Janelle Monáe gets down on the cobbles, Lives,
Atlanta R&B star’s wickedly good set opens Manchester International Festival.
Janelle Monáe
Castlefield Bowl, Manchester International Festival
EVEN IF YOU’D never listened to a Janelle Monáe song, you’d parse the joys in store this evening just from the first few minutes of the set. She announces her arrival with Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. It’s been done before, not least in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it’s still a strong move. Aloft on a white wedding-cake podium, Monáe takes us straight into the spoken intro of Crazy, Classic, Life, reciting part of the United States Declaration of Independence, and then the song begins, a pop paean to proud, loud, queer black living. Janelle Monáe is transmitting multiple glorious forces and cosmic connections down to us tonight in central Manchester.
The Prince connection is the most explicit, in both senses. We are in a Rogers Nelson world of joyful dirty sex, cheeky hip-twitching
guitar riffs and breathy sing-song vocals about being naked on a limousine and having sex in a swimming pool; later, Primetime segues into Purple Rain’s “ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh”s; Monáe’s band is all women, just as some of Prince’s were; and Make Me Feel, the lead single from last year’s Dirty Computer album, has that irresistible guitar hook that Prince wrote and gave to her. Most crucially, most deliciously, Monáe brings the queer black sexy powerful pop genius that Prince blessed us with for decades. There’s Bowie here too (cosmic androgyny, great pop tunes) with a good dollop of Janet Jackson (femme softness and military rhythms, tight dance formations, great pop tunes) and a touch of Mick Jagger (Monáe has the same uncanny ability to always be casting a perfect camp-sassy silhouette from the stage).
Janelle Monáe is considerably greater than the sum of her inluences. She is singularly magnificent, in cahoots with a joyful crowd of Northern misfits, chanting along: “Say it loud/I’m dirty, I’m proud.” We soar through a two-hour set taken mostly from Dirty Computer, with a good chunk of The Electric Lady in the middle and an encore from The ArchAndroid. She’s up on a huge throne for Django Jane and Q.U.E.E.N., then members of the audience are invited up, one at a time, to show out and shine during I Got The Juice.
To end the show, she gives a speech, a call to “continue the fight” for our communities, for trans women, for reproductive rights, for queer rights, for those with disabilities, for the working classes, for immigrant rights; black lives do matter, she reminds us, and “we need all the help we can get to impeach Donald Trump.” She even manages to mention that name without harshing our mellow. And then, for the encore, we get Come Alive (The War Of The Roses) – spooky-groovy bass and panting-screeching, almost Ari Up vocals. She gets down on the cobbles with us, crouching low and then leaping up high, all together, Janelle Monáe and the whole crowd, happy and alive, ready to take on the world.
“The Prince connection is the most explicit, a world of joyful dirty sex.”