Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo-Afrofuturism

Abstract

Multimedia conceptual artist Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky/That Sub- liminal Kid) has recently argued that Afrofuturism is a thing of past, a movement that, in his words, wasn't digital enough . . . [and] didn't have a core group of people with any kind of coherent message. It was conceptually open ended without any kind of narrative.1 Miller's assessment of past forms of Af- rofuturism is certainly arguable, but contemporary singer, songwriter, dancer, performance artist, and self-proclaimed funkstress Janelle Monae explodes any notion that Afrofuturism is no more.2 If we define Afrofuturism as African American cultural production and political theory that imagine less constrained black subjectivity in future and that produce a profound critique of current social, racial, and economic orders, then there can be no doubt that Monae stands at center of a new form of Afrofuturism that she performs through what liner notes from her EP Metropolis (inspired by Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film of same name) term cybersoul, a complex blend of multiple, often technologically mediated musical genres.3Among those genres, funk stands out as Monae's perhaps most sustained influence. As website for Wondaland Arts Society, Atlanta-based artists' collective of which Monae is a founding member, states: believe there are only three forms of music: good music, bad music and funk.4 Monae thereby honors, yet also expands upon, earlier forms of Afrofuturistic funk, most obvi- ously that of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, who, starting in mid-1970s, famously imagined and performed for African American people a Mothership Connection-or, as they sang, Time to move on light years in time ahead of our time / Free your mind to come fly with me on mother- ship.5 With their elaborate stage spectacles, including a landing by an immense spaceship and Clinton's emerging from it, P-Funk offered their audiences a powerful and playful narrative of transcendence and reclamation. Monae offers a recorded and performed narrative of possible transcendence as well, yet that narrative is more coherent, to use DJ Spooky's term, as well as even more explicitly political and inclusive than was Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic's. Over course of last five years, with three albums, a number of videos, and many stage performances, Monae has undertaken a musical, lyrical, visual, performative, and theoretical investigation into, and destabilization of, not only race and gender, but also sexuality, color, and class. She shows us new libera- tory possibilities created by African American cultural production in concert with contemporary technological transformation: that is, neo-Afrofuturism. In words of Wondaland collective: believe songs are spaceships. We believe music is weapon of future. We believe books are stars.6On other hand, Monae also challenges DJ Spooky's confidence regard- ing power of digital and technological. Her lyrics, in particular, sug- gest that pure optimism regarding technoculture understates its vulnerability to being shaped by commodity culture and by regressive notions of human subjectivity and categories of identity. Monae is ever alert to marketplace and her place within it, particularly as an African American woman with work- ing-class roots, even as she exploits that marketplace in name of future justice. Monae thus avoids pitfalls of what Madhu Dubey, following Fredric Jameson, terms postmodernism's romance of residual, in which African Americans and African American culture alone become somehow exempt . . . from contingencies of postmodern condition, standing always for bodily presence, palpable reality, political intentionality to such a degree that the black body alone continues to shimmer with aura of presence.7 Monae is well aware that, as she sings in her biggest hit to date, she must tip on tightrope of a cultural logic of late capitalism that dictates impossibility of the positioning of cultural act outside massive Being of capital. …