The expectation-busting musician’s new album is an invite to a rigorously appointed sensual oasis
On her new album, The Age of Pleasure, Janelle Monáe concocts a imaginative and prescient of sensuality that’s open to complication however goes down straightforward.
Mason Rose/Courtesy of the artist
conceal caption
toggle caption
Mason Rose/Courtesy of the artist
On her new album, The Age of Pleasure, Janelle Monáe concocts a imaginative and prescient of sensuality that’s open to complication however goes down straightforward.
Mason Rose/Courtesy of the artist
Within the already uncomfortably sizzling summer time of 2023, discuss of enjoyment can hit like a forbidden tonic, offering reduction from a gentle food plan of grief, outrage and anxiousness. Janelle Monáe’s new album The Age of Pleasure presents itself as each that stimulant and a guidebook, a compact compendium of fantasies and pep talks designed to encourage listeners to chill out into the dopamine-rushed current tense. “If I may f*** me proper right here proper now I’d try this,” the singer-actor-conceptualist turned libertine life-style coach sings in “Water Slide,” a reggaefied mid-record romp that performs with swimming metaphors — backstroke, freestyle, browsing on the factor prefer it’s excessive tide —to invoke a tipsy form of arousal that lingers delightfully, requiring no launch. A floating feeling, like being drawn right into a swimming pool’s lazy river. Or like getting intimate with out an finish purpose in thoughts, in a protected area with somebody you like. “I may spend the entire day in it,” Monáe swoons, and by “it” she means pleasure itself.
In Monáe’s world pleasure means some apparent issues — materials consolation, self-love, rigorously maintained ties with intimates and an open-ended strategy to alluring strangers. Musically, these values discover expression in a sure cadence, that clavé groove that unfolds the best way sexual pleasure does, slowing time down and rushing it up . Monáe and her collaborators within the Wondaland Arts Society floor The Age of Pleasure within the complicated but accessible rhythms of Afrobeats (some choose Afropop), the diasporic dance music that shares sonic borders with international Latin pop and Caribbean riddims. Afrobeats is the bottom of a lot present mainstream pop, recasting hip-hop on the worldwide stage in methods which might be each traditionally minded — the presence of Nigerian scion Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 on this album accomplish that purpose — and au courant. Monáe queers the pattern with lyrics that remember same-sex encounters and polyamory and by filling Pleasure‘s songs with fast turns, interludes and echoes, making a sinuous inflorescence evocative of many ladies’s responsive patterns and the polymorphous consideration blur of a pleasant orgy.
If this seems like loads, Monáe and her collaborators be sure that it goes down straightforward. The Age of Pleasure is simply over half-hour lengthy and its construction is clear and tight. Supposedly an autobiographical departure from her earlier character-driven idea albums, this neat set nonetheless shows an actor’s sensibility. It unfolds in three acts, with a daring opening, a sophisticated center and a lovely denouement. However not like her earlier Cindi Mayweather trilogy, with its vastly detailed world-building and heady concepts about energy, race and humanity itself, The Age of Pleasure is contained, naturalistic and round. It is a spherical, a narrative that is not linear however grounded in an ebb and circulate, once more like a girl’s sensuality — and in service of a utopian eroticism that runs on true mutual recognition.
True to her type and accommodating an instrument that is extra chameleonic than stunningly distinctive, Monáe places on many voices all through The Age of Pleasure. The primary 4 tracks are flexes, runway struts redolent of the ballroom (and, inevitably, Beyoncé’s Renaissance). The dominant voice right here is that of a haughty rapper who additionally likes to play. Monáe does not stroll, she floats; she’s on her champagne s***, phenomenal, so sizzling she’s haute. That is the warm-up, the infusion of pleasure required to pursue pleasure with out an excessive amount of threat of being exploited. “I am taking a look at a thousand variations of myself, and we’re all advantageous as f***,” Monáe spits over an avant-funk beat, able to seize her besties and go on the prowl. Flipping a line from decadent Euphoria, she speaks up for seductiveness as a energy as an alternative of a destabilizing aspect.
Her excursions occupy the album’s center and most fascinating part, a set of mid-tempo grooves that flip inward to explain a queer expertise of enjoyment. An interlude that includes Saint Grace Jones murmuring in French units up the part; then comes “Lipstick Lover,” the summery reggae single that hovers within the air like a throwaway whereas establishing Monáe’s all-important perspective. “I like lipstick on my neck,” Monáe chants within the refrain, not solely making clear that she needs queer enjoyable however pointing towards erogenous zones that unseat Afropop and hip-hop’s phallocentric tendencies. Much more efficient is “The Rush,” its half time dancehall riddim and ethereal harmonies sounding like what being turned on appears like, steadily but sneakily intensifying on a wave of Monáe’s murmurs with further strokes from Amaarae and Nia Lengthy. “I get that feelin’,” she repeats, redirecting her thought processes under her neck over a mattress of what the credit describe as “percolating freaquencies.” Feeling turns into a mind-set. Subsequent comes “Water Slide,” its drenched metaphors accentuating the music’s physique consciousness.
The ultimate flip in The Age of Pleasure complicates pleasure by displaying the way it’s a two- (or three-) method avenue that may get a little bit bumpy. The insistence of “Know Higher,” a lover’s plea constructed round densely multi-tracked vocals from Monáe and Nigerian crooner Ckay, reminds the listener that pleasure calls for consent. That music drifts proper into “Paid In Pleasure,” a sticky allegory that allows some perversion, turning intercourse’s typically transactional nature right into a fetish. (Monáe’s early mentor Prince would have loved this one.) Our sensual hero recovers her wits on the ultimate two tracks — the lovable ode to throupling “Solely Have Eyes 42,” which quotes a doo wop traditional to swathe polyamory in innocence, and the temporary, tender “A Dry Purple,” which reveals that Monaé can do craving as convincingly as she will be able to pose or purr, and begins the album’s cycle of awakening, pursuit and connection once more.
For all its narrative aptitude, The Age of Pleasure is definitely extra about making area than telling a narrative, and that is why this album is extra immediately beguiling than her earlier releases, whose excessive ideas may end in a sure chilliness. Monáe has referred to as this area an oasis, and its sheltering vibes are paramount. The album’s rollout, through a Rolling Stone cowl and the “Lipstick Lover” video, has centered on Wondaland West, the communal Los Angeles manse the place Monáe is housemother, with its party-ready courtyard that Rolling Stone‘s Mankaprr Conteh described as “magnificent, with its tranquil pool within the middle and troves of nooks, crannies, out of doors baths, and citrus bushes” — an Eden the place slipping away with a particular somebody is as attainable as becoming a member of in on a bunch hug. Throughout lockdown, in collaboration with the diasporic roving social gathering On a regular basis Individuals, Monáe started internet hosting gatherings. The Age of Pleasure displays this communal expertise, asserting that the one method pleasure can flower is in well-tended gardens the place folks can chill out into themselves. For BIPOC and queer folks, such locations have usually been tough to search out, and they’re presently below siege. The Age of Pleasure establishes its utopia to light up the necessity for extra mundane variations of it to multiply.
The time period “pleasure zone” has totally different meanings; it designates delicate components of the physique, but additionally areas the place folks can step outdoors the grind of their each day lives and play. Postmodern concept names sure traits of those areas: They’re sheltering, versatile and eccentric, permitting guests to attempt on usually unavailable modes of being. Entry to such areas has usually been denied BIPOC and queer folks; the historical past of the swimming pool, Monáe’s favourite metaphor, is stained with the blood of racist segregation. That is why imagining — and creating — such oases issues a lot, and why, for all its lightness, The Age of Pleasure is profoundly political. As these songs transfer from Lagos polyrhythms to Atlanta hip-hop horns to variations on earlier pop twists on dance flooring innovation like govt producer Diddy’s long-lost undertaking Soiled Cash, The Age of Pleasure conjures a dream of frictionless fluidity the place any fantasy may be pursued, any identification embraced, safely. The myriad photos of water add to the sensation of escaping gravity — and it is positively pool water, teal blue and shielded from harmful undertows, the place a leg can press in opposition to a thigh on a floatie with no hazard of pulling anybody below.
Janelle Monáe’s supreme capacity to comprise herself, to meld with the roles she takes on, is her essential energy and shortcoming as a performer. She has achieved a lot as an actress by disappearing into roles that require her to don disguises, assist others disguise themselves, maintain secrets and techniques and discover energy on the margins. Her music has typically lacked a robust charismatic middle as she’s pursued totally different characters and plotlines. On The Age of Pleasure she experiments with a brand new position — that of her personal advantageous self, alive in a physique and wanting to really feel as a lot as she will be able to. This enables her to place apart the extremely dramatic expressiveness to which she’s not suited and as an alternative dwell in that liquid expertise of suggestiveness and seduction the place gestures converse louder than phrases. Monáe nonetheless appears to withstand intense feelings — heartache, for instance, does not floor anyplace right here, and regardless of all of the kissing and licking and gives to maintain her lovers coming, she does not hit any orgasmic notes herself. As an alternative, she and the Wondaland crew provide an alternative choice to all that: a moist dream of a greater world.
