By exploring Afrofuturist album Dirty Computer and the Cantonese worship conference Raw Harmony Worship Live, the panel explores musical meaning-making through reorientation of religious analytical frameworks. In the case of Dirty Computer, womanist theology is centered in the exploration of science fiction, whereas in the Raw Harmony Worship Live experience, psychoanalysis displaces theology to understand worship music as the breeding ground of God-centered fantasy. This session will conclude with the business meeting for the Music and Religion Unit.
In 2018, Janelle Monáe released the album and film “Dirty Computer” to critical acclaim. The work features themes of gender, sexuality, sex, racism, conformity, totalitarianism, technology, and brutality in an Afrofuturist setting. This paper analyzes both the album and the film through a womanist theological lens, drawing on the works of womanist and black feminist scholars and theologians. By interpreting the soteriological implications and religious imagery of “Dirty Computer,” this paper demonstrates how the work provides a vision of salvation relevant to the experiences and imaginations of queer black women. Continuing the tradition of Afrofuturism as a tool for communicating theology, Monáe promises her audience a model of thriving achievable through relationship and self-actualization, even in the most apocalyptic of circumstances, through her story of queer androids and a memory-erasing police state.
This article develops an interpretive method for reading worship music as the material infrastructure of ideological fantasy rather than a neutral vehicle for theological meaning. Through a parallax analysis of the Cantonese worship conference Raw Harmony Worship Live (Hong Kong, 2026), this study demonstrates how a radically consistent "Wall of Sound" generates non-overlapping economies of enjoyment depending on the orchestration of the subject's fantasy space. The parallax gap thus disclosed reveals the libidinal infrastructure of contemporary therapeutic religion, where the same technical hardware functions alternately as ecstatic fullness and a contemplative void. Both assemblages perform a similar structural operation by translating socio-economic trauma into manageable interiority, a process that forecloses political questions by converting structural conditions into therapeutic occasions. The article concludes by asking whether worship music might traverse rather than merely service the fantasy, offering a methodology that repositioned musical arrangements as ideology's hardware rather than its decorative surface.