By Guest ColumnistC. Leigh McInnis, Psychedelic Literature
Many of y’all have asked if I’ve seen Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, and, if so, what do I think of it. Since it’s easier to send one email rather than several, I’ll try to make my response as quick and painless as possible. Monáe’s Dirty Computer is an interesting/excellent retelling of a much-told narrative about Big Brother (the Government) working to oppress anyone it deems as “the other” or dangerous for being different and having individualized ideas. (See Brave New World, 1984, George Clinton’s video for “If Anybody’s Gonna Get Funk Up It’s Gonna Be You,” etc.) As an older person, I’ve learned not to discredit something because it is derivative of something older if the new thing manages to present the subject matter in some new way or provide some new understanding of it. That is what Wordsworth meant when he asserted that the job of the poet is to make the familiar unfamiliar so that we can re-recognize it. Or, that is what T. S. Eliot meant when he asserted that the job of the poet is to know the canon of history so that one can, then, carve a unique place for oneself. (Unfortunately, Eliot’s “canon” was really, really white, but the gist of his point remains.) That is also what my own Pops indicated to me when I had written this excellent poem in which I called Ronald Reagan “Ron the Ray Gun,” and he said, “That’s nice son…almost as nice as when Gill Scott-Heron used it twenty years ago.” Clearly, I needed to study the canon more. With all of that said, I not only love the cinematography, movingly creative music, and imaginative lyrics of Dirty Computer, I love that she, like Prince, openly and invitingly, builds on the past to create something new rather than just rehashing the old and never adding anything to it. Knowing that Monáe loves and worked with Prince, I find the title Dirty Computer interesting because in The Lyrics of Prince I state that Prince’s Dirty Mind (1980), “presents the understanding of sexual thoughts (and other rebellious thoughts) as being normal. In its promo for the album, Warner Bros asserts that ‘behind the frequently shocking lyrics is a deep belief that by removing the taboos and allowing youth to express its sexuality in all of its forms, we will achieve a more wholesome society’” (179). I also add:
“Once I got a glimpse of it, looking at the Dirty Mind cover was a revelation. There is this skinny black kid wearing
nothing but a raincoat and drawers, looking as if to say, ‘If you find
something wrong with this picture, there is something wrong with you, not me.’ At that moment I realized that there were others out there attempting to find their own voices and identities, which need not be validated by a group. Even at this point, I do not believe that I was asserting the political identity of those blacks who see more to gain by ingratiating themselves to whites. I am talking about the fundamental notion that denying rights to a race is tantamount to denying rights to individuals and vice versa. I am talking about forcing both whites and blacks to deal with blacks on interpersonal levels and thus exploring the totalities of our human self, especially in the arts. This, of course, can only be achieved when African Americans are willing to remove themselves from the white-controlled social and economic institutions and risk the losses of economic gains to retain control of their humanity, which is reflected through their art. This is essential since white Americans have a definite history of not being able to conceptualize the idea of the African-American individual because we, as a country, have not yet begun to deal with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the economic and political invisibility of black people” (17-18).
So, yes, Monáe’s Dirty Computer
causes me to think/remember all those thoughts and emotions, but I
never think that she is merely copying or imitating Prince in the way
that my Pops never saw Prince as merely copying or imitating Little
Richard, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, or Smokey Robinson. As Prince was
learning from the past to craft new ideas for the current problems
rooted in past ills, Monáe is doing the same. Rightfully, folks will compare Dirty Computer to Beyoncé’s Lemonade, but I would offer that they also remember Andre’ 3000’s videos for The Love Below for the visual and lyrical similarity as well as the videos from Janet Jackson’s Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 albums as conceptual counterparts. Of course, from a film perspective, Dirty Computer is the niece-child of Prince’s The Beautiful Experience, featuring Nona Gaye as one of his love interests, and distant cousin of his Love 4 1 Another. Like Prince and many others before her, Monáe
shows sex and sexuality as socio-political canvases and tools. In
short, if you think that most of Prince’s “sex” songs are exclusively
about “sex,” you just haven’t been paying attention. (Since I don’t
have time to explain all of that, here is a link to an online excerpt
from the chapter “Sex,” from The Lyrics of Prince.)
Monáe has chosen to stand firmly on Prince’s use of sex/sexuality for
the intersection of how America’s major issues of race, gender, and
class are rooted in the white supremacist need of heterosexual white
males to dominate (which can mean to exploit, fetishize, and/or destroy)
everything that is not a heterosexual white male. More specifically,
Monáe has decided to ask her patrons just how “woke” they really are by
asking them if they understand and agree with the notion that the same
evil that creates racism and sexism is the same evil that creates
homophobia? As such, the storyline of Dirty Computer does not
separate racism and sexism from homophobia. Being of a different race,
being of a different gender, and being gay are all viewed as equally
evil by the villainous government entity that is seeking to “cleanse” or
make “normal” all the “dirty” people for being, again, of “the
othered,” be it racial, gender, or sexual preference or orientation. To
Monáe’s question, I must reply with, god-help me, Marlon Wayans’ answer
that I might just be “woke-ish” but not quite woke.
Before I address my being “woke-ish” and not quite “woke,” there are four songs/videos from Dirty Computer
that I’d like to address briefly as the film’s highlights. The visual
for all of these songs and the entire narrative is stunning. The use of
color and camera angles, especially how colors and camera angles
represent singular emotions and ideas and how the blending of colors and
the shifting of camera angles represents the blending, blurring, and
shifting of emotions and ideas, works well to punctuate the narrative.
Next, Monáe is an excellent poet/storyteller. Even when the music
doesn’t always move me, her lyrical imagery always paints a clear
picture of why I should be interested in a particular song’s message.
“Crazy, Classic, Life” is funky, soulful, bouncy, and soft
simultaneously. It allows one to dance, rock, sway, bob one’s head, or
just escape within the groove. And, when she states, “I’m the American
dream, not the American nightmare,” she is making it clear that this
entire body of work is not her making a plea to be accepted by the
establishment but her declaration that those who are unable to see her
and the entire rainbow of humanity as “normal” and “beautiful” are the
ones who are perverted and should be reeducated. Next, “Screwed” is a
straight nod to the 80s—visually, musically, and lyrically—combining
funky guitar, bouncy beats, and undercover socio-political lyrics in the
vein of Nena’s “99 Luftballons” or Prince’s “Party Up,” “Sexuality,” or
“Ronnie Talk to Russia,” especially when Monáe chants, “See, if
everything is sex/ Except sex, which is power/ You know power is just
sex/ You screw me, and I’ll screw you too,” which is a really
interesting way to understand Aretha Franklin’s “Who’s Zooming Who?”
which essentially means “who’s fucking who?” which was always meant to
be understood literally and metaphorically as it relates to gender and
traditional politics if one also understands what Franklin is really
discussing in her song “Respect,” which is a cover of Otis Redding’s
“Respect” with all of its gender and traditional politics. (So, yes,
children, songs about sex are not always just about sex, especially when
there is a creative artist working.) As for “Make Me Feel,” if you
know that I’m a fan of da Funk, you don’t have to ask why I like this
song. Either you are funky or you ain’t. And, if you don’t like “Make
Me Feel,” then you just ain’t funky. Let’s move on. When one combines
“Screwed” with “Pynk,” which is probably the most creatively metaphoric
and soulful song of the project, one realizes that Monáe is working
within what I call the Prince sexual trope where sex becomes a metaphor
for engaging, understanding, critiquing, and offering a solution to the
neurosis of humanity by realizing that the neurosis is often, not
always, connected to one’s narrow or perverted notion of sexuality or
human sexual nature. First, “Pynk” opens—pun intended—by comparing the
vagina to other body parts and other aspects of life that are essential
for survival. Then, after asking how they can make the best parts of
life “last forever,” Monáe provides “‘Cause boy it’s cool if you got
blue/ We got the pynk,” which is a really interesting
answer/resolution/solution for a couple of reasons. On the one hand,
this is the classic notion that men and women need each other. Monáe is
working, symbolically, within the notions of blue being the color of
male and pink being the color of female. As such, if “you/males” got
the “blue,” then “we/females” got the “pynk.” Thus, Monáe seems to be
asserting a similar point that I stated of Black Panther that
“viewers
learn that the natural state of male and female energy is not to be at
war with each other but to supplement and complement each other so that
duality becomes holistic human existence, which can function to reduce
domestic violence and sexist hiring and promotion practices while also
adding even more brainpower to reduce ills, such as global warming, the
growing amount of food deserts across the United States, and the absence
of economic infrastructure in inner cities.”
And, yet, on another level, with much of the imagery of Dirty Computer showing same-sex relationships as normal, even the scenes of “Pynk” show Monáe’s character with a female lover, and with Monáe
recently proclaiming herself as pansexual, the notion of “pynk” being
the healing agent to “blue” connects with and tropes that mystic and
healing notion that Prince often gave to the female characters in songs,
such as “Lady Cab Driver,” “Anna Stesia,” and others. Monáe, building
on Prince’ sexual trope legacy, is presenting pynk, the vagina, or its
essence as something physical and metaphysical. The vagina becomes a
symbol of woman or womanhood as the womb/creation of humanity and as
humanity’s primary healing/salvation agent as well. But, this healing
can only occur when humanity is made aware of the power of the pynk.
Further, for Monáe, this awareness can only occur when people relinquish
what she views as their rigid, prescribed, and man-made notions of
sexuality. In contrast, a pansexual is one who views all
human behavior as being based on sexuality and is one who engages
sexual activity with people of any sexual orientation or gender
identity. So, a pansexual is not limited/restrained or made “blue” by
limited/restrained gender identities, which is also portrayed in “Make
Me Feel” when Monáe
switches back and forth between male and female dance partners,
ultimately ending sandwiched between them in her own pansexual ecstasy.
Additionally, by understanding that the term “pansexual” has its
etymology in Pan, the Greek God of “music,” “sex,” and “ecstasy,” the
Prince connection seems even more clear as, of course, Prince, for much
of his career, presented himself as a “raceless” and “genderless” highly
sexual being. Unlike Michael Jackson who often presented himself as an
“asexual” being until he was accused of child molestation, Prince, like
the Greek God Pan, was a very sexualized being who combined sexual
pleasure and spiritual pleasure in ways that failed to conform to the
sexual confines of others. And this is the rub for Dirty Computer, which causes me to wonder if I’m just “woke-ish.”
Because
“Screwed” and “Pynk” are before “Make Me Feel,” viewers understand that
“Make Me Feel” is a part of the larger narrative’s discussion of
otherness. “Make Me Feel” is the apex of the racial, class, and sexual
liberation and utopia to which Monáe
has been working and that the government agency of the narrative has
been seeking to locate and “cleanse.” To the funkiest groove of the
entire narrative, Monáe’s character pimp strolls, with her female
partner, into this ambi-racial and ambi-sexual utopia like she’s the ish
and like this is what life is always meant to be. In addition, it
seems that being funky, liberated, and tolerant are the only
requirements to access Monáe’s utopia (Uptown, the New Breed, or the New
Power Generation). At this moment in the narrative, she is as
comfortable, fearless, and unapologetic as Prince is on that Dirty Mind
album cover. And to make sure that viewers all understand completely
what she is doing, Monáe throws in a “Good God, I can’t help it” to make
it clear that she is troping the same musical and metaphorical
tradition that Prince was troping from his mentors. Now, with all of
that firmly established on top of this hot as fish grease groove, Monáe
poses one final question to viewers like me. Can I accept racism,
sexism, and homophobia as the same types of evils? And, that’s where I
may just be woke-ish.
From
the time I was eight until now, I never saw Prince as a gay man, and I
have no reason as to why I never saw him as a gay man. I don’t know if
it was because I was already inundated with the gender-bending of glam
rock, but I never once looked at Prince and thought “gay.”
Interestingly, enough, the only thing that raised an eyebrow for me was
in 1991, after years of having other people ask me about his sexuality,
when Prince grinded on the floor with his male dancers and I thought,
“Okay, I get how someone could think dude is gay,” but, by then,
ironically, Prince was actually moving more toward the
traditional/stereotypical persona of masculinity. Yet, what I didn’t
realize until my late twenties and early thirties, by reading Prince
fanzines, such as Uptown and Controversy, and fansites, such as Housequake.com and Prince.org,
is that a good number of people found their sexuality though Prince’s
challenging the sexual norms of masculinity. While I was just seeing a
dude, particularly a black dude, simply not allowing anybody to tell him
what to do or how to be, others, particularly those of the LGBTQ
community, were seeing someone say it is okay for them to embrace, love,
and be themselves openly. (Prince was for many of his generation of
the LGBTQ community what Sylvester was for many of his generation, and I
never made or saw the connection even though I knew who Sylvester was.
It was impossible for most black folks not to know who Sylvester was
because “You Make me Feel (Mighty Real)” was all over black radio, black
clubs, and the skating rinks.) Still, although I never saw the
connection between Prince and Sylvester, I can’t deny that others saw
the connection as it has been one of the prevailing themes of articles
written about Prince since his death, and probably half the
articles/talks at the Prince from Minneapolis Symposium at the
University of Minnesota addressed some aspect of Prince’s impact on or
relationship to the LGBTQ community. So, I don’t find it odd that at
her most creative moment, through which she is also channeling and
connecting with Prince, one of Monáe’s major themes is fighting against
the oppression of same-sex relationships or connecting the struggle of
the LGBTQ community with the struggle against racism and sexism.
As an artistic product of the Purple Funk, Dirty Computer’s
connecting racism, sexism, and homophobia causes me to question whether
I am a hypocrite because I will sign a petition by poets that denounces
the legal discrimination/oppression of someone based on sexual
preference even though I still view the male-female relationship as the
normal romantic relationship. And, to be clear, I don’t take my words
lightly because I understand that the connotation of my statement is
that same-sex relationships are “not normal,” which is the way of
thinking from which Monáe is attempting to liberate me. According to Slavoj
Zizek’s “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” when it comes to sex, both
genders and all sexual orientations are caught in hierarchical dilemmas
posed by the bottomless inhuman partner that dwells, Oz-like, behind the
curtain of the lover’s image; that is, the Real. According to Zizek,
“The problem is that once the relationship between the two sexes is
conceived of as a symmetrical, reciprocal, voluntary partnership or
contract, the fantasy matrix which first emerged in courtly love remains
in power.” Thus for Zizek and Monáe,
thinking of romantic relationships as being dependent upon gender or
gender identities is a false and oppressive construct or structure
rooted in women being submissive to men and all other constructs or
structures being deemed as flawed or perverted. This concept is also
thoroughly explained in works, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” Judith Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” and lots of insightful writing by bell hooks. Beginning with Zizek and navigating my way through Gilbert, Gubar, Butler, hooks, and Monáe,
this is complicated for me because I currently don’t attend church
because I have yet to be able to reconcile the notion that a perfect God
can create an existential universe, which simply means that my notion
of the male-female relationship as the “normal” romantic relationship is
not based exclusively on religious notions. Still, this is a line that
Monáe and others have drawn in the sand. If racism is bad and sexism
is bad, why is not the oppression of someone because of their sexual
orientation not equally as bad? The conundrum for me is that I agree
that all three acts of evil/oppression are equally as bad, but I still
hold to the structure that the male-female relationship is the only
relationship that can perpetuate humanity through childbirth. However, I
must face the hypocrisy/irony of my desire never to have children
because being a writer was more important to me. Additionally, for me,
one of the two greatest issues facing African people, along with white
supremacy, is too many people having babies they don’t want or can’t
afford. So, it is ironic that I’m basing my notion of the male-female
relationship as the “normal” romantic relationship when, again, I think
that life would be better if less than half the people on the planet had
children. So, in raising the issue of same-sex relationships in this
creative manner, Monáe has done her job as an artist, forcing a
recipient to think more thoroughly about one’s notions regarding the
issue. Unfortunately, while challenging art is often the most useful
art, it is usually not the most popular art. As James Baldwin asserted,
love has never really been a popular agenda because most people don’t
really understand the definition of love. Yet, this doesn’t answer
Monáe’s ultimate question. And, at the core of Monáe’s question is the
demand for receivers of her art to contemplate what actually defines
homophobia. Further, is someone like me, who thinks it is wrong for
anybody to be legally denied a marriage license or to be legally denied
service of any type simply based on one’s sexual orientation, a
hypocrite because I still have the notion of male-female romantic
relationships as the norm? Can I fight against the socio-political
oppression of the LGBTQ community while simultaneously perceiving the
male-female romantic relationship as the norm? Is my position the
equivalent of a white person saying, “Well, I think that black people
should have legal rights even though I think white people are the norm
of humanity”? And, if anyone thinks my comparison of the two ideas are
extreme, consider a great line from the film, Assault at West Point: The Court-Martial of Johnson Whittaker in which the so-called liberal white person says to the black person he is helping, “I want you to be free not equal.”
While I continue to ponder this issue, I appreciate someone like Monáe
for using her art to have people think about how these issues connect
and relate. We may not always agree. But, if I don’t, at least,
consider the relationship of racism and sexism to homophobia, I can
never really consider just how enlightened or “woke” I am when it comes
to treating others as I want to be treated. What I don’t want to be is
someone who mindlessly moves to music without thinking critically about
the work’s message. Fortunately, Monáe is the type of artist who makes
that almost impossible to do.
--- About C. Leigh McInnis
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