Do The Voices

One of my favorite Janelle Monae songs comes from their debut EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite. After a purely narrative opening, and prior to the Grammy-nominated cinematic centerpiece “Many Moons,” is a frantically funky introduction to the world of Metropolis: “Violet Stars, Happy Hunting!”

If you’re not familiar with Monae’s albums, they inhabit an android named Cyndi Mayweather, on the run for falling in love with a human. Cyndi is captured and her memories erased, and she’s reborn in a sort of Good-Place-like purgatory, attempting to reestablish her love and life. Freedom is not won with one battle. Cyndi’s Sisyphean escape begins anew each album cycle.

Imagined futures are often fun-house mirrors for the present.

The journey is never easy, perhaps best chronicled in “Cold War” off The Archandroid (2010), and its accompanying music video where Monae breaks down crying halfway through. Monae, however, never descends into total despair, rejoining with defiant celebrations like the ascendant “We Were Rock & Roll” from 2013’s The Electric Lady, and “Screwed” from their iconic 2018 album Dirty Computer.

It all begins with “Violet Stars, Happy Hunting!” Monae plays the lachrymose Greek chorus to the doomed Cyndi, “Impossibly, it’s impossible they’re gunning for me (that they’re gunning for you)”. And it’s this baroque layering of vocal tracks, like so many skins of paint upon a portrait that infuse Monae’s work with such vibrancy. Just listen to the acapella version of this song and try not to scream. Monae is not alone here; during the bridge, guitarist Kellindo shreds a solo buried beneath the sinister whispers of cyborg bounty hunters. Longtime collaborator Chuck Lightning presides over a futuristic slave auction, channeling something like the voice of Chris Tucker’s character from the 1997 sci-fi flick The Fifth Element, . Monae has always marshalled a powerful team, and this is one of their works’ most important lessons: no one escapes alone. (To invoke “Cold War” again, much of that song’s emotion derives from a dark night of the soul where Cyndi finds herself in total isolation.)

I’ve always delighted in Monae’s theatrical, spoken word asides, which appear on every album. In “Make Me Feel”: after singing “You got me right there in your jean pocket,” they say, “(Right there.)” you can hear them pronounce the parentheses, and somehow this magnifies the preceding line’s intimacy. They appeal to the spurned theater kid in me, like Gerard Way’s froggy ghoul voice in “Mama” or Kate Bush’s dreamy apparitions in “Waking the Witch”.

“Violet Stars” doesn’t even get one line in before Monae mutters “(outer space!)” And they keep it up throughout. The effect is not only an omniscient narrator and densely populated stage of characters, but also that we’re hearing so many Cyndis tell their story. If we understand Cyndi to be in a constant struggle to reclaim her repeatedly erased love and memories, we can hear this choir as the many pasts lives of Cyndi setting the record straight.

I finally read Akwaeke Emezi’s excellent Freshwater, and the idea of a third-person plural narration keeps twisting my head. There is a sadness, to recognizing all these past Cyndis’ struggle—how they don’t appear to have survived, captured and bowdlerized again and again. Maybe there is strength too, in seeing that those deaths and defeats were never complete. The voices live on. Emezi and Monae’s works are songs of survival and carry powerful understandings of our present plagues and pains. If the stories sound familiar, let them be lighthouses.

I’m not saying history repeats, but sometimes the record skips.

It's been a bad week. To say nothing of the state of human rights in this nation, it’s the one-year anniversary of losing my friend Abby. It seems like a great deal of time and none at all. I hope you are all safe and seeking comfort with your loved ones, and I hope you’ve found productive outlets for the rage and grief you’re right to feel. All I have to offer is some thoughts on music that I love and you might too.