. However, if you solely focus on the projects that they have overseen artistically, a theme does emerge.
Above all, Monáe is a futurist. Their work taps into the same rich vein of Afrofuturism that George Clinton and Sun Ra made careers out of in the early 1970s before Grace Jones picked up the baton in the 1980s. All their projects, be they records, concert tours, even books, are visions of the future. They may be dystopias, utopias or some combination of the two, but their every work of art carries a vision for what the future could be like, if we allow it to be.
For that reason, if we are to take a single aspect of their vision and use it to define Monáe as an artist, I feel it should be their 2018 masterpiece, Dirty Computer. One of the best albums of its decade, it is also living proof that, since it didn’t make them a worldwide, Chappel Roan-level pop star, we might just be living in the worst possible timeline. Possibly even the one that Dirty Computer itself envisions in its sprawling storyline, as elaborated on in the accompanying film starring Monáe and Tessa Thompson.
The album takes place in a world populated by androids that governments can “program” into perfect little citizens. The title comes from the name given to those citizens resistant to reprogramming: those who maintain beliefs and desires that go against the will of that totalitarian regime, chief among them being homosexuality. Monáe portrays Jane, an android trying to escape from that regime with her thoughts, memories, and identity intact.
However, this is no rock opera, with guest singers voicing different characters and librettos building the world. This is a pop album the equal of any released in the past four decades. From the moment the title track kicks us off with Monáe singing against a background choir built from Brian Wilson’s voice, it’s clear that this is an album bringing together everything that has ever inspired Monáe.
From the new wave-inflected funk of ‘Take A Byte’ and the skycraping guitar riffs of ‘Screwed’, to the sleek trap stylings of ‘Django Jane’ and the Pharrell Williams-assisted dancehall playground chant, ‘I Got The Juice’, every song is dazzling, technicolour joy. The sheer scale occasionally threatens the album, losing its identity in its sheer musical omnivorousness. As the likes of Benson Boone and Imagine Dragons show, if music sounds like everything, it sounds like nothing.
However, everything comes back to Monáe, whose literal and artistic voice commands the album with a novelist’s control. This isn’t genre-hopping as cosplay or dilettantism, but the vision of an artist who understands the art they take in and knows exactly how to deploy it. Besides, if all this is sounding a little too high-minded, then you’ve got ‘Make Me Feel’. It is one of the best pop singles of the decade, and sheer, it is a dancefloor dynamite. Yet still, ‘Make Me Feel’ also fits in within the artistic parameters of the album because with the kind of artist Monáe is, there’d be no place on the album for it if it didn’t.
So, to answer the question proffered at the start of this article, can you define an artist like Janelle Monáe? No, you can’t. The moment anyone does, they find a way of changing that definition to become something entirely new and beguiling. However, what Dirty Computer does is define Monáe’s approach to art. They have the rare ability to take any medium or genre under their control and imbue it with a tell-tale “Janelle-ness” that makes it their signature.
Their other projects might demonstrate this within more defined genre parameters. However, nowhere is their work more maximalist, colourful, bonkers, and hell, more important than on Dirty Computer.
