Janelle Monáe

Dirty Computer

'Dirty Computer' captures the plight of today's outsiders who are fighting back, forming the world to be. Monáe is 10 steps ahead, past the Trump era, embracing the robot-utopia that gives hope to an unprejudiced and equal world. She´s already there - now the rest of us have to catch up.

Ever since the release of The ArchAndroid, Monáe has been tipped to be a future icon. On Dirty Computer, she finally makes good on her promise, keeping the fearlessness of her earlier albums while refining her focus.

Typically dense with historical reference points, as well as contemporary interrogations of real-world issues, Dirty Computer is the ecstatic protest album for an era that will keep people pondering its cultural significance for generations to come.

The aim here is to rocket-propel Monáe into the mainstream, and on that count Dirty Computer succeeds: it is a juicy, genre-crossing pop record ripe with the funk, which somehow combines Beyoncé’s Lemonade and St Vincent’s Masseduction with lashings of Lauryn Hill.

Her charisma, coupled with her artful and unique touch, positions her on a more commercial field without the slightest compromise. But the real story of Dirty Computer is how Monáe reveals an autobiographical sketch.

Dirty Computer is Janelle Monáe's poppiest album to date, as well as her most deeply sexual and political.

Dirty Computer is yet another example of Monae’s prowess and mastery as well as being perhaps her more important statement to date in terms of addressing contemporary America.

The record is big and colorful, its production drawing equally from hip-hop’s visceral impact and psychedelia’s strange weather, its pacing perfect and its songs casually bleeding into one another. It works so well as a big-picture record that it’s easy to forgive Monáe for leaving the edges a little fuzzy.

Ushering in a new era of openness for Monáe, Dirty Computer is simultaneously her most confident and intimate offering to date.

Dirty Computer may be the natural climax that started with cyborgs and wolfmasters and robot-human love, and it certainly makes for a stunning moment within the context of Monáe’s previous work. It also stands as an important political-cultural document. Fortunately, it’s also a very good record.

Yes, Dirty Computer falters along the way with a few weak hooks and some questionable lyrics but at least she was able to wipe out the old Monáe and reboot who she’s truly meant to be — both artistically and personally.

In shedding her sci-fi persona, Monáe has ended up making a great pop album, and a rallying call for “free-ass motherfuckers” everywhere.

This time her lyrics take place in the real world rather than a fictional narrative and with it centralising on what it’s like to be a pansexual African American woman in modern day society, Dirty Computer feels like one of the most significant, insightful and important albums of the year.

Dirty Computer succeeds overall because of it mostly delivers the same elements that made the Metropolis lineage soar.

After navigating complex matrices of identity under an indulgent, accessible veneer, Dirty Computer is ultimately — even “simply” — a cathartic assertion of self in a hostile system.