The Age of Pleasure Is Here
This story seems to be about:
- ABBA ★★
- Afrobeats ★★★
- Baby ★★
- Barack Obama ★
- Bee Gees ★★★
- Beyoncé ★★
- Big Freedia ★★★★
- Black ★
- Castro District ★★★★
- Catchy ★★★★
- Chelsea Guglielmino ★★★★
- Dirty Computer ★★★★
- Donna Summer ★★★
- Dua Lipa ★★★
- Elegance ★★★★
- Elton John ★★
- Europe ★
- Feels Good ★★★★
- Final Countdown ★★★★
- French ★
- Instagram ★
- Jake Shears ★★★★
- Jane Fonda ★★★
- Janelle Monáe ★★★
- Jessie Ware ★★★★
- Joseph Okpako ★★★★
- Joy ★★
- Know Better ★★★★
- Lipa ★★★
- Los Angeles ★
- Love ★★
- Monáe ★★★★
- Muppets ★★★★
- New Orleans ★★
- Pleasure ★★★★
- Pride ★★
- Reverb ★★★
- Robin Little ★★★★
- Sam Smith ★★★
- Santiago Felipe ★★★★
- Sarah Morris ★★★★
- Scissor Sisters ★★★★
- Shears ★★★★
- Television ★★
- Typical ★★★
- Ware ★★★★
This story seems to be about:
- ABBA ★★
- Afrobeats ★★★
- Baby ★★
- Barack Obama ★
- Bee Gees ★★★
- Beyoncé ★★
- Big Freedia ★★★★
- Black ★
- Castro District ★★★★
- Catchy ★★★★
- Chelsea Guglielmino ★★★★
- Dirty Computer ★★★★
- Donna Summer ★★★
- Dua Lipa ★★★
- Elegance ★★★★
- Elton John ★★
- Europe ★
- Feels Good ★★★★
- Final Countdown ★★★★
- French ★
- Instagram ★
- Jake Shears ★★★★
- Jane Fonda ★★★
- Janelle Monáe ★★★
- Jessie Ware ★★★★
- Joseph Okpako ★★★★
- Joy ★★
- Know Better ★★★★
- Lipa ★★★
- Los Angeles ★
- Love ★★
- Monáe ★★★★
- Muppets ★★★★
- New Orleans ★★
- Pleasure ★★★★
- Pride ★★
- Reverb ★★★
- Robin Little ★★★★
- Sam Smith ★★★
- Santiago Felipe ★★★★
- Sarah Morris ★★★★
- Scissor Sisters ★★★★
- Shears ★★★★
- Television ★★
- Typical ★★★
- Ware ★★★★
For the past year or so, artists have marketed delirious new music by talking about the doldrums of lockdown. The signature example is Beyoncé’s Renaissance, a whirligig tour through gay, Black dance history that features the type-A superstar performing her wackiest vocals ever. Renaissance, Beyoncé wrote on Instagram, was born from dreaming of freedom at “a time when little else was moving.” In the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to albums by Janelle Monáe, Jake Shears, and Jessie Ware that offer similarly uninhibited takes on life after stir-craziness. Joy, extremity, and cheesiness—not to mention queerness—are the mood.
Pop has, of course, always embraced a good time. But to understand the vibe shift I’m detecting, think back to the circa-2020 “disco revival,” whose origin predated the pandemic. Artists such as Dua Lipa and Sam Smith peddled musical products whose nostalgic, easy cheer served streaming services’ endless demand for inoffensive grooves. The nightlife of the 1970s was an obvious touch point, but the wildness of, say, Donna Summer’s orgasmic squeals on “Love to Love You Baby” was hardly being conjured. Yet when the coronavirus arrived, this rewarmed disco suddenly sounded more urgent. Figures such as Lipa came to feel like saviors of the nation’s mental health for helping us dance while doing the dishes.
The standout artist of that disco wave was Ware, a U.K. crooner once known for stately ballads. Her 2020 album, What’s Your Pleasure?, ventured into club music, and in doing so extracted glamor from seemingly antiquated ideals of “tastefulness.” The vocals were sexy in a coy way. Reverb swathed the pulsing beats like so much chiffon. Analog instruments were employed with the panache of a French chef using full-fat cream. Queer listeners particularly swooned for the album, in part because Ware—like many straight, white divas before her—was adeptly channeling gay, Black influences.
On Ware’s new album, That! Feels Good!, she returns to the same well—except it’s not the same. The success of What’s Your Pleasure? gave her “huge confidence and ambition,” she has said, and her new music sounds like someone acting on a dare. Elegance has given way to excess, and hauteur has been cut by humor. The album opens with a swarm of gasping voices, like a lewd Muppets skit. Boogying bass lines, campy spoken-words segments, and onomatopoeic innuendos ensue. The music is still tightly composed, but this time it forces a confrontation, asking the listener to either buy into the fantasy or walk away. I don’t foresee this album quite dominating my day-to-day life as her previous one did—it’s better enjoyed like laughing gas, in doses.
A more experienced party jester, Jake Shears has been making gay anthems for more than 20 years now. He started as the front man of Scissor Sisters, a band that whimsically channeled Elton John and the Bee Gees. But he also has a serious side: His first solo album, the 2018 release Jake Shears, was a post-breakup memoir told through orchestral rock. The pandemic made him miss the dance floor, and once people could gather again, he began throwing open-invite parties at his New Orleans home. His new album, Last Man Dancing, was inspired by such celebrations—and forgoes personal fare, mellowness, or any sense of decorum, to excellent effect.
The sonic references on Last Man Dancing are brazen, and inspired by some of the most self-consciously corny artifacts of all time: ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” workout videos by Jane Fonda, who makes a cameo on the album. But Shears has edited this preposterous collage carefully. Bold ingredients are arranged to complement rather than clash, such as when Big Freedia’s glorious, redolent lisp duels an electro-funk bass line on “Doses.” Shears, a strong songwriter, injects lighthearted lyrical concepts with a sense of emotional dynamism, like on “Do the Television,” a fake—but oddly poignant—dance instructional. Yet during the second half of the album, the tracks feel less like discrete songs than ingredients in a flowing, body-pummeling DJ set.
[Read: Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer is for (almost) everyone]
Monáe also sequences her new album as a continual, danceable experience. She has given it a name apt for roaring-2020s vibes: The Age of Pleasure. Fusing R&B, musical theater, and hip-hop for more than a decade and a half now, Monáe has never been a stranger to playfulness. But she is also a brainiac and social symbol who parties with Barack Obama and acts in Oscar-contending movies. Her last album, Dirty Computer (2018), was a sci-fi concept album about Black and queer survival in the face of oppression. It exemplified a strain of pop music, prominent throughout the 2010s, that took itself rather seriously.
Age of Pleasure strips off Monáe’s pretenses, and also, with its body-baring marketing campaign, her clothes. Much like Shears, she was inspired by a series of dance parties that she used to attend before the pandemic—and that she then began hosting, once she was able, in her own Los Angeles home. The music blends reggae, dance hall, and Afrobeats to summon a dreamy, humid haze. The lyrics are like raunchy nursery rhymes, expressing polyamorous and pansexual lust with hilarious frankness. (Typical line: “Phenomenal puss / phenomenal kush.”) Catchy elements such as the sloshing groove of “Water Slide,” or the combo of smooth sax and prickling percussion on “Know Better,” ensure that this album will be soundtracking outdoor revelry all summer. But I must note that even now, something about Monáe’s songwriting still feels reserved. She describes liberation, but her relationship with backbeats can feel tight.
Perhaps that palpable tension between control and release helps explain why albums like this matter: The title Age of Pleasure offers a plea for how things might be, not how they are. The broader social landscape of 2023 makes clear that the loosening-up that’s happening in much of pop is hard-won. After a nightclub-closing plague came a political campaign against self-expression, sexual openness, and queer people’s very existence, driven by right-wing demagogues. Cloisters of frivolity, such as drag shows, have become objects of public scrutiny. Play a song about same-sex desire too loudly, and you might be called a groomer.
I don’t want to suggest that Monáe’s gender-agnostic raunch, Shears’s Castro District aesthetics, and Ware’s fan service for Pride parties are all that radical. In actuality, they reflect scenes and sounds that have long thrived. What’s telling is that they defy attempts to quiet those scenes with a laugh. Now, more than ever, it’s clear how hard it is to squash a good party.
* Source Images: Santiago Felipe / Getty; Sarah Morris / Getty; Robin Little / Redferns / Getty; Chelsea Guglielmino / Getty; Joseph Okpako / Getty