The Otherworldly Concept Albums of Janelle Monáe
“Janelle Monáe has taken the concept album to complex heights; by now, the most surprising thing she could do would be to perform as herself. A charismatic actor as well as a musician—her turns in “Hidden Figures” and “Moonlight” were quietly expert—she is cinematic in whatever she does. “Django, never Sambo,” she brags on the single “Django Jane,” one of two newly released tracks (with accompanying videos) from her forthcoming album, “Dirty Computer.” She calls her albums “emotion pictures,” and, consumed chronologically, the Monáe suite makes up a sparkling, occasionally convoluted space hip-hopera, inspired by Fritz Lang’s Marxist epic “Metropolis,” from 1927. For a decade, Janelle Monáe has been a spokesperson: for black victims of police brutality, on her 2015 protest song “Hell You Talmbout”; for the independence of women artists, at the Grammys this January; for CoverGirl, since 2012, in commercials where her smiling, heart-shaped face looks like a post-Internet beauty ideal as created by an algorithm. And yet Monáe’s opaque mythmaking has also been met with some justified side-eyes, and some tedious crowing about black female authenticity. Was this suit-wearing, pompadour-crowned futurist a package masterminded by her label, Bad Boy Records, or a real soul prodigy?”
— Doreen St. Félix
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