First Listen
I recently read Janelle Monáe’s book The Memory Librarian. It’s a collection of short stories building upon the dystopian society the self described singer/songwriter, actress, producer, fashion icon, and futurist built through their album Dirty Computer and its accompanying “emotion picture.” I’ve been a fandroid since 89.3 The Current broadcast Tightrope into the truck’s stereo on my drive to high school. Every time they come out with a new project I fall in love all over again with Janelle’s vision, artistic chops, and intellect. But the skill The Memory Librarian especially showcases is their incredible capacity as a collaborator and creative partner.
Earworm
The Memory Librarian is a team effort, each of the novel’s five stories is co-authored with a different BIPOC and queer speculative fiction writers. Each of the stories stand alone but function as an ensemble to give profound depth to the world of Dirty Computer. The novel perfectly strikes the balancing act of a collaborative anthology: each story has a particular voice and style but their differences seem to grow naturally from the characters they focus on rather than seeming like fan-fiction, spin-off, or franchise. You can’t disentangle Monáe’s voice, style, or story from their collaborators and you wouldn’t want to. There is so much vision and depth to the text, and it grows so easily from the songs and videos of Dirty Computer, that it’s like these stories were there from the beginning: they just needed these writing partnerships to spring forth.
These deep partnerships are everywhere in Janelle Monáe’s work, from the loving chorus on Big Boi’s Be Still, and the iconic Erykah Badu verse in Q.U.E.E.N., to the shout of KELLINDOOO— in Cold War, announcing their consistent collaborator’s guitar solo. Janelle’s practiced and flexible voice has a way of blending seamlessly with their collaborators, creating songs that don’t sound exactly like either artist but something completely different and greater than the sum of its parts. My favorite example of this is their collaboration with Of Montreal on the track Make The Bus, where you can barely tell when Monáe and Barnes trade lines because their voices are so indistinguishable. You can hear their style and voice shift again on the Prince feature Give ‘Em What They Love, and again on the Solange collab Electric Lady, where the two are so fully incorporated that all you can really pick out of Solange is her occasional punctuated “woo ooh”s.
Just from listening, you can see that Janelle Monáe’s collaborations go beyond asking someone to contribute a verse, they involve building an entire song together and in doing so building a comfortable, collaborative space and a loving relationship. One of my favorite moments where you can see this happening is in the promo video for Monáe and Kimbra’s tragically canceled Golden Electric tour. As the two artists, decked in black and white houndstooth, jam out to a medley of Rock Steady and and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, Janelle tells Kimbra “you’re the star of the song,” which is just the kind of warm loving energy you want to hear from a collaborator you may just be getting to know. Kimbra is, of course, later immortalized as an “Electro Phi Betas Emeritus,” with other collaborators in the Electric Lady video.
Rewind
There’s a scene in The Memory Librarian’s second story, a collaboration with Danny Lore, when Monáe’s avatar Jane 57821 aka Alice aka Cindi Mayweather is led to a cool cave filled with moist soil, soil that serves to ground them and restore erased memories. Reading The Memory Librarian showed me that Janelle’s collaborations aren’t just a part of their practice, they are the point. When Janelle started Wondaland Records it wasn’t to build an empire, but rather to uncover fertile ground for other artists to grow their work. Janelle Monáe is a true visionary, and as The Memory Librarian shows us, the more their community grows the clearer that vision becomes. I’ll close off with a quote from the Wondaland Arts Society wordpress, last updated in 2012 but speaks just as clearly today:
We have created our own state, our own republic. There is grass here. Grass sprouts from toilet seats, bookshelves, ceilings and floors. Grass makes us feel good. In this state, there are no laws, there is only music. Funk rules the spirit. And punk rules the courtrooms and marketplace. Period.