Super Freak

It was a grave miscalculation to expect an avowed futurist to treasure mid-20th-century social mores.

- CRAIG JENKINS

JANELLE MONÁE DOESN'T make albums. She builds worlds. You're swept up in a whirlwind of quirky characters and unique topography and briefed on the overarching social order that connects them. Monáe is a formidable actor, dancer, and singer-songwriter with a sci-fi heart. Her music has often used robotics allegories to unpack present-day trauma, wielding extraordinary machines to extract truths about the human condition, just as Yoshiyuki Tomino's Mobile Suit Gundam, Alex Garland's Ex Machina, and Isaac Asimov's I, Robot ponder ethics and morality beneath the glint of precious metals. Early Monáe works such as 2010's The ArchAndroid and 2013's The Electric Lady are part of an enveloping narrative about an android rising up against systemic oppression that dovetailed with intensifying calls for equal rights in the real world. To tell a story of Black people in the future is to express faith in our making it out of what ails us in the present. (Clashes over-representation in fantasy and science-fiction realms have this at the core: Why can't you see us there?) The tribulations of Cindi Mayweather, the artist's artificial avatar, communicate to the listener that to live is to fight for a fairer future; the slick, smart, slippery funk, soul, and rock vehicles employed to spread the message promise that beautiful music will always endure.