The Spirit of Prince Speaks Through Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer

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The newly out Monáe, who identifies as pansexual, broke her latest album down into three acts. “Songs one, two, three, four—that’s the reckoning. That’s you feeling the sting of being called nigger for the first time by a white person. Feeling the sting of being called bitch by a man for the first time. Feeling the sting of being called queer or a faggot by homophobic people. It’s reckoning and dealing with what it means to be called a Dirty Computer.”

On the opening track of Dirty Computerwhich is also called “Dirty Computer,” the first sound other than Janelle Monáe’s voice singing the title phrase is shockingly, The Beach Boys‘ Brian Wilson who brings his signature angelic vocal harmonies to backdrop Jannelle‘s slow swaying voice as she reminds people that if you look closely she is very simply a dirty computer filled with bugs, just like all of us.

Monáe has said she felt compelled to connect with Wilson after learning that the Beach Boys’ famous gentleness of timbre evolved from the Wilson brothers trying to practice without their parents overhearing. Perhaps she was especially drawn to that story because one of her main anxieties around this album has been how her large and devoutly Baptist family in Kansas City, Kansas, would take their famous 32-year-old relative coming out as pansexual, the celebration of which is high on Dirty Computer’s to-do list. In this song, she has been sending urgent text messages to heaven pleading for some kind of explanation. (“Text message caught up in the sky/ Oh, if you love me, won’t you please reply?”) Dirty Computer is Janelle’s symphony to God.

The excitement over the release of this album came to a big stir when Prince‘s DJ Lenka Paris revealed that the running keyboard bass riff for Make Me Feel had been created by Prince. Paris mentioned on her Facebook page that Prince had asked that she play a track that he had composed during her DJ set and then more than 2 years later, that riff resurfaced in the form of Janelle‘s new single. “As soon as the synth came in, I said ‘Oh, shit! That’s it. He gave it to her.

Janelle confirmed his activity with the album in an interview with BBC Radio 1 stating, “Prince actually was working on the album with me before he passed on to another frequency, and helped me come up with sounds. I really miss him, it’s hard for me to talk about him.” But even up to now, his level of involvement is unknown, including the complete omission of his name from any credits

But how Prince-ly is it?

That part doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. But more importantly, she’s an inheritor of his style-crossing musical taste, his majestically playful (and gender-shmender) fashion sense, his superhuman performance energy, and his in-the-round vision of how song and presentation and rhetoric and mystique combine to make the final work of art. She even has her own smaller-scale version of Paisley Park, a house in Atlanta that serves as the HQ and creative hub for Monáe’s Wondaland Arts Society, a collective of artists who collaborate with her and are mentored by her in turn. Many of them play key creative roles on Dirty Computer, both album and film.

Persistent rumors that Prince secretly was writing Monáe’s songs were hater-misogynist guff, but he did serve as a sounding board, on the phone at any time of day or night. She’s spoken movingly in interviews about how hard it was to finish Dirty Computer without him. But I also wonder whether it would have had as much impact, if she would have had the same intensity, if he had not passed on to (as she always puts it) “another frequency”—if she hadn’t felt a pull to try to step into his shimmering purple void, knowing that while she can’t fill it, neither can anyone, and it needs guardians.

The real question is how Monáe-ish is it? And the answer to that question is very, very. Dirty Computer is a compilation of songs surrounded by the thematic bubble of finally coming out from behind her Cindi Mayweather androgynous persona for the first time and sharing very personal stories. Dirty Computer is about sex like her music never has been before, luxuriating in the flesh and in the pleasures (and punishments) of black skin specifically. She’s calling herself queer and pansexual rather than lesbian or bisexual, but her preferred tag is “free-ass motherfucker.”

Dirty Computer is a call to be our authentic selves

The album is crucially accompanied by an “emotion picture” also called Dirty Computer that depicts a surveillance state where queer people and people of color are hunted down for noncompliance. They’re stopped while driving by the police. They’re beaten and arrested at their own parties. The music videos for the songs act as an allusive, visually stunning novel-in-stories, intentionally paralleling our own reality in judgment.

There isn’t any reason why songs on this album couldn’t find placement on the airwaves. Songs like the eponymous “Dirty Computer”, “Pynk”, “Don’t Judge Me”, and “Make Me Feel” alternate between sex-positive bravado and more intimate confessions about fearing intimacy and vulnerability. The absolute hit on the album is in my opinion, the all-out Prince tribute “Make Me Feel” (the best “Kiss” sequel amid a field strewn with fallen imitators).

“Django Jane” with its bump drop strip club flow, and Janelle’s rapping stand out as well as “Pynk,” which swipes an approach from guest vocalist Grimes to weave a uniquely delicate, plush pink-swaddled texture for perhaps the most extended tribute to the vagina, labia, and tongue in the history of popular song. There’s also “I Like That,” co-produced by Atlanta’s veteran studio stars Organized Noize (behind truckloads of classic-era Outkast, not to mention TLC’s “Waterfalls”), which also includes some of Monáe’s most emotionally detailed personal storytelling.

Dirty Computer is a call for all of us to be our true and authentic selves, but especially women, queer people, and people of color. Monáe doesn’t want to eliminate the oppressor, but rather, help them understand why their views are wrong. The metaphor of the “dirty computer” is as applicable to our society as it is to the futuristic one depicted in the “emotion picture” that Monáe released in conjunction with the album — mirroring our own day and age back to us, like all good art does.

Standout tracks

Dirty Computer”, “Make Me Feel”, and “Don’t Judge Me”