Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid

Alyssa Favreau

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501355721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In Janelle Monáe's full-length debut, the science fiction concept album The ArchAndroid, the android Cindi Mayweather is on the run from the authorities for the crime of loving a human. Living in 28th century Metropolis, Cindi fights for survival, soon realizing that she is in fact the prophesied ArchAndroid, a robot messiah meant to liberate the masses and lead them toward a wonderland where all can be free.
Taking into account the literary merit of Monáe's astounding multimedia body of work, the political relevance of the science fictional themes and aesthetics she explores, and her role as an Atlanta-based pop cultural juggernaut, this book explores the lavish world building of Cindi's story, and the many literary, cinematic, and musical influences brought together to create it. Throughout, a history of Monáe's move to Atlanta, her signing with Bad Boy Records, and the trials of developing a full-length concept album in an industry devoted to the production of marketable singles can be found, charting the artist's own rise to power. The stories of Monáe and of Cindi are inextricably entwined, each making the other more compelling, fantastical, and deeply felt.

1

Tightrope

Free your mind and your ass will follow.

—George Clinton¹

Janelle Monáe is not, as it would appear at first glance, a twenty-first-century singer-songwriter. If we are to take as truth the letters of Max Stellings, director of the Palace of the Dogs Asylum (provided as liner notes within The ArchAndroid), we must acknowledge that Janelle Monáe, patient 57821, comes to us from the year 2719. Snatched, genoraped, and de-existed—that is to say, kidnapped, her genetic code auctioned off illegally, and sent back in time—Monáe’s cloned organic compounds also exist in that far-off future as the famous android Cindi Mayweather.

Residing in Metropolis, a city where, according to Stellings, “elves and dwarves, humans and androids, clones and aliens” can be found, Cindi is a paradox. Celebrated performer but synthetic commodity, manufactured for service but so capable of love, she is at once desired and disposable, object and subject, slave and liberator. With Janelle Monáe exiled into the past, Cindi is on her own, locked in a world where “hearts of hatred rule the land” and “love is left aside.”² Destined to become the ArchAndroid, she will have to learn to navigate a world that is wholly hostile to her, and learn the power she wields as the leader of a revolution.

Of course, we have met Cindi before. In the song “Metropolis,” from Monáe’s self-released 2003 demo The Audition, we know her as a downtrodden server living on the “wired side of town.” In the EP Metropolis: The Chase Suite, Cindi becomes a star singer, falls in love with a human named Anthony Greendown, and is on the run from Droid Control. Her freedom is precarious, with the authorities and a slew of bounty hunters hot on her trail.

In The ArchAndroid, an album that encompasses suites II and III, Cindi is still in hiding, trying to stay safe, and contemplating her role in the android liberation. As the sweeping orchestral strains of the opening “Suite II Overture” give way to the relentless beat of “Dance or Die,” she tells us in tense, staccato rap that “Some will pull the gun because they want to be stars / Snatching up your life into the blink of an eye.” The music is low and anxious, unwilling to let the listener breathe easy as it pushes forward with unrelenting momentum. The tempo fits the situation. For all but its most elite citizens, Metropolis is a harsh world, where “war is in the street and it’s an eye for an eye” and the limited choices one is faced with are to “run on for your life or you can dance you can die.”

But for all the danger with which Cindi is faced, it cannot keep her attention for long. She is madly, deeply, intoxicatingly in love, and as the music shifts into “Faster,” the tone changes. Though the tempo remains urgent—Cindi’s heart continuing to beat “like a kick drum”—the music becomes lighter, relying less on a heavy bass line, record scratches and a brightened electric guitar frenetic as Cindi addresses her lover: “You, since that magic day, we’ve been like magnets in a play.” It’s a wild, star-crossed love, one that Cindi knows logically she should run from, though she finds herself instead heading straight into the sun, melted wings be damned. Anthony Greendown has cost her everything, is for all intents and purposes her “kryptonite,” and yet Cindi is caught up in an inescapable passion, wailing, “my heart beats, it beats for you and only you.”

Throughout this second suite, Cindi’s exploration of what it might mean, exactly, to be the ArchAndroid is continuously punctuated by these feelings. The ballad “Sir Greendown”—so reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn’s “Moon River” in its dreaminess—sits between “Locked Inside” and “Cold War,” songs that most explicitly deal with the class politics and robot disenfranchisement of Metropolis. But it is in the last three songs of suite II—“Oh, Maker,” “Come Alive (The War of the Roses),” and “Mushrooms & Roses”—that Cindi begins to reconcile her need for love with her duty. She first asks of the unknown being who created her, “Oh, Maker, tell me did you know / This love would burn so yellow?”—wondering, perhaps, whether her capacity for love was purposely programmed into her. The aggressive rock of “Come Alive” then takes over, with Cindi letting go and proclaiming her need for release, for pleasure, for “dancing in the dungeon every Monday night.” It’s a hoarse, screeching sexual awakening that rips through the album, setting up then giving way to the much mellower romantic psychedelia of “Mushrooms & Roses.” With Cindi, we have now arrived in “the place to be,” where “all the lonely droids and lovers have their wildest dreams.” In Metropolis we are all “virgins to the joys of loving without fear,” and this is perhaps the exact power Cindi will bring to the role of the ArchAndroid: the ability to meet persecution with unabashed joy and a love that transcends expectation and shame.

In her work Volatile Bodies, feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz writes of a desire that need not be seen as a lack, as something missing that is yearned for. Desire can, instead, be affirmative, be “what produces, what connects, what makes machinic alliances.” It is this active, creative desire that fuels the machine known as Cindi, who uses the bridge of “Locked Inside” as an invocation: “I can make a change / I can start a fire / Lord make me love again / Fill me with desire”—a repeating lyric that ends with “Lord, thank you for desire.” Cindi’s love, far from the distraction it is presented as in “Faster,” gives her the strength necessary to become the ArchAndroid. Desire will provide her with a message that will spread to the farthest reaches of Metropolis, for as Grosz writes, “desire does not take for itself a particular object whose attainment it requires; rather, it aims at nothing above its own proliferation or self-expansion.” As Cindi’s love grows, infiltrating the minds and hearts of humans and androids alike, Metropolis cannot help but change.

“Suite III Overture” begins as a reprise of “Mushrooms & Roses” and “Sir Greendown” enriched with piano, strings, and choir, a waltz in which Cindi urges us to follow in her footsteps and make our way to Wondaland. We are all “lost inside a lonely world where lovers pay the price,” and much of suite III features an array of love songs proclaiming the liberatory possibilities of desire (“I am so inspired / You touched my wires / My supernova shining bright” from “Wondaland,” as an example). Love and desire, as Cindi feels them, act as salvation and extend far beyond a single object of affection. In fact, “Mushrooms & Roses” confirms that Cindi has loved at least once before, a “regular” with “long, gray hair, beautiful smile, and rosy cheeks.” Her name is Blueberry Mary and she’s crazy about Cindi (“she’s wild man, she’s wild!”). Cindi’s desire is thus explicitly queer, both in her subversive android/human love for Anthony Greendown and in terms of gender.

Arguably the earliest hint of Monáe’s own sexual identity in her work, Blueberry Mary will be referenced again as “Mary” in the single “Q.U.E.E.N.” from the 2013 Electric Lady, and as “Mary Apple 53” in the Dirty Computer emotion picture in 2018. A real-world example of why Cindi’s interspecies love is so transgressive, mentions of Mary situate listeners in politics that are far from science fictional, grounding and empowering Monáe’s metaphor. In Cruising Utopia, queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz discusses queerness as a concept that goes far beyond same-gender attraction, acting rather as a “rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality and concrete possibility for another world.” The queerness of Cindi’s love, her subversion of the expectations placed upon her as a second-class citizen of Metropolis, is precisely what is needed to enact change. In loving freely, Cindi reimagines an entirely new world, and Muñoz, linking queer fantasy to utopian longing, writes of both together becoming “contributing conditions of possibility for political transformation.” He urges us to “dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” in much the same way as Cindi does when she sings “There’s a world inside where dreams meet each other / Once you go it’s hard to come back.”³ Queerness, Muñoz continues, is a “longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling of the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”

Cindi’s desire, and her desire to love free of stigma, throws into sharp relief the limitations of Metropolis, and indeed our own world, all the while offering a glimpse of something else, something freer and more beautiful. Queerness, according to Muñoz, “is an invitation to desire differently, to desire more, to desire better”; queered desire makes Cindi the ArchAndroid, the messiah capable of making imagined worlds a reality. Though the end goal must be for us all to feel like ArchAndroids in our own lives, for the moment it is a power that is Cindi’s alone, as Anthony in particular realizes in “57821”: “Sir Greendown told his dear Cindi . . . I saved you so you’d save the world / ‘Cause you’re the only one.” When Max Stellings—asylum director and potential convert—asks, “If the ArchAndroid does exist . . . can she truly save us?,” the answer seems quite obvious.

And what of Cindi’s unwilling progenitor exiled in our time, left in a world so far from her own? For that, we’ll have to leave our twenty-eighth-century Oz, and make our way instead to Kansas, to meet a dreamer called not Dorothy but Janelle.

* * *

Born December 1, 1985, in Kansas City to a large Baptist family, Janelle Monáe Robinson grew up in Wyandotte County, one of the poorest in the city. Her mother was employed as a janitor while her stepfather worked at the post office and father drove a garbage truck. From a young age she contributed to the family’s bills, using money won at talent competitions. Speaking to the Chicago Tribune in 2010, Monáe attributes her leadership skills to this early role as provider: “I had to be the rock in my family for a very long time,” she says. “I always felt my duty was to help and guide.”

But Monáe was nurtured in turn, her early love for music and theater encouraged. In addition to her talent show experiences—where her cover of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” secured her a win three years in a row—Monáe took part in school theater productions and wrote her own musicals at the Coterie Theatre’s Young Playwrights’ Round Table. (An early musical, in an homage to Stevie Wonder’s Journey through “The Secret Life of Plants,” featured a boy and girl falling in love with a plant.) Though money was tight, Monáe’s mother would buy her talent show outfits. Her great-grandmothers played organ in church and taught piano.

In this supportive and musically rich environment, Monáe thrived. “It was a time when I felt most free, on stage,” she would go one to tell Terry Gross on the Fresh Air podcast in 2009. And she made the most of that time performing, even getting kicked out of church as a young child for singing Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” during the sermon. “She was always singing songs,” says Monáe’s mother, Janet Hawthorne. “It was uncontrollable.”⁴ In a Baptist church, music precedes the sermon, so that the congregation is able to “get the Holy Spirit in the music and be ready for church,” Hawthorne says. But it was the music, instead, “where Janelle was ready,” and when it’s the music that feeds your soul, the sermon cannot help but feel like an anticlimax.

After high school, Monáe auditioned for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) in New York City—the only school she applied to. Seeing the academy as a golden ticket opportunity, Monáe auditioned with the song “In My Own Little Corner” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, a song she felt a strong emotional connection to after portraying the lead role in a school production. “My life really depended on that moment,” she would tell Gross, and it’s easy to imagine Monáe, poised to step into the next stage of her career, bringing life to a song that details the liberatory power of imagination. In her “own little corner in [her] own little chair” in Kansas City, Monáe too was dreaming of bigger things.

Despite the stalwart presence of her mother, grandmother, and aunts who, as Monáe would later write in a website bio, “to this day are some of the most powerful beings on the planet,” Monáe’s home life was turbulent, her childhood marked by her father’s prison stints and twenty-one-year battle with addiction. A musical man himself (Monáe believes he could have had a record deal if he hadn’t struggled with his addiction), Michael Robinson Summers coming in and out of his young daughter’s life had a profound impact on her. “At an early age I was exposed to those around me who had gone to really dark places in their lives because of drugs,” says Monáe,⁵ though this only strengthened her resolve to leave and make something of herself. “I realized that I could go away and show that just because...