WILLIAM GIBBONS and DANA GORZELANY-MOSTAK, Media Review Editors The Media Reviews section of this issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music takes the form of a cluster of brief analytical essays devoted to the multimedia concept album Dirty Computer (2018), by the American musician, actress, and producer Janelle Monáe (b. 1985). These essays emerge from "Picturing Performance: Reenvisioning the Arts," a course led by Carol Vernallis at Stanford University in the spring of 2018. Originally conceived for digital publication, the essays have been edited by both Dr. Vernallis and the JSAM multimedia editors into their present form. Since this experimental form constitutes a significant departure from the Journal's standard practice, the editors felt that a brief introduction and explanation was warranted. Aside from providing readers with information about new multimedia releases and useful digital resources, we have in recent years had two overarching goals for the Media Reviews section of JSAM: 1) the exploration of the relationship between music and our perpetually evolving media landscape; and 2) the pedagogical utility of musical multimedia. In addition to exploring Dirty Computer's significant artistic contributions, this cluster of essays directly engages with both of these efforts. Released simultaneously as a music album and a forty-six-minute narrative "emotion picture" (to use Monáe's term) Dirty Computer-alongside other multimedia releases such as Beyoncé's Lemonade (2016)-raises intriguing questions about the extent to which its audio elements can be extracted from its visual components, and more broadly, about the nature of the "album" itself. Moreover, the essays contained in this section illustrate how the analysis of musical multimedia can provide material for rich classroom discussions and projects, as well as how student work can extend outside the classroom and connect with a larger audience. We hope that JSAM, and the Media Reviews section more broadly speaking, can become a useful space for the exploration of these ideas. To that end, we encourage those who might wish to pursue similarly innovative formats to contact the editors with ideas and suggestions.

Traditionally, explicit discussion of listeners’ bodies and personal experiences does not often appear in the realm of music analytical observations. One of the reasons for this omission is the masculinist bias that, prior to the 1990s, characterized much of the field, and that tended to dismiss metaphorical language, overtly subjective musical descriptions, and the role of the body in musical practices all at once. A primary goal of feminist music theory has been to combat this bias by acknowledging many different kinds of bodily experiences as vital to music analysis. In this paper, I suggest an analytical approach that examines interactions between human movement and music in detailed terms, in service of a feminist aim to take bodies seriously. Specifically, I aim to show how music-analytical attention can be productively directed towards the performing bodies that move to music in multimedia pieces by offering a close reading of a music video by the rapper Tyler, The Creator. My analysis focuses on the relationship between Tyler’s movement and the music and on this relationship’s role in informing ways that we might read his self-positioning and identity formation. In so doing, I hope to flesh out a new feminist approach to analysis. This approach centralizes the role of moving bodies, acknowledges the subjective nature of listening experiences, and examines, primarily by way of queer theory, political potentials inherent to the movement-music interaction.

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