1
Tightrope
Free your mind and your ass will follow.
âGeorge Clinton1
Janelle MonĂĄe 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 MonĂĄe, patient 57821, comes to us from the year 2719. Snatched, genoraped, and de-existedâthat is to say, kidnapped, her genetic code auctioned off illegally, and sent back in timeâMonĂĄeâs 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, âelves and dwarves, humans and androids, clones and aliensâ 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 MonĂĄe exiled into the past, Cindi is on her own, locked in a world where âhearts of hatred rule the landâ and âlove is left aside.â2 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 âMetropolis,â from MonĂĄeâs self-released 2003 demo The Audition, we know her as a downtrodden server living on the âwired side of town.â 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 âSuite II Overtureâ give way to the relentless beat of âDance or Die,â she tells us in tense, staccato rap that âSome will pull the gun because they want to be stars / Snatching up your life into the blink of an eye.â 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 âwar is in the street and itâs an eye for an eyeâ and the limited choices one is faced with are to ârun on for your life or you can dance you can die.â
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 âFaster,â the tone changes. Though the tempo remains urgentâCindiâs heart continuing to beat âlike a kick drumââthe music becomes lighter, relying less on a heavy bass line, record scratches and a brightened electric guitar frenetic as Cindi addresses her lover: âYou, since that magic day, weâve been like magnets in a play.â Itâs 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 âkryptonite,â and yet Cindi is caught up in an inescapable passion, wailing, âmy heart beats, it beats for you and only you.â
Throughout this second suite, Cindiâs exploration of what it might mean, exactly, to be the ArchAndroid is continuously punctuated by these feelings. The ballad âSir Greendownââso reminiscent of Audrey Hepburnâs âMoon Riverâ in its dreaminessâsits between âLocked Insideâ and âCold War,â songs that most explicitly deal with the class politics and robot disenfranchisement of Metropolis. But it is in the last three songs of suite IIââOh, Maker,â âCome Alive (The War of the Roses),â and âMushrooms & Rosesââthat Cindi begins to reconcile her need for love with her duty. She first asks of the unknown being who created her, âOh, Maker, tell me did you know / This love would burn so yellow?ââwondering, perhaps, whether her capacity for love was purposely programmed into her. The aggressive rock of âCome Aliveâ then takes over, with Cindi letting go and proclaiming her need for release, for pleasure, for âdancing in the dungeon every Monday night.â Itâs a hoarse, screeching sexual awakening that rips through the album, setting up then giving way to the much mellower romantic psychedelia of âMushrooms & Roses.â With Cindi, we have now arrived in âthe place to be,â where âall the lonely droids and lovers have their wildest dreams.â In Metropolis we are all âvirgins to the joys of loving without fear,â 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 âwhat produces, what connects, what makes machinic alliances.â It is this active, creative desire that fuels the machine known as Cindi, who uses the bridge of âLocked Insideâ as an invocation: âI can make a change / I can start a fire / Lord make me love again / Fill me with desireââa repeating lyric that ends with âLord, thank you for desire.â Cindiâs love, far from the distraction it is presented as in âFaster,â 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, âdesire does not take for itself a particular object whose attainment it requires; rather, it aims at nothing above its own proliferation or self-expansion.â As Cindiâs love grows, infiltrating the minds and hearts of humans and androids alike, Metropolis cannot help but change.
âSuite III Overtureâ begins as a reprise of âMushrooms & Rosesâ and âSir Greendownâ 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 âlost inside a lonely world where lovers pay the price,â and much of suite III features an array of love songs proclaiming the liberatory possibilities of desire (âI am so inspired / You touched my wires / My supernova shining brightâ from âWondaland,â as an example). Love and desire, as Cindi feels them, act as salvation and extend far beyond a single object of affection. In fact, âMushrooms & Rosesâ confirms that Cindi has loved at least once before, a âregularâ with âlong, gray hair, beautiful smile, and rosy cheeks.â Her name is Blueberry Mary and sheâs crazy about Cindi (âsheâs wild man, sheâs wild!â). Cindiâs 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 MonĂĄeâs own sexual identity in her work, Blueberry Mary will be referenced again as âMaryâ in the single âQ.U.E.E.N.â from the 2013 Electric Lady, and as âMary Apple 53â in the Dirty Computer emotion picture in 2018. A real-world example of why Cindiâs interspecies love is so transgressive, mentions of Mary situate listeners in politics that are far from science fictional, grounding and empowering MonĂĄeâs metaphor. In Cruising Utopia, queer theorist JosĂ© Esteban Muñoz discusses queerness as a concept that goes far beyond same-gender attraction, acting rather as a ârejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality and concrete possibility for another world.â The queerness of Cindiâs 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 âcontributing conditions of possibility for political transformation.â He urges us to âdream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worldsâ in much the same way as Cindi does when she sings âThereâs a world inside where dreams meet each other / Once you go itâs hard to come back.â3 Queerness, Muñoz continues, is a âlonging 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.â
Cindiâs 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, âis an invitation to desire differently, to desire more, to desire betterâ; 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 Cindiâs alone, as Anthony in particular realizes in â57821â: âSir Greendown told his dear Cindi . . . I saved you so youâd save the world / âCause youâre the only one.â When Max Stellingsâasylum director and potential convertâasks, âIf the ArchAndroid does exist . . . can she truly save us?,â the answer seems quite obvious.
And what of Cindiâs unwilling progenitor exiled in our time, left in a world so far from her own? For that, weâll have to leave our twenty-eighth-century Oz, and make our way instead to Kansas, to meet a dreamer called not Dorothy but Janelle.
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Born December 1, 1985, in Kansas City to a large Baptist family, Janelle MonĂĄe 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 familyâs bills, using money won at talent competitions. Speaking to the Chicago Tribune in 2010, MonĂĄe attributes her leadership skills to this early role as provider: âI had to be the rock in my family for a very long time,â she says. âI always felt my duty was to help and guide.â
But MonĂĄe was nurtured in turn, her early love for music and theater encouraged. In addition to her talent show experiencesâwhere her cover of âThe Miseducation of Lauryn Hillâ secured her a win three years in a rowâMonĂĄe took part in school theater productions and wrote her own musicals at the Coterie Theatreâs Young Playwrightsâ Round Table. (An early musical, in an homage to Stevie Wonderâs Journey through âThe Secret Life of Plants,â featured a boy and girl falling in love with a plant.) Though money was tight, MonĂĄeâs mother would buy her talent show outfits. Her great-grandmothers played organ in church and taught piano.
In this supportive and musically rich environment, MonĂĄe thrived. âIt was a time when I felt most free, on stage,â 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 Jacksonâs âBeat Itâ during the sermon. âShe was always singing songs,â says MonĂĄeâs mother, Janet Hawthorne. âIt was uncontrollable.â4 In a Baptist church, music precedes the sermon, so that the congregation is able to âget the Holy Spirit in the music and be ready for church,â Hawthorne says. But it was the music, instead, âwhere Janelle was ready,â and when itâs the music that feeds your soul, the sermon cannot help but feel like an anticlimax.
After high school, MonĂĄe auditioned for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) in New York Cityâthe only school she applied to. Seeing the academy as a golden ticket opportunity, MonĂĄe auditioned with the song âIn My Own Little Cornerâ from Rodgers and Hammersteinâs Cinderella, a song she felt a strong emotional connection to after portraying the lead role in a school production. âMy life really depended on that moment,â she would tell Gross, and itâs easy to imagine MonĂĄe, poised to step into the next stage of her career, bringing life to a song that details the liberatory power of imagination. In her âown little corner in [her] own little chairâ in Kansas City, MonĂĄe too was dreaming of bigger things.
Despite the stalwart presence of her mother, grandmother, and aunts who, as MonĂĄe would later write in a website bio, âto this day are some of the most powerful beings on the planet,â MonĂĄeâs home life was turbulent, her childhood marked by her fatherâs prison stints and twenty-one-year battle with addiction. A musical man himself (MonĂĄe believes he could have had a record deal if he hadnât struggled with his addiction), Michael Robinson Summers coming in and out of his young daughterâs life had a profound impact on her. âAt an early age I was exposed to those around me who had gone to really dark places in their lives because of drugs,â says MonĂĄe,5 though this only strengthened her resolve to leave and make something of herself. âI realized that I could go away and show that just because...