“They call us dirty ’cause we break all your rules now,” Janelle Monáe asserted in 2013 on The Electric Lady’s “Q.U.E.E.N.,” a song that was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.” Five years later, during an interview with Hot 97’s Ebro Darden, 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.”
Nevertheless, Dirty Computer’s opening act is harmonically lush, filled with bright synthesizers and rhythm guitars that refuse to linger in the melancholy found in the lower frets—their realm is one of tentative exhilaration, of becoming. The album’s following two acts celebrate the unabashed ownership of one’s otherness (“Django Jane”) and speak to the fear that comes from such visible vulnerability (“So Afraid”). The story has no end in sight, in part because Monáe is one of its first authors.
As a queer, dark-skinned Black woman in an industry historically inclined to value her opposite, Monáe knows that the narrative behind the content matters just as much as the content itself, despite its exceptional quality. Which is perhaps why, from a distance, her career looks like an exercise in freedom by accretion, something amassed over time. Nearly 10 years have passed between Monáe first asking us if we’re “bold enough to reach for love” on Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) and the bisexual lighting, tongue clicks, and aching sexuality of Dirty Computer’s “Make Me Feel.” “For the culture, I kamikaze” she proclaims on “Django Jane,” a rap song full of trap hi-hats that dunks on the patriarchy and her haters. Monáe understands how much she’s risking even today by being out. “I knew that I was supposed to make this album before I made [2010’s] The ArchAndroid,” she told Darden. The relief of Dirty Computer is palpable, the culmination of years of silence and deflection in order to one day be free.
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. Monáe’s love for her influences far exceeds the artistic and sartorial nods to Keith Haring and David Bowie within her film. In Dirty Computer, Monáe is undercover passion on the run. She is bad. She is part of the rhythm nation. She no longer needs to ask if she’s a freak because she loves watching Mary. In Dirty Computer, she wants Mary Apple 53, played by Tessa Thompson, to take a bite.