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Tiptree Honor List and Hugo Award Finalist for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

This visual music album follows the struggles, joys, incarceration, and eventual liberation of a queer, Black woman who is punished by a system that seeks to "cleanse" her of all elements in her life that deviate from the norm. She is sent to a prison in which her memories (each of which is a separate music video and an ode to mutual love in rebellion) will be erased. The workers in charge of the erasure, who sit back and enjoy the memories prior to destruction, serve as a sharp metaphor of the white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal system that is obsessed with Black bodies and creativity while still remaining profoundly anti-Black. This concept album forms a cohesive science fictional narrative, introducing futuristic elements in a way that is rarely seen so explicitly in the medium, opening up new pathways for the musical exploration of feminist science fiction.

Track Listing

1. "Dirty Computer" (featuring Brian Wilson), 1:59
2. "Crazy, Classic, Life", 4:46
3. "Take a Byte", 4:07
4. "Jane's Dream", 0:18
5. "Screwed" (featuring Zoë Kravitz), 5:02
6. "Django Jane", 3:10
7. "Pynk" (featuring Grimes), 4:00
8. "Make Me Feel", 3:14
9. "I Got the Juice" (featuring Pharrell Williams), 3:46
10. "I Like That", 3:20
11. "Don't Judge Me", 6:00
12. "Stevie's Dream", 0:46
13. "So Afraid", 4:04
14. "Americans", 4:06

Total length: 48:42

The Electric Lady is the follow-up to Janelle Monáe's debut album The ArchAndroid (2010) and debut EP Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) (2007), and consists of the fourth and fifth installments of her seven-part Metropolis concept series. Partly inspired by the 1927 film of the same name, the series involves the fictional tale of Cindi Mayweather, a messianic android sent back in time to free the citizens of Metropolis from The Great Divide, a secret society that uses time travel to suppress freedom and love.

At a moment when the term Afrofuturism can seem like an easy shorthand for all things black and imaginative, Electric Lady makes Afrofuturism less about androids and fantastic other worlds than about the unrealized futures we are living with now. If we are the beneficiaries of past struggle, Monae and the Wondaland artists insist that we are also the inheritors of some long-deferred dreams.

Monae's album title alone performs a black feminist coup by turning a glorified object into a glorious subject. Here the male fantasy theme park of Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland becomes The Electric Lady, a female agent who not only claims a term ("lady") historically reserved for white women but also seizes the creative power that "electric" connotes. -- Emily J. Lordi, FeministWire

Track Listing:

Suite IV

1. Suite IV Electric Overture - 1:37
2. Givin' Em What They Love (featuring Prince) - 4:26
3. Q.U.E.E.N. (featuring Erykah Badu) - 5:10
4. Electric Lady (featuring Solange) - 5:08
5. Good Morning Midnight (Interlude) - 1:22
6. PrimeTime (featuring Miguel) - 4:40
7. We Were Rock & Roll - 4:19
8. The Chrome Shoppe (Interlude) - 1:10
9. Dance Apocalyptic - 3:25
10. Look into My Eyes - 2:18

Suite V

1. Suite V Electric Overture - 2:20
2. It's Code - 4:05
3. Ghetto Woman - 4:46
4. Our Favorite Fugitive (Interlude) - 1:23
5. Victory - 4:12
6. Can't Live Without Your Love - 3:54
7. Sally Ride - 4:08
8. Dorothy Dandridge Eyes (featuring Esperanza Spalding) - 4:15
9. What an Experience - 4:57

Total length: 67:35

In The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, singer-songwriter, actor, fashion icon, activist, and worldwide superstar Janelle Monáe brings to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, exploring how different threads of liberation--queerness, race, gender plurality, and love--become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape... and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms.

Whoever controls our memories controls the future.

Janelle Monáe and an incredible array of talented collaborating creators have written a collection of tales comprising the bold vision and powerful themes that have made Monáe such a compelling and celebrated storyteller. Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts--as a means of self-conception--could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether human, A.I., or other, your life and sentience was dictated by those who'd convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate.

That was until Jane 57821 decided to remember and break free.

Expanding from that mythos, these stories fully explore what it's like to live in such a totalitarian existence...and what it takes to get out of it. Building off the traditions of speculative writers such as Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Becky Chambers, and Nnedi Okorafor--and filled with the artistic genius and powerful themes that have made Monáe a worldwide icon in the first place--The Memory Librarian serves readers tales grounded in the human trials of identity expression, technology, and love, but also reaching through to the worlds of memory and time within, and the stakes and power that exists there.