Gone were the tightly controlled alt-rock anthems, performed by a stylishly androgynous figure in a buttoned-down tuxedo. Or, even more provocatively, to perhaps come to accept our conscious, ordering mind as secondary to the more real-seeming emotions that are manifested, expressed and shared physically. Acknowledging, accepting and embracing the primacy of desire, as the lyric so playfully suggests, is therefore felt more palpably in the musical hook that powers the track than it is in the lyric.
In hindsight, it was this early-career rejection of the Black Jezebel stereotype that made her later embrace of the erotic possible. Indeed, her transition from romantic but seemingly asexual android to explicitly pansexual Dirty Computer is all the more powerful for the fact that this new incarnation of her public image builds upon the queer persona she had previously constructed, precisely to avoid the corruption of genuine eroticism that normative straightness always seeks to impose.
Queerness, then, is absolutely central to any understanding of the erotic as something that is both personally and politically liberating. More than just a question of individual sexual orientation, queerness represents a radical rejection of straight, white patriarchal oppression by embracing a fully intersectional understanding of social power. More than merely existing as a gay, bi or trans person, a truly queer subjectivity always thirsts for more of everything that matters: more pleasure, more fun, more justice, more sex, more love, more dignity, more life.
This illustrates with crystal clarity how queerness harbours an irreducibly utopian core. For those who can easily adapt to straight time, there is no direct threat. You were dirty if you refused to live the way they dictated. You were dirty if you showed any form of opposition at all. This provides a basic structure for the emotion picture that allows individual music videos to be incorporated into a frame narrative where each represents a particular memory, dream or vision β while also acknowledging how those categories constantly bleed into each other.
But even within this darkly totalitarian future the memories we witness as they are being eradicated positively overflow with utopian energy. These illicit festivities, full of art, dance and impromptu connections, provide a compelling glimpse of what it means to exist β even temporarily β inside ecstatic time. For where straight time is a framework that rigidly regulates and compartmentalises who we are and what we are supposed to feel, ecstatic time releases us from its rigid binary hierarchies, opening up a state of radical freedom that feels downright dizzying.
