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Welcome to my blog!  I will be doing an extratextual reading of Janelle Monáe’s discography, paying particular focus on the figure of the cyborg, and seeing what narratives and messages we can gather from this evaluation.

Though the blog can be read through a single scroll, here are some navigation links in case you want to view it through any of these lenses:

Author’s Notes- Any original content written by the author.

Quotes- Just pulled quotes from various Afrofuturist texts.

Gifs- Just GIFs featured in the blog.

Extratextual Analysis- The use of text outside of Janelle Monáe’s discography to contribute to and elaborate upon her work.

Dirty Computer- Posts just relating to Janelle Monàe’s ‘emotion picture’ Dirty Computer.

Metropolis Suite- Posts just relating to Janelle Monàe’s multi-album narrative The Metropolis Suite.

Liminality of the Android- Author’s specific commentary of the role of the liminality of the android in Monàe’s work and the extratextual analysis relating to it.

The Human Focus- Author’s specific commentary on the role of the human focus in Monàe’s work and the extratextual analysis relating to it.

Narratives of Resistance- Author’s specific commentary on the role of narratives of resistance in Monàe’s work and the extratextual analysis relating to it.

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Extratextuality as a Theoretical Model

I wanted to start with an explanation on why I want to do an extratextual reading of Monáe. The first is to understand that no texts exist in a vacuum. Every piece of media draws upon others, references are made due to the conscious or subconscious effort of the creator, and providing an extratextual analysis will allow us to look beyond the media itself and into the implications and messages those references create. This is especially potent with music, a genre which is by nature a collaborative process. Monáe worked with a huge amount of collaborators to produce all of her works, and presented here I have just a small listing of some of the outside sources Monáe drew upon for just one song. This kind of extratextual focus is especially important for art in Afrofuturism, which is a genre that draws upon theory, visual art, tradition, music, and history to create a synthesis of meaning greater than the sum of its parts.

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‘Be wary of the Techno-Fix’: Neo-Afrofuturism

While many other writings on cyberfeminism and tech theory seem to take a very optimistic approach about the ways in which humanity can be aided through tech, Janelle Monáe uses the lens of afrofuturism and a black, feminist cyborg theory to push against her own objectification. In both ‘Dirty Computer’ and the Metropolis Suite, Monáe’s characters act as subcultural leaders in a rebellion against a technofascist future.

To focus on Janelle Monáe means to unravel a complex and nonlinear narrative of Monáe’s relationship to technology, feminism, queerness, and art. A few ethnomusicologists and cultural theorists have referred to Monáe’s position as ‘Neo-Afrofuturism’. While Monae definitely pays homage to many of her Afrofuturist forebears, she casts forward into a new kind of Afrofuturism; one that references the past and the future as well as the present in both her music and her politics, drawing upon her experiences as a black, pansexual woman and genres ranging from contemporary electronic to 70’s funk.

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The cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction….The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.

Donna J. Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”

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Cindi Mayweather and the Liminality of the Android

Janelle Monáe has two main characters she utilizes in her discography: Cindi Mayweather and Jane 57821. Cindi Mayweather, present on her first two albums Metropolis and ArchAndroid, is an android in Star Core Metropolis, an imagined city based on Friz Lang’s Metropolis. In Star Core, liberation movements — android power, black power, queer pride, and freedom of artistic expression — have been suppressed, but remain preserved through musical artifacts that surface as objects of quaint curiosity to the modern citizens of Metropolis. This can be seen in the music video “Many Moons”, where androids are auctioned off to the extremely wealthy as Cindi performs in the background, dancing associated with Jazz, Funk, and Blues music. Cindi’s plot ends when she falls in love with a white human man and runs off with him–inadvertently becoming the instigator of an android rebellion.

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I’m a cybergirl without a face a heart or a mind, (a product of the man, I’m a product of the man), I’m a savior without a race (without a face).

Janelle Monáe, “Violet Stars Happy Hunting“

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I thought it would be interesting to look at Cindi in connection to Black No More, where Max Disher is also able to transcend racial barriers in his appearance. Both Disher and Cindi use their racial ambiguity to infiltrate some of the highest points of white supremacy, and their transformation renders them both a kind of ‘cyborg’, imbued with new powers through technological intervention.

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Why not be the first Negro to try it out? Sure, it was a chance, but think of getting white in three days! No more jim crow. No more insults. As a white man he could go anywhere, be anything he wanted to be, do most anything he wanted to do, be a free man at last…and probably be able to meet the girl from Atlanta. What a vision!

George Schuyler, Black No More, p. 10

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Dirty Computer and the Human Focus

In 2018’s ‘Dirty Computer’, Janelle Monáe departs from her alter ego Cindi Mayweather and focuses on a character who lives in a time closer to the present. In this ‘emotion picture’, human experiences, thoughts, and feelings are the only way to escape a hypersurveilled, memory-less techno-future. She is a ‘dirty computer’, a human who refuses to conform to societal expectations. Her character, Jane 57821, attempts to escape a technofascist dictatorship fixated on memory wiping by going into hiding and throwing underground raves with her two lovers. Much of this album is focused on the human experiences of Monáe’s character– the elements that scientists are trying to wipe out when she is captured and subjected to memory erasure.

Many critics have said that this was Monáe’s reckoning to a deeper portrayal of her true self. I think it may be Monáe providing another path to resistance alongside Cindi Mayweather, one in which focus on human experience, emotion, and empathy towards what grounds us. Many of her songs are about experiences Monae has lived through, including Django Jane and Screwed.

In her song PYNK, where this photo is also from, she asserts that her experiences with her lover, played by Tessa Thompson, will leave a lasting impact even in the face of adversity. PYNK also uses yonic visual imagery to ground the song in a lived, bodily experience.

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“I just wanna paint your toes and in the morning kiss your nose

Cause when I’m with you I don’t feel afraid

Maybe this love will indoctrinate

I echo every word that you say

The way you feel, yeah I feel the same way

Remember the night when I combed your hair

I hope I didn’t freak you out when I stared

I donate my truth to you like I’m rich

The truth is love ain’t got no off switch

So if the walls come tumbling down

And if the ocean really does drown

And if my memories never come back

I’ll still remember when we were first was naked at

Picture our faces and new oasis

When we made love we left many traces

Just like the blush that’s on your cheeks

Deep inside we’re all just Pynk.”

- Janelle Monae, “PYNK”

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The Role of Historical Memory

Historical memory plays a large part in Monae’s narrative, and in the genre of Afrofuturism in general. In the Metropolis Suite, Cindi is special in that she can, at moments, remember the past, referencing artists such as Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, George Clinton; as well as Afrofuturist Sun Ra and queer icons like Freddie Mercury, Marlene Dietrich, and David Bowie, before being subjected to a “Nevermind” gas that causes her to forget her past.

In Dirty Computer, Jane desperately tries to hold onto her memories even while they are being wiped away by the same “Nevermind” process. Memory of her past and her narrative to a larger history ground her in herself and allow for her to break free from the hegemonic power structures that bind her.

I wanted to include a quote from Butler’s Parable of the Sower series and think about the role of historical memory in Kindred as well. Both characters have strong relationships with history and memory to ground them in their existence and help them through hard times. This relates back to a larger narrative in Afrofuturism and African diasporic writing as a whole, as memory and narrative play a huge part in story telling, history writing, and cultural remembrance.

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We have lived before. We will live again. We will be silk, Stone, Mind, Star. We will be scattered, Gathered, Molded, Probed. We will live And we will serve life. We will shape God And God will shape us Again, Always again, Forevermore.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

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Narratives of Resistance

Monae embodies narratives of resistance both through her own personal narrative and the narratives of her characters. Though they occupy an imagined future, Cindi and Jane face adversities that are commonly found today: hypersurveillance, capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism and more.

Her use of androids and supercomputers shows a subcultural mode of resistance; What Monae is offering are different paths to resistance, all centering on two messages: remember your past and be assured of your humanity.

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If cyborg consciousness is to be considered anything other than that which replicates the now dominant global world order, then cyborg consciousness must be developed out of a set of technologies that can provide the guides for survival and resistance under first world transnational cultural conditions.

Chela Sandoval, “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed”

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At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified– at least that’s what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you’ve turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you’ve shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don’t have it.

Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, p. 344