Using music as technology is what both imprisons blackness and liberates it – Only the perm creates methods of resistance that resolves BOTH the links AND the AFF

Similarly to the struggle for narrative and rebellion in “Many Moons,” Monáe wages a battle for the control of the narrative that defines her in the video for her song “Q.U.E.E.N.” Technology features heavily in both the narrative at stake, blackness as anti- technological, and the means by which that battle is fought. Monáe traces the dangers of technology and their associated capitalist narratives as a means of literal and figurative imprisonment, echoing past uses of technology against black bodies. She also holds hope for technologies to be used against the systems that created them. While the audience is not privy to the apparatus by which they travel through time, technology is both the mechanism by which the rebels are imprisoned and their means of escape. The rebels have been momentarily detained physically by the museum’s animation suspension technology and rhetorically contained by its narrative, but they are not forever halted. It is the technology of the turntable and the musical extension of the DJ that connects them to the larger community that ultimately frees them from their imprisonment. Two young women who had been “touched” by the music storm the museum and play the record that frees the members of Wondaland. Part and parcel of Monáe’s use of community is in- group membership and the transmission of coded messages across synapses of time between “cells,” where cell refers both to a biological unit and to an individual group of “terrorists” in Monáe’s “freedom movements.” These messages are illegible to the outside world, decipherable only to in- group members. As the voiceover in “Q.U.E.E.N.” notes, “Researchers are still deciphering the nature of this program and hunting the various freedom movements that Wondaland disguised as songs, emotion pictures, and works of art.”47 These messages, transmitted through the music, are designed in such a way as to block access to their meaning by the researchers who, years later, still struggle to decode them. This allows the revolution to continue long after the original revolutionaries have been captured. Working beyond the temporal boundaries of their own lives in this manner enables the Wondaland crew to time- travel in multiple ways. This community’s identity is also a racially marked one. This is apparent in the contrast between the white cultural markers of the museum and the markers of blackness to be found on the bodies of the Wondaland members, in the lyrics of “Q.U.E.E.N.,” and in the imagery of the Wondaland exhibit. The museum is marked by whiteness in many ways: it is represented visually by a white woman who speaks with a British accent against a backdrop of classical music, indicating a cultural whiteness, while the space of the museum itself is a blizzard of a literal whiteness. In contrast, the Wondaland exhibit is equally marked by blackness. In addition to the blackness of Wondaland’s bodies and those of the black women who free them, the painted African tribesmen, the skull with the gold tooth, and Monáe’s music equally mark a cultural blackness. Activated through the musical impulses across the boundaries of space and time, this community liberates Wondaland and allows the cycle of rebellion to begin anew. The “musical weapons program” of Wondaland is the tool by which that liberation is made possible. Musical technologies have become weaponized, have become a tool in the fi ght for liberation. The weaponization of music so key to Monáe’s revolution in Q.U.E.E.N. has a long history in African American thought and certainly Afrofuturist thought. For example, Sun Ra’s 1974 fi lm Space Is the Place opens with the black science fiction icon’s discussion of the power of music as a tool of liberation. While wandering through the woods on a planet in a distant galaxy, Sun Ra notes: Th e music is diff erent here. Th e vibrations are diff erent. Not like planet Earth. Planet Earth sounds of guns, anger, frustration. . . . We’ll set up a colony for black people here. See what they can do on a planet all their own without any white people there. Th ey could drink in the beauty of this planet. It will aff ect their vibrations . . . for the better, of course. . . . We’ll bring them here through either isotope teleportation or transfelequization or better still teleport the whole planet here through music.48 Music, space travel, and utopia are deeply entwined in what Afrofuturist scholar Graham Locke refers to as Sun Ra’s “Astro Black mythology.”49 Whereas Sun Ra does not characterize music as a weapon, it certainly exists as technology that can connect to distant points and functions as a form of transportation between them. And similar to the racialized community in Janelle Monáe’s “Q.U.E.E.N.,” this is a community for black people and one that, according to the black separatist thought of the day, represents the potential to better black lives: “It will aff ect their vibrations . . . for the better, of course.”50 According to Sun Ra, once away from the infl uence of white people, black people may be able to achieve something greater, a utopian community made possible through musical vibrations. Undeniably, music is the core of his vision. Music, in Sun Ra’s cosmic philosophy and refl ecting the black nationalism of the era, functions not just as the means of transportation, but the “vibrations” of black people form their very essence. The music of the planet and connections built among the community through these musical sound waves are what will improve black lives. Music serves a similar function in “Q.U.E.E.N.,” uniting would- be rebels across time and space, but also dismantling the discourses that defi ne blackness as inferior.