In the already uncomfortably hot summer of 2023, talk of pleasure can hit like a forbidden tonic, providing relief from a steady diet of grief, outrage and anxiety. Janelle Monáe’s new album The Age of Pleasure presents itself as both that stimulant and a guidebook, a compact compendium of fantasies and pep talks designed to encourage listeners to relax into the dopamine-rushed present tense.
“If I could f*** me right here right now I would do that,” the singer-actor-conceptualist turned libertine lifestyle coach sings in “Water Slide,” a reggaefied mid-record romp that plays with swimming metaphors — backstroke, freestyle, surfing on the thing like it’s high tide — to invoke a tipsy kind of arousal that lingers delightfully, requiring no release. A floating feeling, like being drawn into a swimming pool’s lazy river. Or like getting intimate without an end goal in mind, in a safe space with someone you love. “I could spend the whole day in it,” Monáe swoons, and by “it” she means pleasure itself.
In Monáe’s world pleasure means some obvious things — material comfort, self-love, carefully maintained ties with intimates and an open-ended approach to alluring strangers. Musically, these values find expression in a certain cadence, that clavé groove that unfolds the way sexual excitement does, slowing time down and speeding it up all at once. Monáe and her collaborators in the Wondaland Arts Society ground The Age of Pleasure in the complex yet accessible rhythms of Afrobeats (some prefer Afropop), the diasporic dance music that shares sonic borders with global Latin pop and Caribbean riddims.