Across three albums, Janelle Monáe has made listeners do their homework. She crafts sci-fi extravaganzas, funk-soul LPs with distinct acts, characters and storylines. There are accompanying short films, spin-off books and alter egos. Easter eggs in the liner notes seem almost quaint in comparison. The Age of Pleasure, her fourth full-length, is a lot simpler in approach: this is a sex record, a frothy, horny ode to erotic delight that breezes past in a carnal blur.
As if recorded off the edge of an infinity pool, this tight collection of 14 tracks – many of them brief, lush interludes – embraces laidback cool while endlessly calling back to the pioneers of Black soul. Seun Kuti, son of Afrobeats titan Fela, supplies shimmering brass on the braggadocious “Float”. “Champagne S***” is a mélange of marching band horns and dancehall synths. Grace Jones rocks up, cooing in French (“Trouble, trouble, trouble,” she purrs) before peacing out. “Lipstick Lover” bounces on a vintage reggae groove.
At the centre of it all is a never more confident Monáe, the happiest person at this particular orgy, whose version of self-love is amusingly forthright: “I’m looking at a thousand versions of myself,” she proclaims against a grimy bass riff on “Phenomenal”, “and we’re all fine as f***.” She becomes even less coy on “Water Slide”, an airy bit of funk seduction: “If I could f*** me right here, right now, I’d do that.”
It all tracks with Monáe’s personal evolution in recent years, which includes coming out as pansexual and identifying as a variety of pronouns at once (“she/her”, “they/them”, and “free-ass motherf****r”). Lyrics here repeatedly nod to a kind of utopian gender ambiguity (“A bitch look pretty/ A bitch look handsome”) and celebrations of free love – as well as the sheer thrill of desiring and being desired. “Let our rain become a monsoon, I want the rush,” moans actor Nia Long at the top of “The Rush”, a slow jam that is practically naked, bar a Spanish guitar and some sensual reverb.
Clocking in at a scant 31 minutes, you could call The Age of Pleasure a quickie – but one that more than manages to scratch that itch.
