Music/Society Modern Wrld (W7)

Let’s Flip It! Quare Emancipations Black Queer Traditions, Afrofuturisms, Janelle Monáe to Labelle

Gayle Murchison

I begin today by asking y’all to fl ip it. No, I don’t mean to turn a somersault. I mean “fl ip the script.” That is, as the Oxford English Dictionary defi nes “fl ip,” “to make an unexpected or dramatic change. Also: to reverse the usual or pre- existing positions in a situation; to turn the tables.”1 “Flipping the script” means to invert or disrupt dominant paradigms— narratives— to challenge and defy ex- ogenous and constrictive categories and to engage in discursive practices and per- formative acts that push against the bounds and binds of existing social relations and power structures. Our gathering at “Queer AMS of Color” or, rather, “Race- ing Queer Music Scholarship” marks the institutional beginnings of the ways in which we can begin to fl ip and queer the script with respect to both the larger institution of the American Musicological Society and the LGBTQ Study Group.

The scholarly literature about African American— as well as African and global African diasporic— music (like black bodies) both expresses and engages struggle. The academic project does not just study; instead, it falls beside and sometimes couples with a range of social, cultural, and political movements along a continuum from social commentary and critique to outright political action and revolution. Historically, black LGBTQIA have been left out of academic music’s historiography and excluded from conversations both within and without the LGBTQIA academic music community— something I began to explore at the Columbia University December 2015 symposium honoring Suzanne Cusick, “Women, Music, Power.” That this is so comes as no surprise; nor am I alone in beginning to confront the issue of race and LGBTQIA. Several recent African American theorists have argued that the term “queer” excludes, erases, or

1 “fl ip, v.,” OED Online, September 2016, Oxford University Press, http:// www .oed .com /view /Entry /71654.

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minimalizes people of color and their cultural productions. E. Patrick Johnson theorizes quare studies, which “addresses the concerns and needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people across issues of race, gender, class, and other subject positions.”2 Francesca T. Royster applies quare theory to postsoul music, examining both LGBTQIA artists and how a range of musicians explores gender and nonheteronormative sexuality.3 Sheena C. Howard explores intersectional black lesbian identity.4 Thus, today, I proceed to fl ip the script and move beyond identifying a concern in order to off er one approach to queering black music: through the prism of Afrofuturism and the music of the 1970s group Labelle (singers Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash) and the millennial Janelle Monáe. There is a long rich black quare music tradition to which Afrofuturism has been central. Afrofuturist quare musicians (from Sun Ra to Janelle Monáe) create post– civil rights worlds in which African Americans enjoy full social privilege and civil rights and liberties and inhabit spaces welcoming a range of emancipated black sexualities.

In this essay I will analyze two recordings and videos, one by Labelle and one by Monáe, that meld science (speculative) fi ction with postwar black popular music. In 1974 the trio Labelle released the Alan Toussaint– produced Nightbirds. The album included both the monster hit “Lady Marmalade,” which breached taboos by identifying with a sex worker and by addressing interracial sexual encounters, as well as “You Turn Me On.” A quare reading of Labelle’s 1974 “You Turn Me On,” performed February 22, 1975, on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, considers how the group navigated the limiting girl group / soul diva dichotomies of the mainstream media to off er a utopian vision of black sexuality.5 The second recording is 2013’s “Q.U.E.E.N.” (Queer, Untouchables, Emigrants, Excommunicated, and Negroid), from Monáe’s Electric Lady CD, part of a trilogy that includes 2010’s Metropolis: The Chase Suite and 2008’s The ArchAndroid.6 “Q.U.E.E.N.” posits Janelle Monáe as a revolutionary leader; Monáe’s dystopia is the successor to Labelle’s soul- era Afrofuturism. Vis- à- vis bell hooks (see “Selling Hot Pussy,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation), these videos can be read as quare feminist critiques, for each troubles the way in which the music industry off ers black female bodies on a continuum from eroticized to hypersexualized.7 Each also provides examples of

2 E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (2001): 20.

3 Francesca T. Royster, Sounding Like a No- No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post- Soul Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).

4 Sheena C. Howard, Black Queer Identity Matrix: Towards an Integrated Queer of Color Framework (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2014).

5 Labelle’s songwriter, member Nona Hendryx (out as LGBTQIA), characterized the group and her music in interviews as political.

6 Monáe further confi rmed that “Q.U.E.E.N.” is an acronym in an interview with Jeff Benjamin, available on the cable channel Fuse.TV website. Jeff Benjamin, “Janelle Monáe Says ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’ Is for the ‘Ostracized & Marginalized,’” September 18, 2013, http:// www .fuse .tv /videos /2013 /09 /janelle - monae - queen - interview.

7 bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 61– 77.

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quare black music and the way black music (or any listener) can be “hair- yuh” and “quare- yuh” (i.e., “here [or, to pun, hear] and queer,” in African American Vernacular English), in ways that we— given the ubiquitousness and saturation of black popular music throughout all arenas of global mass culture— have gotten used to it.8 Taken together, Monáe and Labelle off er two points on the continuum of Afrofuturist quare resistance.

Afrofuturism Mark Dery is credited with having coined the term “Afrofuturism,” which is applied to African American science- fi ction and speculative- fi ction writers— even going as far back as W. E. B. Du Bois: “Speculative fi ction that treats African- American themes and addresses African- American concerns in the context of twentieth- century technoculture— and, more generally, African- American signifi cation that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future— might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism.’” Dery asks, “Can a communi- ty whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subse- quently been consumed for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” He foregrounds race: “Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers— white to a man— who have engineered our collective fantasies?”9

Others have expanded on Dery’s defi nition. Ytasha L. Womack, one of the movement’s proponents, wrote the manifesto Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci- Fi and Fantasy Culture.10 In 2013 in “Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism and New Hollywood,” Lisa Yaszek (referencing Kodwo Eshun) defi ned Afrofuturism as a global movement and the cultural expression of African and African diasporic writers, musicians, and others.11 More than just imagining black futures, Afrofuturism also off ers a way of engaging the past. It off ers a site where both the past and the future can be, as Mark Bould writes, interwoven with the present reality. Or, as Yaszek writes, Afrofuturists “use stories about the past and the present to reclaim the history of the future.”12 Bould traces the history of Afrofuturism, extending as far back as the late nineteenth century with writers such as Charles Chestnutt and Sutton E. Griggs; he includes early twentieth- century

8 The phrase “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” was oft en chanted at ACT- UP demonstrations and during Gay Pride marches during the 1990s.

9 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 179– 222, 180.

10 Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci- Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013).

11 Lisa Yaszek, “Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism and New Hollywood,” in A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction, ed. Lars Schmeink (2013), 12, http:// virtual - sf .com / ?page _id = 372. For a study of black comic books and comic book characters, see Frances Gateward, The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

12 Mark Bould, “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF,” Science Fiction Studies 34, no. 2 (July 2007): 177– 86, http:// www .jstor .org /stable /4241520. This special issue is devoted to Afrofuturism. See also Yaszek, “Race in Science Fiction,” 12.

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writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Edward A. Johnson. Major later twentieth- century Afrofuturist writers include Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler.13

Afrofuturism has long been attractive to black musicians as an aspect of twentieth- century modernism. The roster of Afrofuturist musicians ranges widely. Among many things these musicians share as Afrofuturists are an engagement with technology, the creation and envisioning of past- future worlds, and an en- gagement in science- fi ction and speculative- fi ction narratives.14 Afrofuturism, as John Szwed reminds us in his biography of Sun Ra, one of the original Afrofu- turist musicians, has its antecedents in the earliest New World African cosmology, as those earliest African slaves believed that aft er death their souls could fl y back to Africa— a perception that enriches our understanding of the popularity of the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” among so many black religious congregations.15 Jazz musi- cians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s engaged with Afrofuturism, notably Sun Ra, George Russell, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock. We can even hear Afrofuturism as speculative fi ction in the 1930s “zombie” music of Mary Lou Williams: consider those recordings where she is especially harmonically ventur- ous, eschewing forward propulsive harmonies in favor of static oscillating textures. R&B, soul, funk, dancehall, dub, disco, hip hop, and electronic dance and later mu- sicians whose work fall under the rubric of Afrofuturist include George Clinton and Parliament- Funkadelic; Earth, Wind, and Fire; Lee Scratch Perry; Sylvester; Michael Jackson; and many others. While we may hear this music as experimental or avant- garde, or simply as dance music, it is crucial to remember that these Afro- futurist musicians— especially those whose intersectional identities reach beyond heteronormativity and further mark them as “quare”— do important transforma- tive and restorative politicocultural work.

Quare Music, Eccentric Performances, and Black Sexualities Quare black music has off ered one avenue by which African Americans can cre- ate and inhabit spaces where they are free to express a range of sexualities, espe-

13 Bould, “The Ships Landed Long Ago.” There is a growing body of scholarly literature on Afrofu- turism. For more perspectives on Afrofuturism, see the special issues of Dance Cult and Social Text. For perspectives on black religion and Afrofuturism, see Black Theology 14, no. 1 (April 2016). For more about the exclusion of black writers from studies and anthologies of science fi ction, see Douglas Kilgore De Witt, “Diff erence Engine: Aliens, Robots, and Other Racial Matters in the History of Science Fiction,” Sci- ence Fiction Studies 37, no. 1 (March 2010): 16– 22, http:// www .jstor .org /stable /40649582. See also Lisa Yaszek, “An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Rethinking History 9 (June/September 2005): 297– 313. With respect to African Afrofuturism, see the special issue of Journal of African Cinemas devoted to African writers and Afrofuturism published in 2003. For a short discussion of African Afrofuturism, see Alena Rettová, “Sci- and Afrofuturism in the Afrophone Novel: Writing the Future and the Possible in Swahili and in Shona,” Research in African Literatures 48, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 158– 82. Afrofuturism has mythic roots in slavery; for example, some West Africans enslaved in the US mainland believed in fl ight and that aft er they died they would fl y back to Africa.

14 For a discussion of jazz and hip hop musicians, see Kodwo Eshun’s manifesto, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998).

15 See John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). See also Lorna McDaniel, “The Flying Africans: Extent and Strength of the Myth in the Americas,” Nieuwe West- Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide 64, no. 1/2(1990): 28– 40.

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cially those beyond cis- gender heteronormative ones, and Afrofuturist aesthetics and musicians have played an especially prominent and public role in both quare black music and global African American popular music in general. Two ques- tions arise: What is quare black music, and what is its connection to Afrofuturism? Quare black music can be understood in several ways along a continuum. The most basic (and, admittedly, problematic) defi nition: music created, performed, interpreted, and so on by LGBTQIA African, African American, and African di- asporic musicians. The work of both Suzanne G. Cusick and Francesca Royster allows us to expand on this defi nition. In “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Eff ort Not to Think Straight,” Cusick explores the relationship between music and— specifi cally, lesbian— sexuality.16 In the most extensive study to date specifi cally linking quareness and music, Royster examines “a group of maverick performers who push the norms of blackness as they get entangled with sexuality and gender through the powerful platform of popular music” through what she terms “eccentric performances”: “Through spectacular acts of creativity, the eccen- tric joins forces with the ‘queer,’ ‘freak,’ and ‘pervert’ to see around corners, push the edges of the present to create a language not yet recognized: new sounds, new dances, new confi gurations of self— the makings of a black utopia.” With the last phrase, she connects quareness, music, and Afrofuturism. Royster distinguishes be- tween queer performance and queer identity, arguing for the avoidance of markers that inscribe a hegemonic white LGBTQIA identity: “Even though these perform- ers might not always fi t recognized codes of blackness or lesbian, gay, transgender, or queer identity, it matters that these performers are participating in an ongo- ing and always changing black aesthetic. Whatever their claims to identity might mean, their performances mean and mean intensely for other black and queer lives, as models, infl uences, and soundtracks to queer world making.”17 Here, her argument resonates with parts of Cusick’s, as Roster allows for a quare way of lis- tening to black performances. Together, Cusick and Royster allow the theorization of a quare black music that does not depend on the quare identity of a musician. This allows for a range of readings, from the subjectivity of the listener(s) to the nature of the performance as interpreted against received hegemonic notions of African American sexuality, gender identity, and performance.

Labelle and Quare Redemption With respect to post– World War II female Afrofuturist musicians, Labelle ranks among the fi rst to emerge and cross over with white audiences and to mainstream a postsoul quare black feminist sexuality. Here, I turn to Royster’s concept of the function of postsoul music: she links the emergence of 1950s and 1960s soul to the civil rights movement, especially to Black Pride and Black Power. This period in

16 Suzanne G. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Eff ort Not to Think Straight,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed., ed. Phillip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 67– 83.

17 Royster, Sounding Like a No- No, 3, 24, 8, 24.

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black music was marked by respectability politics, coupled with masculinist na- tionalism and nation building that argued for “legitimate” and “authentic” types of black music. This not only codifi ed ideas about race but also constrained black fe- male sexuality. Postsoul music (i.e., funk and other music of the 1980s and later) al- lows for “eccentric performances.” As discussed above, these eccentric performanc- es are not specifi cally LGTBQIA, yet, according to Royster, they allow space for the expression of a range of sexualities and identities. Linking quare and Afrofuturists, Royster includes among these performances “home girls who have chosen to be- come exiles, brothers from another planet, the tribe of the Black Bohemian, nerds, queers, Trekkies, and Funkateers.”18

During the 1970s Labelle embraced a feminist Afrofuturist image and aes- thetic. Moving beyond the constraints of the girl group aft er joining with Vicki Wickham (who became their manager in 1970), Patti and the Blue Belles (later changed to Bluebells as well as Bluebelles) transformed to become Labelle, a funk- rock trio that moved from the R&B Chitlin’ Circuit to become one of the few black female groups singing rock in the 1970s. Labelle performed before white rock audiences alongside rock groups such as the Who yet retained its core black audience.19 Stretching beyond R&B and soul and the stages of the Chitlin’ Circuit and even the Apollo, Labelle exemplifi es Royster’s eccentric performer, from its Afrofuturist presentation in the group’s costumes and makeup (such as they wore on the cover of the July 3, 1975, issue of Rolling Stone), to its landmark Metropolitan Opera House and other stage and television performances, to its recordings.

Labelle’s 1974 soul ballad “You Turn Me On” was written by Nona Hendryx, who emerged as the group’s primary songwriter.20 The music is written in a minor key, and the text is full of ambiguity. First, we are not sure of the gender of either subject or object. Second, we are not fully sure of the status of the relationship. Our speaker reveals complex emotions: coming to terms with the end of a relationship that one can easily hear as not yet fully concluded. What we are certain of is its erotic nature, as heard in the chorus and bridge. Labelle performed the song on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, which was broadcast on television February 22, 1975, and is now available online.21 In the video we see Labelle as having moved beyond the mainstream media’s limiting girl group / soul diva dichotomies to appear as otherworldly beings clad in silver lamé, the same colors they encouraged their

18 Royster, Sounding Like a No- No, 8. 19 For more on black women and rock music, see the work of Maureen Mahon, especially “Listening

for Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton’s Voice: The Sound of Race and Gender Transgressions in Rock and Roll,” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 15 (2011): 1– 17.

20 Labelle, Nightbirds, Epic KE 33075, LP, 1974, reissued on CD EK 33075, 1988. 21 See the website Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, http:// www .donkirshner .com /bands/. For videogra-

phy, see the Vintage Rock TV Archive, https:// sites .google .com /site /vintagerocktv /usa /don - kirshner - rock - concert, and TV .com, http:// www .tv .com /shows /don - kirshners - rock - concert /february - 22– 1975- average- wh ite- band- the- guess- who- labelle- 2680926/.

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Metropolitan Opera audience to wear.22 Patti takes us to church, colliding sacred and secular, not only with her blues- pentatonic, melismatic virtuoso vocals but with the way in which she commands the stage: dancing, prancing, bowing and bending at the waist, as if caught up in the Spirit at a Pentecostal church service in a state of ecstatic worship, or perhaps the preacher exhorting a sensual homily. But we are not drawn to the mourners’ bench— though the song’s minor verses would indicate so. Rather, we are brought to the precipice of a decidedly erotic performance, though not one in which LaBelle, Hendryx, or the bikini- clad Dash is off ered for consumption. Gripped, we are drawn into a performance where we view a future black female body empowered to delight simultaneously in an Afro- cized and Afro- sized Kama Sutra of erotic pleasure without the chains of the bad relationship. We know she is empowered, for rather than singing about how her man (or wo- man) done her wrong, she has either ended it or will simply come and go as she pleases, returning to the source of pleasure, but without the pain that a more structured and confi gured relationship brings. We are presented with something absolutely, sensually delightful toward the end of the performance: the sounds of three women’s voices twining, a- switchin’ and a- twistin’, slippin’, and slidin’ around each other. As LaBelle’s and Hendryx’s voices move from unison to harmony, Dash’s soars climactically above— all in stop- time. Three women so quaringly beg, “Don’t stop / what you’re doing.” In what we both hear on the recording and see in the television broadcast, Labelle presents queer performances that push back on so many diff erent levels, challenging, for instance, (1) the music industry’s off ering of black women’s primarily objectifi ed bodies for visual consumption; (2) the image of the long- suff ering woman who will stand by her man to her own detriment; (3) what Royster deems the respectability politics of soul music, having a clearly single woman who is glad to be free of her partner simply taking delight in a no- strings- attached relationship. Here— in an alternate quare reading of this utopian vision of black sexuality— we can hear a lesbian or bisexual, trans- , or nonheteronormative black subject on the precipice of redemptive love while still acknowledging the pain and confl ict of same- sex

22 See the July 3, 1975, cover of the rock magazine Rolling Stone. Video of Don Kirshner’s Rock Con- cert performance is available on YouTube, https:// www .youtube .com /watch ?v = 3PcusPYrFCA & list = RD3PcusPYrFCA. For more about the silver outfi ts worn by both Labelle and the audience, see the re- view of their Metropolitan Opera performance: Kirb, “Music Records: Concert Reviews— Labelle Show,” Variety (Archive: 1905– 2000), Wednesday, October 9, 1974, 58, retrieved from https:// search .proquest .com /docview /1285995009 ?accountid = 15053. Labelle’s upcoming appearance at the Metropolitan Opera was announced in Variety in July: “Metopera Wooing Rock Name Dates,” Variety, July 24, 1974, http:// search .proquest .com /docview /1017185784 ?accountid = 15053. See also “Music Records: Labelle, First Black Rock Act at Met, Will Do Same at Harkness Theatre, N.Y.,” Variety, March 5, 1975, 62, http:// search .proquest .com /docview /1286010914 ?accountid = 15053.

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relationships during the decade sandwiched between Stonewall and the modern LGBTQ rights movements, sparked by the AIDS crisis.23

Monáe/Mayweather Quaring the Afrofuture Thirty years later, we encounter another Afrofuturist quare music on a diff erent end of the spectrum, yet a successor to Labelle and other Afrofuturist funkateers and funkmeisters. In contrast to the hopeful queerly erotic redemption heard in “You Turn Me On,” Janelle Monáe off ers up a dystopian vision of the postapoca- lyptic Afrofuture in a musical genre she terms “cybersoul.”24 Over three CDs she tells the story of an android Cindi Mayweather, Android 57821, an Alpha Platinum 9000 who has been programmed with a “rock star profi ciency package . . . and a working soul.”25 In the artwork of all three CDs, Monáe is depicted as her android alter ego, from the robot Maria on the cover of Metropolis, with Monáe depicted in an art deco headdress that makes overt reference to the 1927 fi lm Metropolis on 2008’s The ArchAndroid, to the black- and- white- stripe- clad female droid clones on the cover of 2013’s The Electric Lady.

We are fi rst introduced to Cindi and the dystopian “Metropolis” on Monáe’s 2003 EP The Audition. In “Cindi” Monáe sings of self- acceptance; in “Metropolis” we learn of joy- control— a suppression of illicit quare love that in this case does not involve interracial or same- sex partners or even interspecies or intergalactic love. In the year 2719 outlaw love is that between humans and cyborgs. As has been noted by critics and in the blogosphere, Monáe mashes up two science- fi ction classics: the 1927 fi lm Metropolis and the 1968 Philip Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book upon which the 1982 fi lm Blade Runner is based.26 In her trilogy Monáe uses her alter ego, the android Mayweather, to explore anxiet- ies surrounding sexuality and diff erence, much as the television show— and fi lm franchise— Star Trek did. In her 1997 article, “The Monster Inside: 19th- Century Racial Constructs in the 24th- Century Mythos of Star Trek,” Denise Alessandria

23 For more on the intensity of Labelle’s performances and the way in which Patti LaBelle completely immersed herself in those performances, see Francesca T. Royster, “Labelle: Funk, Feminism, and the Poli- tics of Flight and Fight,” American Studies 52, no. 1 (2013): 77– 98, esp. 84. For information on Labelle’s early years, see Mark Anthony Neal, “Bellbottoms, Bluebelles, and the Funky- Ass White Girl,” in Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (New York: Routledge, 2003). For an overview of Nona Hendry’s career, see Sonnet Reman, “Between Rock and a Hard Place: Narrating Nona Hendryx’s Inscrutable Ca- reer,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 16, no. 1 (2006): 107– 18. For a fi rsthand account of these years, see also Patti LaBelle’s autobiography (cowritten with Laura Randolph Lancaster), Don’t Block the Blessings: Revelations of a Lifetime (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996). Larry LeGaspi’s costumes were designed for live performances and public appearances (Royster, “Labelle: Funk, Feminism,” 83).

24 See Daylanne K. English and Alvin Kim, “Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo- Afrofuturism,” American Studies 52, no. 4 (2013): 217– 30.

25 Liner notes, Metropolis, Bad Boy / Wondaland 511234- 2, 2008, CD. See also English and Kim, “Now We Want Our Funk Cut,” 219.

26 In the latter, Dick explores the question of whether androids— machines— can have feelings, which would place them on par with humans and thus deserving of equal status as living, conscious beings. In this dystopian world, nonhuman, carbon- based life forms have become extinct as the result of nuclear world war, and humans have, largely, been replaced by androids. In both the book and fi lm, bounty hunters kill rogue androids— in the fi lm, those who have returned to Earth from the outer space colonies.

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Hurd argues that in Star Trek, race is not problematized while anxieties revolve around the mixing between humans and alien species such as Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, Betazoids, and others.27 In a spoken verse, Monáe counters the stereo- types that humans have of wired folk: they can be bought or sold; they are bionic strumpets; they have no feelings. Cindi longs for another world where she can express her forbidden love for the human, Sir Anthony Greendown. Indeed, in the call- in radio segment with WDRD DJ Crash Crash, “Good Morning Midnight (In- terlude)” and “The Chrome Shoppe (Interlude),” heard on 2013’s The Electric Lady, we hear rebellious droids call in, supporting “our favorite fugitive, Cindi May- weather.” In the last call- in segment, “Our Favorite Fugitive (Interlude),” one caller, Time University student Josh, who has been following the Droid Underground, asks if those in the electric community believe Mayweather is not only the Electric Lady but also the ArchAndroid. Aft er being cut off by Crash Crash, who will not allow Josh’s treasonous talk, Josh exclaims, “Robot Love is Queer!”

Monáe further explores the dystopian society that forbids these interspe- cies human- droid relationships. By 2008’s Metropolis EP, Cindi Mayweather has become an outlaw who is to be “disassembled” because of her love for Greendown. The album opens with the bounty hunters being given their marching orders. Mayweather sings about being an “alien from Outer Space” who is now hunted. The video of “Many Moons” confl ates the fashion runway with both the slave auc- tion and commoditized sex.28 We see various citizens and denizens of Metropolis bidding on androids, including a white couple bidding on Suzie Scorcher. The wife whispers in her husband’s ear. As Mayweather asks, “Are you bold enough to reach for love,” we observe a quare visual exchange between the white couple and the black droid, Scorcher, a scene that is followed by Mayweather’s rap, modeled on Madonna’s “Vogue.” In contrast with Madonna’s original, however, Mayweather recounts no list of glamorous Hollywood movie stars. This is a mélange of soci- ety’s ills and outcasts and personal physical and mental health issues— a catalog recited against a visual montage of disturbing historical images, culminating in a mushroom cloud of the apocalypse. As she raps, Monáe performs dance steps that are a veritable primer in the African American vernacular dance of James Brown, Michael Jackson, Prince— the mashed potato, the slide, the moonwalk. At one point aft er a traumatic memory, Mayweather seems to short- circuit and lose control. The audience— including a chorus in Venetian plague- doctor masks iden- tifi ed as Deep Cotton Punk Prophets— witnesses her short- circuit and deactivation by a bounty hunter as her body is borne aloft . Having been lowered to the ground, she is bid home by Lady Maestra, the Master of the Show Droids, ironically mount-

27 Star Trek, Hurd argues, presents a utopian vision of harmonious race relations between blacks and whites, as well as other people of color, on the one hand, yet it nonetheless continues to perpetuate nineteenth- century racial tropes, on the other, chiefl y, the Tragic Mulatto. See Denise Alessandria Hurd, “The Monster Inside: 19th- Century Racial Constructs in the 24th- Century Mythos of Star Trek,” Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 23– 34.

28 The video can be found on Monáe’s website, http:// www .jmonae .com /video /many - moons - offi cial - video, as well as on her offi cial channel on YouTube.

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ed on a white horse and surrounded by a chorus of veiled women, simultaneously recalling bridesmaids and postmodern Afro- Valkyries.

If Mayweather is a droid engaged in an illegal, miscegenational queer love aff air, Monáe’s persona is also a rebel, as we learn in the third chapter of the trilogy, a prequel that provides information about the connection between Monáe and Mayweather. Monáe, born in 2719, was cloned as the android, then traveled back to the twenty- fi rst century. Mayweather, however, is the leader of Wondaland, a group of rebels, as we learn in the video for “Q.U.E.E.N.” (directed by Alan Ferguson):

It’s hard to stop rebels that time- travel. But we at the Time Council pride ourselves on doing just that. Welcome to the Living Museum, where legendary rebels from throughout history have been frozen in suspended animation. Here in this particu- lar exhibit you will fi nd members of Wondaland and their notorious leader, Janelle Monáe, along with her dangerous Badoula Oblongata. Together they launched proj- ect Q.U.E.E.N., a musical weapons program in the twenty- fi rst century. Researchers are still deciphering the nature of this program and hunting the various freedom movements that Wondaland disguised as songs in motion pictures and works of art.29

Monáe and her zombie band are brought back to life to perform “Q.U.E.E.N.” If in the previous parts of the trilogy Monáe sheds light on illicit love, here she ex- pands ideas about the black feminine. Monáe calls out all those who criticize her and other “unruly” outcasts, asking, “Am I a freak?” and declaiming, “Don’t judge me.” Surrounded by her clones, she lists a range of behaviors in which she engag- es without apology. Here, Monáe deliberately plays on diff erent meanings of the word “freak,” from simply an odd or strange person to someone who engages in a range of sexual practices, from vanilla heterosexual to kinky to queer. She simply lives life on her terms, refusing to conform to society’s notion of a heteronorma- tive black feminine. Midway through, Badoula Oblongata (Erykah Badu’s alter ego in Monáe’s dystopian Afrofuture) joins in, off ering a freedom song.

At one point in the video, we see one of the rebels seated in front of a vin- tage typewriter, typing “We will create and destroy ten art movements in ten years.” The track concludes with another Monáe rap— a manifesto. Throughout the fi rst part of the video, we have seen Monáe surrounded by the dancers, a chorus of her clones. Aft er the Badu interlude, we see Monáe alone in a James Bond sequence, dressed in a tuxedo. In the background, we hear a sonic swirl that alludes to and quotes passages from Marvin Gaye’s groundbreaking album of social commentary, What’s Goin’ On (1971). Similar to the way in which Gaye addressed the Vietnam War, drug addiction, environmentalism, and a range of issues facing African Amer- icans post– civil rights to fi nd hope in the face of nihilism, Monáe reaches out to those on the margins, such as those she names in the acronym. She said in a Fuse. TV interview with Jeff Benjamin, “I wanted to create something for people who

29 Prologue by digital museum docent, “Q.U.E.E.N.” music video.

Murchison, Let’s Flip It! Quare Emancipations 89

feel like they want to give up because they’re not accepted by society.”30 Together, these three, who appear as distinct segments of both the song and the video— the chorus of clones who are unapologetic freaks; the brain, the central nervous system, Badoula; and the rebel, Monáe— will lead the oppressed droids (and pre- sumably others) to a better way: freedom. Ultimately, they fi ght against economic exploitation and social injustice. Clad in the ultimate male power suit of semifor- mal evening wear, the tuxedo (which Monáe wears as a uniform to pay homage to her parents, whose work as blue- collar laborers required them to wear uniforms), along with a red sash more typically worn by heads of state or monarchs, Monáe appropriates visual symbols of white masculinity, wealth, and power to call out and push back against oppression.

Conclusion In her rap manifesto, Monáe begins, “Let’s fl ip it.” While calling out injustices, she also makes a very telling and empowering statement: “She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel” and later, “Yeah, I’ma keep sangin’, I’ma keep writin’ songs / I’m tired of Marvin asking me ‘What’s Going On?’” She has indeed written her own script, a dystopia in which her alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, leads the an- droids in rebelling against state control and sanction of consenting relationships, fi ghting for droid and cyborg rights to be recognized as fully human, capable of emotions, intellect, and love and of forming bonds with one another across multi- ple social statuses and restrictions, paralleling the struggles of black quares within multiple communities. Though Monáe’s future is dystopian, it is optimistic: her manifesto lays out the script for subverting dominant paradigms about poverty, race and racism, equality and equity. The Afrofuturist character of Mayweather and Monáe of the future are the channels through which the present- day Monáe critiques contemporary hegemonic American society, which circumscribes so many aspects of the lives of black women, including their quareness. As we can see, Monáe’s Afrofuturism resonates with and is in conversation with Labelle’s. In the 1970s the group— in addition to its songs of social commentary— presented a kind of black female sexuality that moved beyond the respectability politics of soul. And, as we hear in the ambiguity of “You Turn Me On,” Nona Hendryx, along with Patti LaBelle and Sarah Dash, could explore quareness, albeit coded.

Labelle and Monáe— along with other Afrofuturists— are instructive. We can indeed, as musicologists, theorists, ethnomusicologists, music pedagogues, fl ip it. We can change the dominant script, switch up our narratives, and not just re- claim the music and voices of black quares but recognize their struggles, agency, and ways of imagining a black future.

30 Benjamin, “Janelle Monáe Says.”

90 Women & Music Volume 22

gayle murchison is associate professor of music at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of The American Musical Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetic of Copland’s New American Music, the Early Works, 1921– 1938 (University of Michi- gan Press, 2012), and her research interests include William Grant Still, Mary Lou Williams, Zap Mama, and the music of social and cultural movements (such as the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights movements, as well as Afro- European studies). She has contributed a book chapter, “Mary Lou Williams’s Girl Stars and the Politics of Negotiation: Jazz, Gender, and Jim Crow,” to Jill Sullivan’s edited collection Women’s Bands in America: Performing Music and Gender in Society (Rowman & Littlefi eld, 2016). Professor Murchison is currently the editor of Black Music Research Journal.

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