Monáe transforms racist markers of capitalism

Part of the revolutionary potential of Janelle Monáe as digital griot is her ability to layer these “competing and complementary beats” to critique previous historical moments and their continuing impact on the present. For instance, “Q.U.E.E.N.” recalls and critiques the nineteenth- century pseudoscience that sought to prove black inferiority by examining every body part. Indeed, the exhibit of the frozen bodies of the rebels echoes the display of Saartje Baartman.87 The positioning of Badoula Oblongata’s body at the beginning of the video further supports this claim. While she is positioned as the leader of the three revolutionaries she stands beside, clearly planning some sort of response, Oblongata’s back is to the viewing audience, and her buttocks thrust toward us. In this way we focus not her role as a leader within the organization but rather on her body. However, this anthropological discourse is disrupted by the music, inserting a revolutionary and technological narrative into the disturbed linear one. For instance, the skull is transformed from a marker of the anthropological gaze to a literal tool of liberation. It is the skull used as a record player that frees Monáe from the prison attempting to defi ne, sanitize, and contain her. This skull- as- record player, which features a golden tooth as the needle that translates the grooves into liberating vibrations, recalls the grill, a marker of the “thug.” This constitutes a radical reclamation of the gold tooth from marker of otherness to one of liberation. Where Van Veen argues that “the violence and capitalist bling of ghetto realism” that traps blackness into one confining identity and that Afrofuturism provides an “escape hatch” from this trap, by adopting the gold tooth as the mechanism for escape, Monáe does not seek to distance herself from the “bling of ghetto realism.”88 She reclaims and transforms that marker. Again, Monáe returns to the struggle to defi ne blackness as fully human. Pundits, such as Geraldo Rivera, have argued that markers of “thug” culture like the gold tooth or the hoodie, somehow divorced from race, are responsible for the loss of young African American lives.89 Those making this argument claim that it was not his race, but rather Trayvon Martin’s choice to wear a hoodie that resulted in his death, for instance. However, the hoodie, or the gold tooth, cannot be divorced from race. The importance lies in what the hoodie comes to represent, particularly when clothing a black body, a “thug.”90 According to arguments of this type any marker of thug life, be it a hoodie or baggy pants, is enough to cheapen the value of the life of the black man wearing it. The “Q.U.E.E.N.” video critiques this argument and other arguments made about blackness, about femininity, and sexuality via the repeating chorus that continually asks “Am I a freak . . .” What white culture might read as a marker of disposable life, the gold tooth in the context of the video is transformed from a marker of class and race that dehumanizes blackness in the eyes of white America to a tool of liberation. White America’s definition of the gold tooth does not constitute an identity to be escaped in this video. The tooth itself becomes a signifier that transmits a liberatory signal, a vibration that crosses synapses to connect the past and the present; a signal that demonstrates how technological engagement, when paired with knowledge of history, and an awareness of the present combine to create a force of social liberation. This marriage of the transformation of both technology and its attendant racialized narrative is the power of the digital griot.