The concept album is an extravagant obfuscation of what we imagine as the artist’s “self”—think of Pink Floyd’s comments on sanity in “The Dark Side of the Moon”; David Bowie adopting the costume of the alien androgyne Ziggy Stardust; George Clinton, the human kaleidoscope, and the extensive Funkadelic “Mothership” mythology. Historically, the concept album has suggested a detour in an artist’s œuvre, a one-off production that lands with attendant visuals, loaded with literary, cinematic, and historical references. (Set pieces from the Wu-Tang Clan have even spawned ancillary comics.) But the form has lately become a vaguer thing, and a requirement for the famous-beyond-comprehension artist, who, by performing some kind of thematic fiction, also performs an intimate reveal. When, in the cartoon video for the single “The Story of O. J.,” Jay-Z appears as the exasperated Jaybo, an update to the big-lipped Sambo, he wants us to remember that moguldom brings misery.

The thirty-two-year-old artist Janelle Monáe has taken the concept album to complex heights; by now, the most surprising thing she could do would be to perform as herself. A charismatic actor as well as a musician—her turns in “Hidden Figures” and “Moonlight” were quietly expert—she is cinematic in whatever she does. “Django, never Sambo,” she brags on the single “Django Jane,” one of two newly released tracks (with accompanying videos) from her forthcoming album, “Dirty Computer.” She calls her albums “emotion pictures,” and, consumed chronologically, the Monáe suite makes up a sparkling, occasionally convoluted space hip-hopera, inspired by Fritz Lang’s Marxist epic “Metropolis,” from 1927. Since her début EP, “Metropolis: Suite 1 (The Chase),” released in 2007, Monáe has performed as the post-human Cindi Mayweather—a “rock-star proficient” android who falls in love with the human Anthony Greendown. Dense liner notes and interjecting overtures on her projects describe a dystopia apparently of her own design: the literature from “The Electric Lady,” her 2013 album, tells us that “Janelle Monáe, Palace of the Dogs Patient #57821,” has received “secret compositions conveyed to her by the android hero Cindi Mayweather.” In interviews, Monáe sometimes speaks as Cindi, at once evading and inviting questions. “The lesbian community has tried to claim me, but I only date androids,” she said, deadpan, to Rolling Stone, in 2010.

For a decade, Monáe has been a spokesperson: for black victims of police brutality, on her 2015 protest song “Hell You Talmbout”; for the independence of women artists, at the Grammys this January; for CoverGirl, since 2012, in commercials where her smiling, heart-shaped face looks like a post-Internet beauty ideal as created by an algorithm. And yet Monáe’s opaque mythmaking has also been met with some justified side-eyes, and some tedious crowing about black female authenticity. Was this suit-wearing, pompadour-crowned futurist a package masterminded by her label, Bad Boy Records, or a real soul prodigy?

Monáe—who for years performed in a “uniform,” variations of a black-and-white suit—grew up in Kansas City. Her father worked as a sanitation worker and her mother as a janitor. In high school, she wrote musicals—one about the miracles of photosynthesis, based on Stevie Wonder’s album “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants,” from 1979. In Atlanta, just shy of her twenties, she worked at an Office Depot to finance her demo, “Audition,” which she self-released, in 2003. Atlanta’s ATLien futurists André 3000 and Big Boi both raved over her talent, and the latter ended up executive-producing “Metropolis.” What became clear, after the releases of “The ArchAndroid,” in 2010, and “Electric Lady,” in 2013, and after Monáe co-founded her own label and collective, WondaLand Arts Society, was the depth of her cultural and musical immersion. Monáe’s albums are passionate studies of the prophecies of Octavia Butler, the radical social criticism of Wonder, the lurching outsiderism of Bowie.

The risk of art pop is that the mélange will overpower the music. Monáe’s alien visions have sometimes felt like a de-rigueur, Afrofuturist pastiche. But when the balance is right—in the fists-up exhilaration of “Cold War,” or the “Total Eclipse of the Heart”-esque pining of “Primetime”—the formula is winning. Monáe sings; she raps; she dances; she writes. At the Boston House of Blues, in 2013, the night that the City Council declared October 16th “Janelle Monáe Day,” for her social activism, I watched the five-foot-tall artist complete a course of choreography that was more like a chain of stunts, all while maintaining an unnervingly spectacular vocal tone. Plenty of pop stars have incorporated Donna Haraway’s idea of the female cyborg, its indomitability, its performance and evasion of gender, into their aesthetics; Monáe is one of the few to give life to its perfection. A couple of summers ago, performing alongside the fellow-dandy Jidenna, her Wondaland label-mate, she oozed P-Funk intuition, barely pausing to breathe.

In 2010, after Monáe sent her album “The ArchAndroid” to Prince and Wonder for their opinions, Prince sought her out, becoming a mentor. He contributed to “Electric Lady” and, posthumously, provides the synth line on “Make Me Feel,” the stronger of the two singles from “Dirty Computer.” Like her idol, Monáe is a traditional showperson, hugely conscious of the power of symbol. Hers is the purest interpretation of the pop star as cipher—a human on whom misfits of race, of love, and of gender can project their own aspirational fictions. We’ve endured the titillations of Katy Perry kissing a girl, Madonna making out with Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera on the V.M.A. stage. But Monáe’s response to the “speak your truth” dictate—the idea that artists are polemicists who must reveal whatever makes them “real”—continues to captivate. She won’t answer questions about her sexuality in interviews, but in “Q.U.E.E.N.,” from “Electric Lady,” on which Monáe sings with Erykah Badu (whose own concept album involved embodying Lady “Amerykah”), Monáe teases, “Say, is it weird to like the way she wear her tights?” In the trailer for her latest “emotion picture,” released earlier this month, we see Monáe in the arms of two lovers, one man, one woman. Monáe’s personae draw on artists, from Bessie Smith to Freddie Mercury, who have communicated through metaphor, for self-protection, and through camp, for glamour.

It’s the video for “Make Me Feel,” her version of Prince’s conversation starter “Controversy,” that has caused the real stir online. “This is pure, unadulterated black bisexual happiness,” a writer for Autostraddle, a queer feminist Web site, wrote. Until now, Monáe’s universe has only obliquely featured sex; “Make Me Feel” is, to quote the lyrics, “an emotional, sexual bender,” “powerful with a little bit of tender.” Erotic strokes of guitar come in, accompanied by heavy whimpers. There’s nothing robotic in this scenario: in the video, the thinker’s pop star is all messy urges, prowling through a phalanx of swaying female legs. She grows crazed choosing between a male and a female paramour (the latter played by the actress Tessa Thompson). The critic Sasha Geffen beautifully identified the blue and magenta of the video as “bisexual lighting”: “She plays multiple characters and checks herself out, a visual representation of the queer confusion that arises when you’re not sure whether you want to sleep with someone or become them, or both,” Geffen wrote. The video could have been Monáe’s coming out—sexually, artistically—but she remains her own hall of mirrors. I’m eager to see her next reflection.