The music video begins with Monáe by herself, levitating. The first lyrics of the song are transformed abruptly into a much lower pitch, but that doesn't stop her from saying them straight to the camera -- which is very jarring. The first verse is only Monáe with exclusively women of color, but by the end of the song, there is a whole group of what look to be a diverse crowd of both men and women. I was surprised to see more men in the video at the end -- We also transition from a private environment to a yoga studio, to finally a restaurant/ bar scene. This is a reversal of the typical male-dominated pattern I'm used to in a music video like this: A man and his crew will go to the club and take home girls they find there. Instead, Janelle Monáe takes her crew to the club and ends up dancing with everybody.
In an interview about the song recently, Monáe said this of the song and accompanying video:
“When I look to some of my heroes, Michael Jackson, Prince, and even Madonna, they never repeated themselves,” she explained. “They always figured out new ways to shock and to reinvent themselves. That’s what I’m going to do.”
What else might be going on in this music video?
I think it's interesting to look at the way Monáe performs gender in this music video. She is known for her style as being more androgynous or "gender bending", often wearing suits, ties, and bowties in her performances, which creates a strong contrast to the styles exhibited by most other women in popular music today. In this video, however, Monáe chooses to perform femininity in a more conventional way, baring her body as she sings about yoga pants. I have heard people talk about the aesthetic of this video as proof of Monáe selling out her femininity to be exploited, but after watching the video, I don't believe that this is the case. In the first half of the video, Monáe celebrates athleticism, women of color, and their bodies in a way that is reclamatory, where she retains power and agency over her own body. Even at the end of the video, after men enter the video, the interactions that are depicted do not relinquish power.
ReplyDeleteJonathan, I think you were right for wanting to dig deeper and question the meanings that this song and video might hold. In her video for "Q.U.E.E.N", a song Monae wrote with Erykah Badu, a narrator at the beginning of the song explains that Wondaland, which is Monae's record label, produced "freedom movements...disguised as songs, emotion pictures, and works of art". The key word here is disguised, but I think what is so fascinating about Monae's work is that a lot of the revolutionary qualities of her music and visual performances are hidden in plain sight.
ReplyDeleteI think you and Emily have both highlighted interesting aspects of this performance concerning gender, but I also think it is imperative to point out that you cannot talk about Monae without talking about both gender and race. I might be going out on a limb with this, but I have some thoughts about why Monae chose yoga as the subject for this song and video that pertain to race.
If you do a quick search of "yoga" on google and go to the images tab, you will find nothing but pages and pages of photos of white women smiling in tree position or whatever you call it (I don't do yoga). Beyond this, rich white girls in yoga pants is a common trope in this cultural moment. Is is not possible that, after literally centuries of white Americans appropriating black culture in their music, Monae is deciding to re-appropriate yoga into a black cultural art form? In "Q.U.E.E.N", there is a part where Monae questions "am I a freak for getting down?" which might be nodding to the cultural shaming that occurs around black women's expression of their sexuality, and beyond this there is a re-affirmation of the power of the black woman's body through the refrain at the end: "the body don't lie".
I think that, if we look more closely at the amazing line referring to her areola ("you cannot police me so get off my areola") you can see that these words were chosen very carefully to evoke not just a gendered struggle but a race struggle as well. It is extremely potent and relevant in this day and age for a black woman to be singing that no one can "police" her body.
Just some thoughts.