By Vernon Jordan, III
I remember a time when I knew who I was, and knew who I wanted to be, without having the verbal language for it. I was three, four and five, trying to Moonwalk along with Michael Jackson in my godmother’s living room. On the rides to church or back home I would belt “ABC”, or my favourite, “I Want You Back”, as the cassette tapes played and my heart raced with images of those African American gladiator children of funk called The Jackson 5.
I wanted round, nappy, big and bouncy fros like theirs. I wanted to slide across a stage with a guitar strapped around my itty bitty chest. I wanted to move and be moved—and I wanted to move other people—just like MJ did.
In the years following, I would dream for myself a future made of microphones and electric guitars. My peers, browner and lighter than me alike, would tell me that those were white things, a white music for white boys. All of us ignorant to history, I believed them, for in all the media I consumed, white boys and their skin held the ingredients to superstardom, to fame, and more simply, to recognition.
White shapeshifting was the universal kind. They were every day of the week and every man and every time-and-place, and Black people were made out to be conduits of evil, of that which creeped into the negative dark space of the night—if we existed at all.
So wrapped up in and warped by the white american imagination, I had forgotten my first superstar, Michael Jackson. I had forgotten my first self, the Black boy who moved freely, the one who simply was. I stiffened. I stopped dancing, just like the other boys, and I retreated inward—becoming quieter, angrier—just as violent white capitalist hetero-inclined patriarchy taught me.
When I was 14, I found my second superstar: Janelle Monae. My friend Mo, on whom I had a beautiful crush, introduced me to “Tightrope”. We would listen at lunch time, and would practice how to do the tightrope dance, twisting our feet back and forth, elevating one above the other just so.
The Tightrope was the first Black social dance I ever cared to learn, and though it was not a nationwide hit like The Stanky-Leg or Soulja Boy, I fell in love. Monae blazed all footwork of James Brown and Michael Jackson, and she howled in a thousand different voices, like Prince—all of this on full display with her studio debut, The ArchAndroid.
I mopped my kitchen floor, bopping my head, swaying my hips, and rapping alongside Janelle and Saul Williams until I couldn’t breathe anymore. I thrashed up a groove in every room around my home, and soon realised the three year old me had begun to reawaken. Monae’s music begged me to dance—and the phrase “Dance or Die”, from the second track on The ArchAndroid, became my personal politic.
She knows that the dance floor is and has been an exercise in liberation for Black people; and this encompasses what makes a Janelle Monae Robinson, artistically reborn in Atlanta, third and lost member of Outkast, such a formidable musician. She is all about the jam. Under everything, there is always a stank ass funk.
Her newest release, Dirty Computer, realises Monae’s dream of a full “emotion picture” alongside an album, but it also abandons the musical tensions, the wide range of references, and pure expansion of the sound I fell in love with. Monae and her team at Wondaland Arts Society have been said to craft music “made in the past, as well as the future,” but her tender craftsmanship, her wild and free undergrowth of Black musical imagination is hardly touched on Dirty Computer.
In the “emotion picture,” Monae steps into the role of Jane 57821 (unrelated to android No. 57821, otherwise known as Cindi Mayweather, the superstar, lover, and fugitive titular character of Monae’s past Metropolis saga) who undergoes a process of memory erasure and social control called “cleaning.” In the opening to the short feature, Jane narrates, “You were dirty if you looked different… if you refused to live the way they dictated… if you showed any form of opposition—at all.”
The film offers some beautiful visuals—most of all, for me, the image of Jane and her lovers Zen (Tessa Thompson) and Che (Jayson Aaron) playing on a beach by the water. It’s a quick interlude—a dream perhaps—bursting with the fragile prickles of skin long soaked in water. The film has two or three of these purely melodramatic character and world-building moments, but mostly courses through the music videos for the album’s five singles.
The use of the music videos/memories/dreams as a framing device for the story, however, feels loose and reveals nothing new or exciting for Jane’s narrative. A bigger flaw is that the time spent away from the music videos we are forced spend with two white dudes who are erasing Jane, instead of learning more about her, Zen, Che, and their poly/bisexual love story in this totalitarian world.
In one portion of “Take A Byte”, there is an unforgettable image of Jane dangling upside down by neon wires, grey-ombre braids dangling over her décolleté (in the trailer, this was my favourite image), while the white dudes activate the “Nevermind,” watching her removed memories with pleasure and curiosity over their faces.
Reading the moving image and sung text together is disturbing in that it suggests these two spectators and active engagers of violence can have whatever they want—any piece of Monae’s queer data, a “byte” and not a “bite”—and that she welcomes this extraction. Narratively, we know that Jane 57821 does not enjoy this process, but the song feels so hypersexual and exploitative that all I could think of was how her record label might have “Taken a Byte” of Monae’s genius to cash in on her newly public sexual attitude.
The album is stronger than the film, but only slightly. Blog spaces from The Rolling Stone, to Pitchfork, to Student Edge suggest that it is a radical work because it is her most vulnerable and intimate to date—but I’m still looking for the “most” part. It is refreshing to hear Janelle expressing lust and want and love for other women, as a free ass motherfucking pansexual, but Dirty Computer is not the first nor the greatest instance of her doing so.
What is new is Janelle singing as herself, and while there’s an argument that this is a show of vulnerability, I’d like to trouble that boundary between alter-ego and the singular, every day self. Ultimately, Cindi Mayweather and Monae share the same vocal/oral voice, albeit from different perspectives, perhaps. But the result is the same: we hear and connect to something because of the way Monae sings and speaks and raps.
We don’t look at Monae’s performance in Moonlight (or any actors in any film!) and say that she lacks vulnerability because she was playing a character. To give Dirty Computer that much credit simply because Monae sings as herself would deny the incredible vulnerability and intimacy I connected with that was conjured through Janelle’s character of Cindi Mayweather on previous records.
This notion of the album being her most vulnerable certainly has to do with Janelle’s candid language around sex and sex acts, too—particularly after the release of the single and accompanying music video “PYNK”. The single, and thus the album as a whole, is rightly titled an anthem for pussy (and queer) power, but the sonics of the song feels like a universalising, an attempt at shapeshifting of the universal kind—a white-washing of sorts of Janelle Monae’s oeuvre.
The verses are brilliant, beautiful, and vibrant, reminding me of the work on “Wondaland”, but the chorus is an aching binary pain. “PYNK” sounds like a pop-glam of Katy Perry, all set with a weirdly unconvincing guitar line. Across the album, Monae’s voice becomes overcome with the bells and whistles of momentary mainstream Pop and otherwise radio-ready music.
Black musical sonics is always concerned with the ground, with the dirt—and the spirits animating around and within and away from those flesh grounds. This is the story of Jazz, the Blues, Rock n Roll, of Hip Hop, and of much older forms of African music and dance that we feel in our backs even as we have lost or forgotten names for them. What made a Janelle Monae album was her ability to time travel with all this in mind, to mix and muddle and reference and fly “so far away from soul that she’s come back around to it.”
Listening to Dirty Computer, I’m struck with the question: If the computer is dirty, then where is the dirt? Where is the funk? Where is the messy, the liminal, the fugitive that encompasses a Black queer existence? Janelle doesn’t show us. I craved a breakdown, even a slight deconstruction, of what a dirty computer is; not just that dirty computers fucked and were queer, but how they fucked and how they were queer. The soul is lost on this album. So much is said but so little is felt.
My siblings, Black queer women, femmes and fellow Black queer men have written how the album has treated them well, and for me there are a few really good moments I felt treated well too. “Don’t Judge Me” hits home as a soulful muted rock invitation to make love (a la Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams”, a la Jimi Hendrix)—and though the album concerns sex, this is the only track that actually drips sexy. “Django Jane” is an incredible MC moment. It’s raw, it’s political, and yet no more political than she’s always been. “Screwed” is a balancing act of Zoe Kravitz’s dry vocals and Monae’s lyrical brilliance: “You fuck the world up now / we’ll fuck it all back down.” “I Like That” is an easy RnB darling. “So Afraid” asks questions on the risks of loving, of opening oneself up. And the bass-line on the closing section of “Crazy, Classic, Life” is unfuckwitable.
Thankfully, Janelle Monae’s ethos of pure, pleasurable, erotic, and tender love remains intact. Monae using words like queer, bisexual and pansexual in public and hopefully in her personal life makes me happy, but it is not an earth shattering revelation. Her music has always been Afroqueer.
I think of when Janelle introduced queer femme android Blueberry Mary on the psychedelic neo-soul rock anthem “Mushrooms & Roses”, and her vivid and felt word-images. I think of lyrics from “Sally Ride”, on The Electric Lady: “Real love / I wanna feel the real love / Real love / Ain’t nobody got to steal love / Wanna know what it really means to be in love”; I think of “Dance Apocalyptic”, where Janelle re-appropriates and queers Juicy J’s “Bandz A Make Her Dance”; and I think of how Janelle literally time travels on the track “Neon Gumbo”—the song plays “forward,” counting up in the minutes as songs do, but the element of the track is purely a reversal of the closing minutes of her 2008 Grammy nominated emotion picture track “Many Moons”.
It is with this work in mind that Janelle Monae reminded me it was OK to be your own kind of weird, and let others hear the music of your spirit, the shuffling of its feet—long before I called myself queer, bisexual, or fluid. There is no doubt that Dirty Computer is a continuation of Janelle Monae’s Afroqueer artistry, but it is at once a major crossover and 101-primer on her beliefs and her musical abilities. And that doesn’t make it a bad album. It is solid. But I wanted to “Dance or Die”, and in Dirty Computer I found little of the groove that felt like freedom.
VERNON JORDAN, III (King V, on the mic) is a Philly-born‘n raised writer, filmmaker, and poet, interested in stories about the interior lives of Black people. He has a lifelong fascination with the supernatural and otherwise speculative/magical/funky shit. A graduate of Muhlenberg College (’16) with a BA in a self-designed major called Black Voice and Cultural Studies, Vernon has led creative writing and film workshops at colleges and universities, and his senior thesis short film, “See My Dreams Come True”, has played at over five national and international festivals. A Screenwriting MFA candidate at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema (’19), his film work can be found on Vimeo and more of his prose and poetry work on Huffington Post, The Establishment, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and Catapult Community.
