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Dirty Computer was ranked fourth in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2018 list, and was awarded the Ocasio-Cortez Octothorpe for Most Hashtaggable
The towering artifice with which Janelle Monáe decorated The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady was truly magnificent. Some of the most daring and experimental new music of the past decade served to underscore the theatricality, the performativity central to her subject matter: a rogue machine on the run in a world where disobedience is swiftly and harshly punished, her mechanism a living metaphor for the intersection of all oppression and minority. Her crime? Falling in love with a human.
But at times, like my beloved Björk’s sixth and seventh albums Volta and Biophilia, (perhaps also number five, Medúlla, if you’re so disinclined, but your mileage may vary) Monáe did lose the trees for the forest. Her storytelling, so cinematic, so exquisitely outré, occasionally bordered on the didactic. In particular, I found The Electric Lady’s radio interludes more disruptive than informative.
Now, Monáe has shifted gears. She has jettisoned what little baggage there was to jettison, pruned back her auteurish excesses, and placed front and centre the human experience.
To whit:
“If you try to grab this pussy /
This pussy grab you back”
Dirty Computer sizzles and effervesces with energy, overflowing with such trenchant observations, the stuff of prospective tattoos and slogans and hashtags, the stuff pop music, as I’ve written before, is designed to drive into hearts and minds with maximum efficiency.
This is not shallow listicle-baiting. These are surface ripples and waves and crashing tsunamis defined by the dark currents of deep waters yawning far beneath. This is a lucid articulation of complex politics, of what it means to be queer, to be black and to be a woman all at once in a world out to crush all three.
And folks, it is wall-to-wall slappers.
Neither hide nor hair of orchestral bombast may be found on Dirty Computer. The occasional cameo from an elegant string quartet meshes into an album of taut and sinewy pop music; funky, slinky and dangerously sexy. Monáe spryly stretches elasticated basslines between bright bars of technicolour bliss, themselves strung with webs of stylish, skittering, high-hats, coiling it all together snugly with her smooth, velvety vocals. She reaches for the stars in concept and in execution, and plucks quite a few of them to stud into her oeuvre: spicy peppercorns to flavour her soup, sweet gumdrops to decorate her cake, sparkling sequins in her own mighty afrofuturist constellation.
Brian Wilson lends a touch of old-school sepia shimmer to the album’s introduction, while the centrepiece hinges on a cascade of synthetic hooks chained together by cultural icon (and Monáe’s personal mentor), the late Prince. And as if her ambition weren’t already heavens-high, she interpolates a sample from a certain speech about a certain man with a certain dream.
A wink is as good as a nod to Radiohead’s magnum opus. Twenty-one years ago, OK Computer seared itself into the history books, raging and writhing with white-hot pre-millennial angst, twisting fears of what was blazing through the dawnlight of technological innovation into an instant classic. The smoke has long since cleared, Monáe notes, and vague anxieties have crystallised into horrifying clarity. And yet, instead of rending her garments and gnashing her teeth, she’s dancing on the embers, kicking up clumps of salted earth and scorchmarks in an act of defiance and of infectious joy.
Whether stomping through ‘Take a Byte’, or bouncing and ricocheting off ‘I Got the Juice’, or even delivering sultry quips like “Everything is sex / Except sex / Which is power” she never lets the bastards get her down, and the triptych at the core of Dirty Computer relates exactly what is worth celebrating: a diversity of loves.
‘Django Jane’ showcases Monáe at her most sardonic, delivering a roasting rebuke with cool, nonchalant swagger. Self-love requires self-defence, after all. The coquettish ‘Pynk’ relates another kind of self-love, imaginatively enumerating various disparate rosaceous elements and ties together a hypnotic refrain from the deceptively simple theme of colour (“Pink like your tongue going round / Baby / Pink like the sun going down / Maybe / Pink like the holes in your heart / Baby / Pink is my favourite part”).
And then there’s ‘Make Me Feel’, the album’s strobing, tactile climax — “It’s like I’m powerful with a little bit of tender / An emotional, sexual bender” — rejoicing in the kind of reciprocal love that communities and partners use to spur each other higher and higher, until with a shrug, Monáe dips her sunglasses — “That’s just the way you make me feel / So good, so good, so fucking real”. A synth flanges open suggestively in response. For once, it’s not the cursing that earns its iTunes explicit tag
Dirty Computer claims the place of Monáe’s most direct, most honest album. Perhaps her standoffish, arm’s-length repertoire may indispose some from meeting Monáe halfway. And though it clocks in well under an hour, it still feels a touch too long, losing a little steam towards the end of the second act. ‘So Afraid’ drags itself languidly along, and ‘Stevie’s Dream’ burbles along for over six minutes, an uninviting element in an otherwise engaging album. But this slight dip makes the finale pop all the brighter.
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The towering artifice with which Janelle Monáe decorated The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady was truly magnificent. Some of the most daring and experimental new music of the past decade served to underscore the theatricality, the performativity central to her subject matter: a rogue machine on the run in a world where disobedience is swiftly and harshly punished, her mechanism a living metaphor for the intersection of all oppression and minority. Her crime? Falling in love with a human.
But at times, like my beloved Björk’s sixth and seventh albums Volta and Biophilia, (perhaps also number five, Medúlla, if you’re so disinclined, but your mileage may vary) Monáe did lose the trees for the forest. Her storytelling, so cinematic, so exquisitely outré, occasionally bordered on the didactic. In particular, I found The Electric Lady’s radio interludes more disruptive than informative.
Now, Monáe has shifted gears. She has jettisoned what little baggage there was to jettison, pruned back her auteurish excesses, and placed front and centre the human experience.
To whit:
“If you try to grab this pussy /
This pussy grab you back”
Dirty Computer sizzles and effervesces with energy, overflowing with such trenchant observations, the stuff of prospective tattoos and slogans and hashtags, the stuff pop music, as I’ve written before, is designed to drive into hearts and minds with maximum efficiency.
This is not shallow listicle-baiting. These are surface ripples and waves and crashing tsunamis defined by the dark currents of deep waters yawning far beneath. This is a lucid articulation of complex politics, of what it means to be queer, to be black and to be a woman all at once in a world out to crush all three.
And folks, it is wall-to-wall slappers.
Neither hide nor hair of orchestral bombast may be found on Dirty Computer. The occasional cameo from an elegant string quartet meshes into an album of taut and sinewy pop music; funky, slinky and dangerously sexy. Monáe spryly stretches elasticated basslines between bright bars of technicolour bliss, themselves strung with webs of stylish, skittering, high-hats, coiling it all together snugly with her smooth, velvety vocals. She reaches for the stars in concept and in execution, and plucks quite a few of them to stud into her oeuvre: spicy peppercorns to flavour her soup, sweet gumdrops to decorate her cake, sparkling sequins in her own mighty afrofuturist constellation.
Brian Wilson lends a touch of old-school sepia shimmer to the album’s introduction, while the centrepiece hinges on a cascade of synthetic hooks chained together by cultural icon (and Monáe’s personal mentor), the late Prince. And as if her ambition weren’t already heavens-high, she interpolates a sample from a certain speech about a certain man with a certain dream.
A wink is as good as a nod to Radiohead’s magnum opus. Twenty-one years ago, OK Computer seared itself into the history books, raging and writhing with white-hot pre-millennial angst, twisting fears of what was blazing through the dawnlight of technological innovation into an instant classic. The smoke has long since cleared, Monáe notes, and vague anxieties have crystallised into horrifying clarity. And yet, instead of rending her garments and gnashing her teeth, she’s dancing on the embers, kicking up clumps of salted earth and scorchmarks in an act of defiance and of infectious joy.
Whether stomping through ‘Take a Byte’, or bouncing and ricocheting off ‘I Got the Juice’, or even delivering sultry quips like “Everything is sex / Except sex / Which is power” she never lets the bastards get her down, and the triptych at the core of Dirty Computer relates exactly what is worth celebrating: a diversity of loves.
‘Django Jane’ showcases Monáe at her most sardonic, delivering a roasting rebuke with cool, nonchalant swagger. Self-love requires self-defence, after all. The coquettish ‘Pynk’ relates another kind of self-love, imaginatively enumerating various disparate rosaceous elements and ties together a hypnotic refrain from the deceptively simple theme of colour (“Pink like your tongue going round / Baby / Pink like the sun going down / Maybe / Pink like the holes in your heart / Baby / Pink is my favourite part”).
And then there’s ‘Make Me Feel’, the album’s strobing, tactile climax — “It’s like I’m powerful with a little bit of tender / An emotional, sexual bender” — rejoicing in the kind of reciprocal love that communities and partners use to spur each other higher and higher, until with a shrug, Monáe dips her sunglasses — “That’s just the way you make me feel / So good, so good, so fucking real”. A synth flanges open suggestively in response. For once, it’s not the cursing that earns its iTunes explicit tag
Dirty Computer claims the place of Monáe’s most direct, most honest album. Perhaps her standoffish, arm’s-length repertoire may indispose some from meeting Monáe halfway. And though it clocks in well under an hour, it still feels a touch too long, losing a little steam towards the end of the second act. ‘So Afraid’ drags itself languidly along, and ‘Stevie’s Dream’ burbles along for over six minutes, an uninviting element in an otherwise engaging album. But this slight dip makes the finale pop all the brighter.
Popping off fireworks of red, white and blue, ‘Americans’ is punctuated with handclaps and grinning choruses, a neo-gospel anthem bringing the album to a jaunty, jiving close. On this song of devotion, Monáe embraces her nation with honesty and with zeal, and it took me entirely by surprise. Such patriotism from the mouth of a different performer may come across as myopic, but Monáe spins it into an act of astonishing, radical, defiant optimism.
I do try to stay in my lane here at the Ramble, and in life, amplifying other, more qualified voices, rather than adding my own to the uproar. Monáe’s proclamation on ‘Americans’ makes me think of an article Ta-Nehisi Coates recently penned for The Atlantic on the subject of noted provocateur Kanye West’s recent headline-grabbing exploits. His thesis compares Kanye to Michael Jackson; powerful black men seeking freedom and liberation, but not on their own terms. White freedom is their goal, freedom to say and do and think how they like with no responsibilities and no consequences, Jackson because that was the only kind conceivable decades ago, West because it is more convenient for him.
Monáe refuses to settle for the low-hanging fruit. She envisions a future of black freedom: of love and support, of harmony and community, freedom for all, of all races and colours and creeds, not just for the obscenely rich.
A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist, they say, and given the choice between those three labels, I identify most with the final one. It’s been clear for a while now that we are witnessing the long, slow collapse of an empire in real time. The United States of America had already rotted, if not to the core then deeply and permanently, and only recently began sloughing off seemingly salvageable outer bark to reveal a core of wriggling maggots and parasites greedily gobbling down, slaking their own insatiable hunger until they consume themselves in a spectacular dumpster fire of supremacy-soaked cash and mixed metaphors.
Monáe refuses to settle for the low-hanging fruit. She envisions a future of black freedom: of love and support, of harmony and community, freedom for all, of all races and colours and creeds, not just for the obscenely rich.
A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist, they say, and given the choice between those three labels, I identify most with the final one. It’s been clear for a while now that we are witnessing the long, slow collapse of an empire in real time. The United States of America had already rotted, if not to the core then deeply and permanently, and only recently began sloughing off seemingly salvageable outer bark to reveal a core of wriggling maggots and parasites greedily gobbling down, slaking their own insatiable hunger until they consume themselves in a spectacular dumpster fire of supremacy-soaked cash and mixed metaphors.
So many musicians have drawn — inspiration seems like far too positive a word, one that does not reckon with the cancerous, marrow-deep damage, but it will do for now — from the endless stream of atrocities funnelled directly into our senses day and night. LCD Soundsystem, for one, underlined with reference to concrete reality their previously established themes of obsolescence and the temporary nature of all things and the crushing inevitability of death. Others have hammered to their digital doors fiery remonstrations against the disgusting men perpetrating various crimes against individuals and against humanity. Encouragingly, there have been comparatively few premature depressed dirges. The body, for better and for worse, is still kicking.
But never had the thought crossed my mind that it could be saved, much less that it deserved to be saved. All it took was a queer woman of colour proudly declaring:
“I am not America’s nightmare /
I am the American dream”