Monáe celebrates the freedom to be who and what you are on Thursday, and the sold-out theater follows her lead.
More than any other artist out there, Janelle Monáe is laying claim to the throne vacated by the late Prince, a fact made clear by the powerful and passionate show the singer-rapper delivered when her Dirty Computer tour played at the sold-out Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 28.
And her claim is rightful. Prince was a fan of the 32-year-old, so much so that he’d collaborated with her on songs for “Dirty Computer,” her just released third full-length album, before his death. Like Prince, Monáe writes songs both serious and sensual, funky and fun, wrapped in a self-mythology of symbols and stories, delivered with elaborate choreography in fashion-forward costumes..
But Monáe is her own woman, or android, to use one of her favorite themes, an artist fully formed by her own talent and drive, and over the course of 17 songs and an hour and 40 minutes at the Greek on Thursday it felt like only the early stages of her spaceship journey through our universe.
The night opened with her band playing the title track to the new album, a song she collaborated on with Beach Boy Brian Wilson, as two attendants escorted a slab-like table across the stage, a body, presumably Monáe, lying still atop it, a callback to the 40-minute short film of the same name she released with the album, introducing its concepts of women and power and sexual identities, the character she played an android named Jane who is fighting to find her true self in a repressive society.
But then things really took off, with a seamless run through the first half of the new album, songs that included “Crazy, Classic, Life,” “Take A Byte,” and “Screwed.”
Monáe’s opening costume had an almost militaristic look to it, from the French gendarme hat she wore to the red, white, and black belted coat and high boots she wore, with her four main dancers mirroring a version of that look as they did other outfits throughout the show.
“Django Jane,” another new song, followed with Monáe literally on a throne, surrounded by 14 dancers now, the song mostly rapped by her including the phrase “black girl magic,” which sort of seems like a perfect description for the art she’s created.
The midsection of the show slowed things down a bit with songs such as “Q. U. E. N.” and “Electric Lady” from earlier albums, giving Monáe a chance to catch her breath from the fast-paced dancing and also talk to the crowd, which was diverse in ethnicity, gender, and orientation, about the intersection of love and power, one of the recurrent themes of her songwriting.
The ballad “PrimeTime” wrapped up that softer stretch of the show, her band seguing in the instrumental finale of Prince’s “Purple Rain” as Monáe ducked off stage for a quick costume change, returning in a raspberry beret and what I can only describe as the pants she wore in the video for “Pynk,” for to describe them in any more detail might make my editor’s head explode. Somewhere on another plane of consciousness Prince smiled and nodded his approval.
The back half of the main set dove deep in the funk, with new songs such as “Make Me Feel,” one of her recent single, this the one with an irresistible synth line, and “I Got The Juice,” which saw Monáe inviting fans onto the stage for a dance off in which the fans all impressed but for the token nerdy white guy who even my teenage daughter thought I could have outdone. Yeah. He was that bad.
A pair of terrific tracks from “The ArchAndroid,” her first full-length, closed out the set, both of them, “Cold War” and “Tightrope,” songs that initially brought her some of her first big exposure when they were released seven years ago.
The encore that followed curved back to some of the serious themes she’d touched on throughout the night, with “So Afraid” and “Americans.” The first addressed the fear and pain that the oppressed feel for no reason other than the color of their skin or the person that they love.
The second, and final song of her set, presented a more hopeful call for a future in which all Americans, all people can be true to who they are, a call to action that Monáe, feels with every beat of her very human heart.
When: Thursday, June 28
Where: Greek Theatre, Los Angeles
