The 2010s File Feature
Make Me Feel
Recording and Release History of "Make Me Feel" by Janelle Monae Janelle Monae, the Atlanta-born, Kansas City-raised artist known for her boundary-defying sy…
01 The Story
Recording and Release History of "Make Me Feel" by Janelle Monae
Janelle Monae, the Atlanta-born, Kansas City-raised artist known for her boundary-defying synthesis of funk, soul, R&B, pop, and conceptual art, released "Make Me Feel" in February 2018 as one of two simultaneous lead singles from her third studio album Dirty Computer. The paired release with "Django Jane" on February 22, 2018, was a deliberate strategic choice that positioned the two tracks as complementary statements: "Django Jane" as a fierce hip-hop declaration of power, and "Make Me Feel" as a euphoric celebration of desire and sensory experience. Together they announced the arrival of Dirty Computer as an album with both political and personal dimensions.
The production on "Make Me Feel" was handled with a clear understanding of its primary sonic touchstone: the music of Prince, who had served as a mentor and collaborator to Monae earlier in her career. The song's guitar tones, rhythmic feel, and overall production aesthetic were widely recognized as an homage to Prince's Minneapolis Sound of the early and mid-1980s, and the tribute dimension of the song was especially resonant given that Prince had died in April 2016, roughly two years before Dirty Computer's release. Monae had spoken publicly about Prince's influence on her artistic development, and "Make Me Feel" translated that influence into explicit sonic conversation.
The recording of Dirty Computer was an extensive process that involved collaboration with a wide range of producers and songwriters, reflecting Monae's position within a broader creative community that included artists from multiple genres and backgrounds. "Make Me Feel" was co-written by Monae alongside a team that included Nate Wonder and Chuck Lightning, her longtime collaborators at the Wondaland Arts Society collective, the creative hub she had founded in Atlanta and which had supported her artistic development from her earliest projects. The collaborative dynamic at Wondaland was central to how Monae developed her distinctive aesthetic blend of Afrofuturist concept work and immediate pop appeal.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "Make Me Feel" debuted at number 99 on the chart dated March 10, 2018, spending one week on the ranking. The song's chart presence extended across multiple formats, with particularly strong performance on the Adult Alternative Songs airplay chart, where the song's combination of retro production and contemporary messaging resonated with the format's audience. Dirty Computer itself debuted at number six on the Billboard 200 when released in April 2018, confirming Monae's status as a commercially successful as well as critically celebrated artist.
The critical reception for "Make Me Feel" was immediate and enthusiastic. Reviewers praised its production craft, the clarity of its Prince lineage, and the confidence with which it announced the album's themes. The accompanying music video, directed by Alan Ferguson and Monae herself, became a subject of significant cultural conversation for its visual exploration of fluid identity, desire, and community. The video's imagery was widely interpreted as one of the most explicit artistic statements about queer identity that Monae had offered, representing a notable evolution in her public presentation.
Grammy voters responded to "Make Me Feel" with nominations that underscored its status as one of the most significant releases of 2018. The song received nominations in categories including Best Traditional R&B Performance and contributed to Monae's broader Grammy recognition during the Dirty Computer campaign. The awards recognition validated what critics and listeners had already established: that "Make Me Feel" was among the year's most carefully crafted and culturally significant pop recordings.
The song's release context benefited from the profound anticipation that had built around Monae's return to recording. Her previous album The Electric Lady had appeared in 2013, and the gap between releases had only increased the expectation for what she might produce next. "Make Me Feel" met that expectation directly, delivering a track that sounded both immediately familiar as a Prince-inspired production and distinctly modern in its lyrical concerns and cultural timing, confirming Monae's ability to work within genre traditions while advancing her own singular artistic vision.
02 Song Meaning
Meaning and Themes of "Make Me Feel" by Janelle Monae
"Make Me Feel" by Janelle Monae explores the language of desire, sensory experience, and self-discovery through an ebullient, funk-driven musical framework that makes its emotional content feel physical and immediate. The song centers on the experience of being moved by attraction and connection in ways that exceed rational categorization, celebrating the body's capacity for feeling without insisting on rigid definitions of who is doing the feeling or for whom. This openness was central to both the song's meaning and its cultural reception, which recognized it as one of the most joyful and genuine articulations of queer desire in contemporary mainstream pop.
The thematic influence of Prince extended beyond the sonic surface of the song into its lyrical philosophy. Prince had always been an artist for whom sexuality, spirituality, and artistic expression were inseparable categories, and "Make Me Feel" operates within a similar framework: the experience of desire is not just personal but revelatory, a way of knowing something true about oneself and the world. Monae absorbed this approach and applied it to her own artistic identity, producing a song that felt both deeply influenced and genuinely original.
Within the larger narrative architecture of Dirty Computer, "Make Me Feel" occupied a specific emotional position. The album was constructed as a concept record about a character whose memories and identity had been targeted for deletion, and its running themes of reclamation and resistance framed the celebration in "Make Me Feel" as something more than simple hedonism. To feel, in the world of the album, was a form of survival; to embrace desire and joy was an act of refusal against forces that would erase identity. This context gave the song a political dimension that its surface brightness did not immediately communicate but that deepened its resonance for attentive listeners.
The song's reception within LGBTQ+ communities was particularly warm. Monae had been careful in previous public appearances to maintain ambiguity about her personal life, but "Make Me Feel" and its accompanying music video shifted that dynamic considerably. The video's imagery presented romantic and erotic connection between people of different genders in ways that made Monae's exploration of her own identity legible to audiences who had been waiting for that kind of artistic openness. The song's release preceded Monae's direct discussion of her identity in a Rolling Stone interview published alongside the album's promotion, and the two together constituted one of the more culturally significant moments in mainstream pop's engagement with queer identity in the 2010s.
Musically, the song communicated its themes through production choices as much as through its words. The infectious groove invited physical response rather than analytical distance, making the experience of listening to the song a partial enactment of what it was describing. This alignment between form and content was characteristic of Monae's best work, where the musical and the conceptual reinforced each other rather than operating separately. The repeated experience of that groove becoming familiar was itself a kind of knowing, a way of internalizing what the song was saying about the relationship between body, feeling, and identity.
"Make Me Feel" has maintained a durable presence in discussions of significant 2010s pop songs, regularly cited in assessments of the decade's most culturally meaningful recordings. Its combination of formal sophistication, genuine emotional openness, and historical awareness placed it among a small group of songs that managed to be simultaneously accessible to casual listeners and genuinely substantive for those who engaged with its ideas more deeply. For Monae, the song represented a public crystallization of themes she had been working toward throughout her career, a moment of clarity after years of carefully constructed mystery.
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