TRACK REVIEW: Janelle Monáe - Stronger (from the Netflix series, We the People)

TRACK REVIEW:

Janelle Monáe

PHOTO CREDIT: Clara Balzary for The Gentle Woman

Stronger (from the Netflix series, We the People)

9.6/10

The track, Stronger, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOqMvZmuLxM

GENRES:

R&B/Soul/Gospel

ORIGIN:

Kansas, U.S.A.

RELEASE DATE:

1st July, 2021

LABEL:

Bad Boy Records LLC

__________

THIS is going to be quite…

a detailed and deep review. I know that most of mine are but, when it comes to Janelle Monáe, there is a lot to cover off and explore! In time, I will get to her new song, Stronger. It is taken from the Netflix series, We the People. I have been waiting for a chance to review Monáe. She is one of the most captivating artists in all of music. Her new track is typically awesome and memorable. I will work my way to that. Right now, I want to look at her earlier life and what it was like growing up. I will discuss her sexuality after (as I think that it is important). As we learn from this interview with PAPER, growing up where she was, it was challenging to raise the issue of her sexuality:

“Monáe grew up in Kansas City in a Baptist church, with a Christian family and in shoes very different from the ones she walks in now. She remembers being quite young when she realized she was queer, and although the vocabulary wasn't there, the feelings were. "I was like eight," she remembers. "I don't think I actually knew how I identified. I knew that I was attracted to women, girls, men, boys. I knew that." Like many LGBTQIA+ people raised in more rural and religious areas, Monáe found it difficult to ask those questions without feeling ostracized.

"I've seen people get beat up because they were considered to be 'too feminine' or 'too masculine' for how they identified," she says. Some of those people were family friends, including a gay male friend of her aunt's, whom she watched be shunned from his community. "It was because of Black men who thought he was trying to come onto them, but he wasn't," Monáe says, "It was their own ignorance and insecurity and fear that led them to lash out. When I saw that..." her voice trails off. "To be a gay Black man, and Black men are like the 'heads of the households' and I'm a Black woman, this young kid. I thought, then it's really over for me”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Clara Balzary for The Gentle Woman

By all accounts, it does seem like Monáe had a difficult childhood. Like a lot of artists, Monáe’s parents were not always there. She didn’t have the most stable family life. When she spoke with The Gentle Woman last year, we discover how the church provided an outlet and way for Monáe to channel her talents. We also get a bit of background and history regarding Monáe and where she moved to after she left home:

“Her father, Michael, was a truck driver who was largely absent and left her mother, Janice, when Janelle was less than a year old. Janice worked cleaning houses and as a janitor. Her mother remarried, and had a second daugther, Kimmy.

Growing up, Janelle sang in the local Baptist church and performed in talent competitions and musicals from a young age, but she insists that she was no wunderkind. “Honestly,” she says, “there were so many talented kids around me, and at that age I was intimidated more than anything.” A precocious storyteller and writer with an avid interest in science fiction (to which she was introduced by her paternal grandmother via The Twilight Zone), she joined a young playwrights’ programme in school and began writing her own musicals, including one inspi-red by the trippy 1979 Stevie Wonder album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.

Though she was adept at singing, acting and writing, she was hardly spoiled for choice when she finished school. “Nobody was coming to Kansas City offering record deals,” she says drily. “We were the last place that people would think to look. So I didn’t know if I was just going to be in the music industry proper, but I thought that there could be a place for me on Broadway.” She applied to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York and was accepted on its bachelor of fine arts course in musical theatre. “I was just thinking about what I could do now. And I was like, Yeah, I can sing and act, so that’s what I want to do full time.”

In New York, Janelle shared a small apartment in Harlem with an older cousin who worked night shifts at the post office; they took turns sleeping in the single bed while the other was out. Janelle worked part time as a maid in Manhattan to make ends meet.

But while she was grateful for the opportunity to learn how to sight-read music and properly dissect a role, it wasn’t lost on her that as the only Black woman in her year, she didn’t look like everybody else and wasn’t being represented on the page. “I didn’t see the roles that I liked,” she says. “I didn’t see the new, fresh opportunities for Black voices on stage. And so I was just like, Fuck this, I need to actually spend some time living”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pari Dukovic for GQ

I am going to change topics in a second. I do feel like Monáe’s background is important in terms of her music and how she approaches life now. It does seem, quite evidently, how there wasn’t necessarily this open and accepting attitude within the family when it comes to talking about her sexuality. Many other artists grow up and spend a lot of their life unable to find that supportive voice from their family. Building on the interviews I have already sourced from, Monáe spoke with The Guardian last year. Even though it was difficult to talk about her sexuality, it was necessary for personal growth:

“The conversations she had with her family about her sexuality were hard, mainly because she anticipated pushback. She hates arguing with her loved ones, but not as much as she hates passive-aggression. “We can all be guilty of it and it’s one of my pet peeves. I love my passive-aggressive people as humans, but it is something that is triggering for me, because I grew up in a family where if there was something bothering us, you knew about it. There was no stomping around the house; there was, OK, let’s discuss this. I think the harder a conversation is with the people that you love and care about, the more necessary it is for growth.”

And who knows, she says; sometimes people surprise you. “I have an aunt who is such a Bible thumper – and no disrespect to them, I love Bible thumpers – but she was the first person at the Dirty Computer concert. She was right there in the front row, hugging me and telling me how proud I made her. This was the one I was so convinced would not look at me as her niece that she loved. But our relationship has gotten stronger”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pamela Hanson for InStyle

Not only is Janelle Monáe a terrific songwriter. She is also a fantastic actor. To tie in with We the People, I wanted to spend some time with Monáe as this screen star. In some ways, she has an aspect of David Bowie: creating these different personas and looks, both on screen and on albums. Coming back to that interview from The Gentle Woman, and we find out about Monáe’s screen progression; how she came to the attention of Prince - also how there is this mixture of the rooted/down to earth and otherworldly (with Monáe):

“Janelle, 34, first fell to earth, Bowie-style, in the mid-2000s as an otherworldly new androgyne on the scene, a genre- and gender-bending musical prodigy who one critic referred to as “James Brown reborn in a more advanced female future”. Her breakthrough album, 2010’s The ArchAndroid, was a sci-fi-inflected, haute-conceptual blend of pop, funk and soul – a declaration of intent that seemed at once indebted to precursors such as George Clinton and Sun Ra and a harbinger of things to come. In interviews she often spoke of being sent from the future, and it was sometimes hard not to take her at her word.

The ArchAndroid attracted the attention of Prince, who became a mentor, as did Stevie Wonder (he and Janelle performed together, and a recorded phone conversation between the two of them appears as an interlude on Dirty Computer). Since the release of The ArchAndroid, Janelle – singer, songwriter, entrepreneur, actress, producer, social activist and fashion iconoclast – has kept enough plates spinning to rival a circus performer.

In short order, she performed at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards in 2011 alongside the artists Bruno Mars and B.o.B, became a spokesperson for Cover Girl in 2012, and was featured the same year as the guest vocalist on Fun’s “We Are Young”, which became a number one hit across the world, exposing her to a larger mainstream audience. Her second studio album, The Electric Lady, was released in 2013 and appeared to benefit from her growing visibility, reaching number five in the Billboard 200. There were successful guest appearances with everyone from Pharrell Williams to Grimes and Kelly Clarkson and a 2014 performance at the White House with artists including Aretha Franklin. And Janelle’s electrifying stage presence and epicene style, which brought to mind Little Richard as styled by Marlene Dietrich, positioned her as the tuxedo-wearing, pompadour-crowned saviour of pop music.

Janelle made her feature film debut in 2016 with supporting roles in two movies, the Oscar-winning Moonlight and Hidden Figures, which won the coveted nod for best ensemble at the 2017 Screen Actors Guild Awards; to both she brought a palpable intelligence, grit and what Julie Taymor refers to as the “feminine power of listening and being supportive”. By then, it felt as if the impish performer and avowed time traveller had been part of our pop-culture consciousness for aeons.

Over the years Janelle has adopted a post-human persona (often in the form of her sometimes cloying alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, a messianic android from the year 2719 who falls in love with a human), but her roots are undeniably terrestrial. Janelle Monáe Robinson grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, in an extended family that included 50 first cousins. “There were a lot of us,” she explains, touching her ear, a tic-like gesture that she repeats throughout our conversation, “and we all pitched in as needed. I watched over my little cousins; my older cousins watched over me. My aunts made sure I had clothes for school, and my mom did the same for her nieces and nephews. One of the things my family instilled in me is the importance of community”.

I am going to move on to Monáe’s sexuality and how integral and important that is to her identity. I want to stick with acting briefly and come back to that interview from The Guardian. Whilst the film did not pick up huge acclaim, Monáe’s turn in The Glorias was particularly impressive. She spoke about the importance of the film:

“Her choice of acting roles is equally loaded. Later this year, Monáe will appear in The Glorias, a biopic of Gloria Steinem based on her 2015 memoir My Life On The Road, in which different actors, including Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander, play the feminist in different phases of her life, with Bette Midler as Steinem’s fellow activist Bella Abzug. It covers similar ground to the recent TV show Mrs America, with at least one big difference: that of Monáe’s character, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who co-founded Ms magazine with Steinem and was an activist and community organiser of equal standing. She didn’t appear in Mrs America, just as she has, relative to Steinem, been largely airbrushed out of history. “That’s why representation matters and that’s why I said yes to this film,” Monáe says.

Steinem herself approached Monáe to ask if she’d play Pitman Hughes. The two women had met, years earlier, at an awards ceremony, where Monáe had the chance to thank Steinem. “Talk about someone who’s timeless,” she says. “She’s so spry, and on it, and involved, and knows about what’s going on today – she’s an icon.” Most impressive, to Monáe, was the fact that Steinem lobbied hard for the Pitman Hughes character to have a central part in the film. (Monáe spoke on the phone to Pitman Hughes, now 82, and found it both inspiring and professionally helpful to hear her “talk about her relationship with Gloria; the things they had to endure”.)

Monáe was also, because Pitman Hughes has been so erased from public memory, “excited that her story was being told. And the fact that Gloria was adamant that Dorothy was in it really let me know what kind of person Gloria is. Dorothy is responsible for helping Gloria to be a great public speaker – she had stage fright, and because Dorothy was a singer, she was able to help her. She was one of the first black business owners in Harlem and was able to teach Gloria more about the black community”.

Let’s move on and explore Monáe as this very special and original artist. I already compared her to David Bowie. I don’t think this is unfair or exaggerating. It is clear that, compared to her peers, there is something about Janelle Monáe that is timeless and iconic. She is such a bold, multifaceted and powerful artist. Once more, coming back to the interview from The Gentle Woman, we get a sense of how Monáe has evolved as an artist:

“Which is not to say that everything about Janelle has remained constant. For one thing, her music has evolved from the sometimes wilfully impenetrable retro-futurist stylings of her early releases to the more commercially viable, eminently danceable pop-funk offerings on Dirty Computer, such as “Screwed”, featuring Zoë Kravitz, and the catchy Prince-inspired single “Make Me Feel”.

She may be, to quote Spin magazine, “a canonised artist without a classic album”, but the absence of commercial superstardom has allowed her the creative freedom to mine the intersection of the personal and the political, and subjects of Black womanhood, identity expression and sexual fluidity, with funky abandon.

“She’s always been somebody who I would consider pretty fearless,” says Mikael Moore, her long-time manager and collaborator, “but if you look at her evolution as a songwriter, as a performer and vocalist, as an MC, I think it shows the risks she’s prepared to take as an artist”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ralph Lauren

Part of Janelle Monáe’s appeal and status comes down to her fashion. Rather than being an anodyne or boring artist, she has definitely crafted her own style. In reviews, I like to dig deep with artists and spotlight them from different angles. It provides us with more story and layers. There is an interesting Vogue article that responded to Monáe’s involvement in a special Ralph Lauren event:

“Whether it’s taking over Central Park for his 50th anniversary or staging a one-night-only Art Deco nightclub extravaganza, if there’s one thing Ralph Lauren knows, it’s how to put on a show—even when, as with his spring 2021 collection which debuted this evening, there’s no live audience. To mark the occasion, Lauren enlisted the help of his regular collaborator Janelle Monáe for a black-and-white film performance in the grandiose setting of his Beverly Hills store, here transformed into a smoky speakeasy while Monáe does her best Frank Sinatra in a double-breasted tuxedo and singing a swoon-worthy rendition of “All or Nothing at All.”

“When it comes to music, I consider myself a time traveler,” Monáe told Vogue ahead of her showstopping performance. “I can find the beauty of music in every era, but being able to dip into this made me just fall in love with Old Hollywood and film noir. We went back and forth on a lot of songs from that era, and one of the songs I hadn’t heard before, but Ralph asked me to take a listen to, was this song called ‘All or Nothing at All.’ And it was sung by a lot of the greats, but the rendition that I liked the most was actually a young Frank Sinatra’s rendition.”

Over the past few years, Janelle Monáe has become one of Ralph Lauren’s most visible ambassadors, whether performing at the fall 2019 Art Deco nightclub spectacular, or wearing a breathtaking hooded gown covered in crystals to last year’s Oscars. But Monáe’s relationship with the brand in fact stretches back over a decade, to soon after the release of her first record, 2010’s The ArchAndroid. “They were one of the first brands to embrace me, before I did any movies, before I even had my second album out,” Monáe remembers. “At a time when I couldn't even afford to buy a suit, I remember them gifting me one. They’re like family, at this point, and this event is, to me, one of the most special collaborations we've done thus far.”

Despite Monáe’s keen instincts for fashion as a means of self-expression—it only takes a brief look across her shape-shifting style from album to album to see that it’s one of the most important tools in her arsenal—her interest in performing as part of this season’s show was also due to her appreciation for Lauren’s constantly evolving vision of what it means to be an American brand today. “I think that an American brand should be inclusive, and understanding that we live in a melting pot, which is why I love the models that were chosen,” says Monáe. “I love the thought behind making sure that we had different forms of beauty”.

In terms of politics, things have been turbulent in America the past year or so. There is a fascinating interview from Gay Letter where Monáe was asked about the protest around the murder of George Floyd and what it is like working in music as a Black queer artist in 2021:

“Janelle Monáe has always felt ahead of her time. She’s an artist who seems made for every era she’s in. Janelle released her first music (a demo titled The Audition) in 2003. Three years later she formed a joint venture with her own label Wondaland Records and P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Records. She’s been nominated for eight Grammys but has maddeningly not won any even though her 2018 album Dirty Computer is considered a masterpiece by many critics and fans. In recent years, Janelle has stepped into acting with roles in Moonlight, Hidden Figures, and the Amazon series Homecoming. She’s also stepped more into herself. After a transformative skydiving experience, Janelle decided to open up publicly about her sexuality.

We spoke to Janelle in two conversations, one mere days before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and then another time after the protests against his murder and broader police brutality had erupted in cities across the country. On both occasions we found her to be thoughtful, open, and fully engaged. She is “building and squadding up” and ready to work as hard as ever to demand justice for the thousands of black people killed by police each year. She was crystal clear about the message she wanted to share with the world during our conversation and during this Pride month: “All black lives matter.”

How are you doing? It’s so hard for me to answer that question, honestly. But I just ate, so that’s good. In general, I’m not in a good space. As many of my people are seeing what’s happening to our brothers and sisters, it’s just hard to shake it. It’s hard to shake the anger; it’s hard to shake being upset. It’s hard to get past the video footage and the evidence that police have killed our black brothers and sisters and nobody is charged or convicted. It’s hard to accept what police are giving us, what the administration is giving us, and what those in positions of power are giving us. And we’re not accepting it.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kelia Anne for PAPER

How have you been protesting over the last few weeks? I am in Los Angeles. I was down there when the tanks rolled out, when the National Guard were out. I have been helping out, passing out lunches for COVID relief, but in terms of my involvement, I have been very much involved in working with the activist Tamika D. Mallory and her movement Until Freedom. We are demanding that Greg Fischer, who is the mayor of Louisville, fire charge and convict the officers who killed Breonna Taylor. They still haven’t fired the officers for murdering Breonna. They had no reason to be at her house. That’s really where I have been putting most of my energy, speaking out for black women who have been murdered”.

What’s it like to work in the mainstream entertainment industry as a queer woman of color in 2020 compared to when you started in 2003? Here’s what I believe: I believe that I was sent from the future. I absolutely believe that, because even hearing you say 2003 for me, during that time, I felt ahead of what was happening. It always bothered me. It always made me feel like I had to stop time, like I had to figure out how to slow my ideas down. I always felt like people were not ready for an artist like myself. I still feel like that right now and it’s hard to digest. It’s like how do you put an octagon in a rectangle? And I say that humbly. I also say that knowing my potential and knowing the work that I put in and knowing that my team, who I’m so thankful for, have been my support system and talked me off ledges when I’ve just felt super alone.

I think that right now a lot of people are discovering new things. I just celebrated the 10th anniversary of The ArchAndroid and honestly what feels like the past for many is the future for us. By “us” I mean those who understand the power of telling stories through science fiction. Those who absolutely believe in the mythology of The ArchAndroid, because I’ve seen some of those things happening. Even right now I feel like I write too much science fiction to be dealing with this reality. It feels very close to the world that I warned people about and I don’t love that. I don’t love it. As a result, because we are here, I feel like I’m an artist on assignment. I feel like the universe moves me where I need to go. It’s never been about just recording songs. It’s been about realizing and maximizing the potential of an idea in its totality. Whether that’s doing an album and doing a film with it, or being in roles that are parallel with the things in the music that I’ve talked about since forever. So yes, I feel like I’m still an artist on assignment. I never know my impact until years later. I’m always looking forward and that can pose a challenge, and also a benefit.

When you were more open about yourself and your journey and sexuality, was the response you got from loved ones, or people you care about, surprising? Actually it was. The people who I thought would be more judgmental or turn their backs on me or abandon me, didn’t! No nuclear button was pressed, and in your mind, I don’t know how you identify, but for me, it’s kind of one of those things where you think about it so much, you’re always thinking about how am I going to talk to my mom about this, how am I gonna talk to my religious great-grandmother about this. You know all these people that prayed for me and loved me and had been there for me, my pastor, who is my first cousin—like how am I going to talk to all these people about this? Are they gonna get it? Are they going to abandon me? You think about it more. In your mind you’ve already made up stories about how they’re gonna respond, so it becomes anxiety fueled by you. It becomes depressing, the thought of it and you don’t want to deal with it. Part of my process was making sure that my childhood self, that people had come to love and know, showed up and told them where they were at the time now. About how evolved my childhood self is. I’m still the same child that loves you and cares about you; however, these are new things I’ve discovered about myself. In fact, I’ve always known but did not feel the support in discussing”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Clara Balzary for The Gentle Woman

As Monáe is lending her music to the series, We the People (where we “Learn the basics of rights and citizenship with upbeat songs by popular artists like Janelle Monáe, H.E.R., Adam Lambert, Brandi Carlile and more”.), it is worth discussing her attachment to and involvement with politics. Coming back to the interview from The Guardian, they look ahead to (at the time) the new film, Antebellum:

“And there’s no question that Monáe is among the most thoughtful and politically engaged artists of her generation. The new movie in which she stars, Antebellum (due to be released later this year), is a horror vehicle that combines aspects of Get Out, Westworld and 12 Years A Slave. It’s a hard film to write about without giving spoilers, but it’s a high-concept project, half set on a plantation in the American south during slavery, half in the modern world, in which Monáe plays a successful writer who becomes the target of an outlandish racist conspiracy. The themes – how the past is not dead; how entrenched racism is in the US – are always apposite, but particularly so now, when the president is stoking white nationalism as part of his re-election campaign. “I read the script and thought, OK, this is a movie that’s connecting the dots from the past to the present and the future,” Monáe says. “And what the future could possibly look like, if we’re not careful.”

She is talking about America’s white-supremacist roots, a conversation that has, until recently, existed mainly on the fringe. In the wake of the death of George Floyd in May, the discussion has moved to the mainstream, along with the one around defunding the police, and while there are, Monáe says, “a lot of people late to the party, I’m happy that we’re having these conversations. You can’t talk about white supremacy, systemic racism, police brutality, without talking about chattel slavery, which is America’s original sin. My ancestors were forced to come to America and work for free, and the first institution of policing was the slave patrol, which was meant to hunt down and kill black people who had run away. So when we’re screaming, ‘Defund the police’, that’s what we are speaking to: we are reminding people, as this film does, that the police were not meant to protect and serve our community; they were meant to terrorise us. It’s a system built on traumatising black folks.”

Monáe is far more eloquent on the subject of America’s racist history than the writers of Antebellum, Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz. The two men also directed the movie and, in spite of Monáe’s excellent performance, it has a cheap, exploitative feel to it. The sexual violence is hackneyed; the character development thin. The movie would, one suspects, have been vastly superior if Monáe had written it herself. She is a fine actor, with a career that took off with her role in Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning film of 2016, and received a boost a year later from her role as Mary Jackson in Hidden Figures, in which she played a mathematician at Nasa, alongside Taraji P Henson and Octavia Spencer”.

It is important to now move to the subject of sexuality. If it was quite hard to be open with her family (to start) about this, Monáe is bringing it more to the forefront. It is less about her own personal experiences and relationships. Monáe, as we find out in the PAPER interview that I quoted from earlier, represents the entire L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community:

“This isn't the first time Monáe, someone at the epicenter of pop culture, has recentered the narrative to focus more on one of the most othered groups in the LGBTQ community instead of herself. Although Monáe can only attest to her own experiences, she has actively made sure to advocate, and make space, for her entire LGBTQIA community. Her performance of Dirty Computer's "Americans" on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert opens on Pose star Mj Rodriquez, who's trans, before the camera slowly pulls out to reveal a group of POC femmes holding each other. She sings a song that says:

Until women can get equal pay for equal work
This is not my America
Until same gender loving people can be who they are
This is not my America
Until black people can come home from a police stop
Without being shot in the head
This is not my America

Monáe publicly dedicated her two Grammy nominations to her "trans brothers and sisters," who she says "are shunned from these sorts of events." Institutional award shows, including the Grammys, are inherently and historically spaces of white, cis, male privilege. While they have recently gotten Blacker, our understanding of diversity must always continue to grow more intersectional. This is part of what Monáe is working toward herself, and advocating for from her audience.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pari Dukovic for GQ

But it isn't these accolades that make Monáe proud. In fact, it was her choice to do something scary, to take a risk and tell the truth, and thankfully that resonated. "I'm just happy that my personal story has also been personal stories for so many other people. There's so many young people who grew up in the South or Baptist families, who were told that they won't be accepted by Christ. They can listen to this album and feel hugged. They can feel loved. They can feel seen. They can feel heard. That's the most beautiful thing." Monáe's fans were not just able to find parallels with her journey, but able to find validation in being "dirty." With this album she extended an open hand.

Right before dropping Dirty Computer Monáe came out as pansexual in Rolling Stone, calling herself a "free ass motherf*cker." She reinforced that notion with songs like "Make Me Feel," "Crazy, Classic, Life," and "Django Jane." She solidified it every time she championed free gender expression with her clothing, and drove home the point when her boob winked at us this past Met Gala. Monáe is so exceptionally herself, so sacred in her skin, which shines not only through her music but in her powerful roles in 2016 films Moonlight and Hidden Figures Her character in Moonlight, Teresa, a pseudo-guardian to the young, Black, gay protagonist Chiron, sees many parallels with Monáe herself. She is strong, proud, protective, nurturing and poised. But that wasn't always the case”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pamela Hanson for InStyle

I want to come back to acting. I could have included this before. I do feel like, with Monáe, we have this modern-day equivalent of David Bowie. I think that Monáe’s acting feeds into her music. I have often talked about the relationship between acting and music. How there are similar traits and disciplines in both fields. Not that many big musicians, however, have a prolific screen career at the moment. She spoke with GQ in 2017 and revealed a particular reason why she was so keen to be seen on the screen:

“Not much about Janelle Monáe says “Homo sapiens.” The tailored intergalactic-butler uniform. The massive voice in the maybe-five-foot frame. Even her skin looks airbrushed. So it isn't surprising that when asked how old she is, she replies, “I'm timeless.” Maybe she's an android. “I look at androids as the future Other,” she says, her empathy for the marginalized extending to A.I. “I feel a responsibility to speak out for the Other.” In her new film, Hidden Figures, about a different kind of Other—badass black women working for NASA in the 1960s—Monáe actually plays a computer. (NASA called its mathematicians “computers.”) Her character doesn't take shit. Neither does Monáe. “I want to redefine what it means to be young, black, wild, and free in America,” she says. It's jarring to see someone so in control of her image submit herself to the demands of a studio and director. But Monáe doesn't flinch at temporarily shelving monochromatic space diva for important movies like the awards-season hit Moonlight. Of course, she also has bigger ideas: “I want to see more black people. Not just in films like Moonlight. Big-budget films, too.” And since the life span of an android is probably, like, 500 years, Monáe will have plenty of time to give the Hollywood muckety-mucks a run for their money”.

There are a couple of other things I want to cover before coming to the review of Stronger. I will finish this section by returning to the interview from The Gentle Woman. We return the subject of Antebellum and why it was particularly challenging for Monáe:

“Coming to terms with the residual effects of the past is at the heart of Antebellum, in which Janelle plays a modern-day author who is transported back to the 19th century to live as a slave in the American South and come face to face with her ancestors.

Janelle was widely praised for her roles in Moonlight and Hidden Figures (The New Yorker called her turns in these films “quietly expert”) and the histor-ical drama Harriet, in which she plays the fictional Marie Buchanon, a free Black woman and the owner of a boarding house who helps Harriet Tubman adjust to life after escaping slavery.

But it is her role as Veronica/Eden in Antebellum that has been the most challenging, Janelle says. “Emotionally, spiritually, physically, it’s the toughest role for me to date.” The production involved shooting on a former cotton plantation in Louisiana. “It wasn’t easy for me at all to say, ‘Yes, I’m going to film on a plantation.’ I didn’t want to be anywhere near that. I knew I had a job, though. It was important to highlight the burden that Black women carry to deconstruct systemic racismand white supremacy every single day.People have to understand what we are dealing with and how the past is directly connected to our present. And how the past is not even the past.

“How our ancestors, my ancestors, have been treated historically,” she continues, “is connected to what we are experiencing now with the riots across America. The police are mistreating us; the microaggressions at work and in public – everything that we’re dealing with now is a symptom of past structures that were created to oppress us.”

What got her through filming, she says, was thinking about the special women in her life, such as her great-grandmother, to whom she is still extremely close, as well as public figures she admires, including the activists Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Angela Davis and the outspoken US congresswomen Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known as AOC. “When I thought about all of these voices, these women of colour, these Black women, I found the strength. It was important for me to represent a Black woman who was not going to be silenced, in the same way that these Black women and women of colour are out there protecting the rights of marginalised communities in spite of getting death threats, or being publicly called a bitch at work in the case of AOC.”

In addition to continuing to agitate on behalf of Black Lives Matter (her 2015 song “Hell You Talmbout”, in which she names Black Americans killed by police or in racial attacks, has become the movement’s unofficial rally cry) and supporting activists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Bernice King, Janelle is also the guiding force behind Fem the Future, an organisation she formed in 2015 to create opportunities for young women to get into the film, television and music industries. “It doesn’t have to be in front of the camera,” she explains. “We’re trying to create more well-balanced humans – people who can compete at a high level in all areas and create art that is centred around stories around women, and Black women in particular. How do we all come together and create more noise? Everybody has been in their corners, but people are realising that we are stronger together and the drum needs to be louder”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kelia Anne for PAPER

I have spent some time comparing Monáe with Bowie. In fact, if one were to think of an artist that Monáe is quite closely associated with, then they would arrive at Prince. In fact, Monáe was mentored by the late genius. She was in conversation with The Guardian in 2018. She revealed what it was like to continue her career without her mentor:

“Monáe says the toughest part about staying living in the present in 2018 is moving forward in a world without her chief musical mentor. “It’s difficult for me to even speak about this because Prince was helping me with the album, before he passed on to another frequency,” she says. His sudden death was “a stab in the stomach. The last time I saw him was New Year’s Day. I performed a private party in St Bart’s with him, and after we sat and just talked for five hours. He was one of the people I would talk to about things, him and Stevie Wonder.” Both were among her earliest champions. Before The ArchAndroid was released, she sent each of them a copy, on CD-R, with a handwritten track list.

Prince not only encouraged her then, he lobbied for her first BET awards appearance and he performed on Electric Lady; when he died, he and Monáe were “collecting sounds” for Dirty Computer. “I wouldn’t be as comfortable with who I am if it had not been for Prince. I mean, my label Wondaland would not exist without Paisley Park coming before us,” Monáe says. She laughs a little. “He would probably get me for cussin’, but Prince is in that ‘free motherfucker’ category. That’s the category when we can recognise in each other that you’re also a free motherfucker. Whether we curse or not, we see other free motherfuckers. David Bowie! A free motherfucker. I feel their spirit, I feel their energy. They were able to evolve. You felt that freedom in them”.

The final thing to discuss before coming to the latest Janelle Monáe song is to look back at the Turntables single. Apart from the song, That's Enough (from Lady and the Tramp (Original Soundtrack), there had not been much from her since Dirty Computer in 2018. Turntables, in a way, had brought Monáe back to a more creative mindset. This was discussed in an interview with Variety from earlier this year:

“You’ve said that prior to doing the song, you had not been in a creative mood or wanting to be in the studio. What pushed you into being motivated?

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in the studio. I really wanted to be in the studio, but I think like so many of us, my mental health had to be taken care of. Recording and writing music is such a part of my normalcy, and from the pandemic to the election to voter suppression, nothing going on in the world felt normal to me. So I just had to really understand what kind of world we were going to be walking into, and I had to get my mental health together.

After I watched the film, I got a sense of determination. I knew where I could take that rage, that energy, that fear, that hope, that anxiety— I knew where I could put all that those emotions into, and it was writing the song “Turntables.” I got my marching orders from Stacey. And I guess I started to finally understand that, to use an analogy, if we’re all on a boat, then it’s time to turn the boat. And if Stacy’s asking me for help, I have to show up. Because this is our opportunity to make a turn for the better and really put the power in the hands of the people”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pari Dukovic

Stronger is the latest single from the soundtrack for We the People. There is something pastoral and almost Folk-y about the start of the song. It has this dreamy and somewhat medieval sound that then switches to a funky and scratched electric guitar flavour. I like the introduction and the fact we are taken in different directions. The first verse of Stronger is certainly powerful and striking: “Most of my friends want a little peace/Some of my friends want a little solace/Even when we struggle and we get kicked down/We pick each other down with a little polish/All of my friends want a legacy/Don’t wanna be left out/Every time you think we get a little weak/We get a little bit stronger”. When the song moves to the chorus, there is this beautiful soulful and gospel vocal chorus. Rather than Stronger being this angered and aggressive song, Monáe projects power and urgency in a different way. Her delivery has this quality of being mesmeric, smooth and nuanced. One listens to the song again and again and you are hooked into the delivery. The words get into the head and you will find yourself repeating the chorus mantra (“Ah, we the people, we the people/The people getting stronger”). Earlier, I dropped in some interview information where Monáe discussed her relationship with the church and how important that is. In some ways, Stronger seems like a sermon or this biblical release.

If Stronger, maybe, looks to the past and how there has been this fight for freedom for African-Americans, it also applies to the modern day. The notion of being accepted and finding liberty: “Some of the friends taught me how to dream/Some of the friends taught me how to fight/Even those times when we don’t agree/We know we all tryna save the same day/We don’t the life without the liberty/Not gonna be left out/Every time you think you got the best of me/We get a little bit stronger”. When the chorus comes back in again, it seems even more powerful and engaging. The blended voices and the hook of “We the people” gives it this powerful and stirring quality. Listening to Stronger, I wonder whether Monáe will write more songs like this for a new album. Not that Dirty Computer was lacking in material about politics and injustice. I really like the latest track, and I feel that it is among Monáe’s finest work. One can love the compositional blend, where we get bass, handclaps, a beat and that strutted, scratchy electric lick. Voices build and blend in as Monáe delivers another incredible verse: “Now they cast their votes ’cause the people wanna speak/And they checking their balance ’cause the people wanna eat/What they do process ’cause they seek equality/And we pay for the world so the people in the streets/And they love America, where the people wanna be/And they all know their rights from the sea to shiny sea/From the sticks to the ghettos, yeah the people gonna sea/That the people hold the power and together we’re a little bit stronger”. Monáe’s voice gets heavier and more impassioned as the song reaches its closing stages. You get this real intensity and physicality. The final line – “We don’t want the life without the liberty” – is one of the most important. I think that is what Stronger comes down to: the idea that there needs to be freedom and liberty. Stronger can be applied to the situation in America today and Black Lives Matter – as much as it applies to the struggles of the past. With Stronger (for the excellent Netflix series, We the People), Janelle Monáe has released...