Janelle Monáe made a triumphant return to music Thursday, dropping two new songs and their accompanying videos from her hotly anticipated new album, “Dirty Computer.”
The first, “Make Me Feel,” has shades of early Prince, and shows Monáe making suggestive eyes and gyrating between a man and a woman in an ’80s-style club.
Meanwhile, “Django Jane” is an ode to black women’s empowerment. That video, which can be viewed below, finds the singer-actress seated on a throne, surrounded by an army of fierce, militant-looking background dancers. She drops rhymes like, “We gon’ start a motherfucking pussy riot/Or we gon’ have to put them on a pussy diet.”
Of the two tracks, “Make Me Feel” has generated more buzz, possibly because the video feels like a musical celebration of bisexuality and winks at ongoing speculation over the nature of Monáe’s relationship with her co-star, Tessa Thompson.
However, Monáe eschewed labeling her sexuality in a Guardian interview on Thursday, calling “Make Me Feel” a “celebratory song” but defining herself simply as “sexually liberated.”
Due out April 27, “Dirty Computer” is Monáe’s first album in five years. In the meantime, the star has been focusing on her film career, turning in acclaimed performances in “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures.”
Still, the six-time Grammy nominee blamed her own perfectionism for making her take so long to complete the follow-up to 2013′s “The Electric Lady.”
“You know this is an extremely vulnerable album and it took me a while to make it because I’m a self-editor. I self-edit myself a lot,” she told Zane Lowe of Beats 1 Radio. “I know that there are a lot of things that I haven’t discussed and I think this is the album that you’ll get an opportunity to get a closer glimpse into my mind and into my heart.”
