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The Kansas City-born singer-songwriter, rapper, actor and producer Janelle Monáe attracts enthusiastic attention for her complex and innovative pop music. I suggest she is also a prime example of a musician with scalar agility: the ability to explore, through her music, a multi-scalar world, and to generate new and politically unsettling relationships between the different scales of social life. It is because of her musical style, and the scalar agility of her songwriting, that she is able to critique and affect the scales of the world. Her style—which incorporates sounds and features from R&B, psychedelic folk, musical theatre and hip-hop—has been called ‘Afro-Sonic Feminist Funk’ (Valnes, 2017), while Monáe describes her music as ‘cybersoul’. For Hassler-Forest (2014, 11), Monáe’s expansive, world-building musical oeuvre builds on ‘21st-century convergence culture and post-genre fantastic fiction’. Szaniawska (2019, 36) suggests Monáe works in the tradition and ‘in the spirit of Black speculative fiction writers such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Tananarive Due and N.K. Jemisin who have imaged complex worlds’, while Gipson (2016, 91) sees in Monáe ‘the literary genius of Octavia Butler fused with the musical artistry of Prince’. The music media tends to list her eclectic influences—from Stevie Wonder to Salvador Dali to Star Wars—when trying to ascribe her to a genre, with one reviewer suggesting her output is ‘about as bold as mainstream music gets, marrying the world-building possibilities of the concept album to the big tent genre-mutating pop of Michael Jackson and Prince in their prime’ (Perpetua, 2010, n.p.). She attracts scholarly attention in part because she engages so boldly with popular culture and makes such dextrously political use of pop musical forms. Her music presents the ‘visions and utopian ideas’—or the ‘pluralistic, open-source blueprints’—required for social change (Aghoro, 2018, 339). Her work has a ‘“centrifugal” multiplicity of meaning’ (Hassler-Forest, 2014, 6), and she makes use of numerous media forms—TV interviews, social media accounts, live performances, music videos and what she calls ‘emotion pictures’—to augment and enrich her world-building. She has offered, within and against the restrictions of the twenty-first-century popular music industry, ‘a musical, lyrical, visual, performative, and theoretical investigation into, and destabilization of, not only race and gender, but also sexuality, color, and class’, demonstrating ‘new liberatory possibilities created by African American cultural production’ (English & Kim, 2013, 218). Through her creativity and dexterity she has developed ‘a sound/sight corpus of black feminist knowledges that take advantage of social movement methods’ (Redmond, 2011, 399; 406). She has also, I argue, demonstrated a dextrous ‘scalecraft’ (Fraser, 2010), producing differently scaled places through music, with critical attention to the relationships between such scaled categories as ‘the global’, the ‘metropolitan’ and ‘the individual’ or ‘the body’.

Above all, Monáe is seen as ‘creating alternative futures’ (Valnes, 2017, 9) through a series of ‘musical thought experiments’ (Aghoro, 2018, 339) that draw on and reenergise the Afrofuturist tradition. In fact, with her ‘futural sonic flare’ (Gipson, 2016, 91) she has contributed a ‘new, multivalent … neo-Afrofuturism’ (English & Kim, 2013). Afrofuturism, which first flourished in the 1960s, was driven by musicians who used new music technologies and techniques to create groove-driven ‘sonic fictions’ (Eshun, 1998). We can hear in Monáe’s cybersoul the polyrhythmic complexity, ‘timbral heterogeneity’ and celebration of ‘black vernacular intellectualism’ associated with the big-band jazz and science-fiction-inspired funk (or ‘astrofunk’) of the early Afrofuturist musicians (Valnes, 2017, 3–4). Monáe has followed the likes of Sun Ra in constructing a space- and African-mythology-themed alternate universe in which she features as her rebel android alter-ego Cindi Mayweather (the ‘Electric Lady’). Monáe’s futuristic alternate universe—‘Metropolis’ (on which more below)—is a dystopian cityscape featuring a slave-like class of oppressed worker androids. Monáe’s records and live performances feature sections of talk radio or other narrative to ‘add world-building texture’ that draws ‘explicit parallels between the futuristic storyworld and contemporary social justice movements’ (Hassler-Forest, 2016, 184). This is part of what Murchison (2018, 79) describes as Monáe’s ‘discursive practices and performative acts that push against the bounds and binds of existing social relations and power structures’. It is also part of ‘her agency of worlding alternate spaces that intersect with the realm of the “real”’ (Aghoro, 2018, 339). Marquita R. Smith (2019) emphasises that Monáe’s world-building is hardly escapist: she produces ‘art that inventively addresses the issues of its time’ and her ‘sonic and visual aesthetics’ are linked to her activism with the Black Lives Matter movement (M. R. Smith, 2019, 44; 34). She sees a continuation between the WondaLand that is part of her imaginary world and the WondaLand Atlanta-based artist collective to which she belongs (Hassler-Forest, 2014), and the opening monologue in her ‘Q.U.E.E.N’ video refers to Monáe’s ‘musical weapons programme’ and the ‘freedom movements that WondaLand disguised as songs, emotion pictures and works of art’. It is her ‘combination of art and activism’ (Jones, 2018, 44)—or, I would argue, her activism through art—that gives her Afrofuturist musical creations political power. She ‘fuses social and cultural movements’ (Redmond, 2011, 395). She presents, according to Jones (2018, 43), ‘a literal and figurative “Kansas City”’. She sculpts alternative worlds, and alternative world-subject relations, that have ‘the potential to turn imaginative projections into lived experience’ (Aghoro, 2018, 339), inaugurating new sets of relations in differently scaled worlds.

Scale is a vital and often overlooked aspect of fantastical world-building, including in studies of Monáe’s work. It is through her scalar agility that Monáe ‘strategically intermixes space with racial and sexual politics, black feminism, historical narratives, and class conflicts’ (Gipson, 2016, 92). One scholar who has highlighted Monáe’s scalar work is Shana Redmond (2011). Redmond notes Monáe’s ‘invention and use of scale’ in the video for ‘Cold War’ (2011, 395), drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s discussion of how cultural productions explore ‘the place of black women in relation to various scales: in their minds, in their bodies, in their homes, in urban/rural centers, and in the nation’ (McKittrick, 2000, 126). Redmond (2011, 394) also positions Monáe in a tradition of black women using their bodies creatively ‘to critique and to resituate history’. Undoubtedly one of Monáe’s main scalar contributions is to entirely unsettle the idea of ‘the body’ as a coherent, stable scale of social reality. Monáe’s ArchAndroid/Cindy Mayweather/Electric Lady persona(s) necessitates a split in the category of the body, with different sets of relations for her android and human forms, albeit she has a ‘thoroughly fluid relationship to her alter ego’ which is ‘inseparable from the “real” persona she performs as a twenty-first-century pop artist’ (Hassler-Forest, 2016, 184; see also Szaniawska, 2019, 40). Through her androgynous dress and android persona—which is itself a kind of human-machine hybrid or ‘organic-technological assemblage’ (Aghoro, 2018, 339)—Monáe models a ‘multiplicity of self’ (Tembo, 2019, 197), inviting her audience ‘to imagine a queer multiplicity of being’ (Szaniawska, 2019, 40). Aside from the robot-with-human-flesh imagery she uses on her record covers, we also see her exploration of human-machine bodily hybridity in her stiff and frenzied dance gestures, her signature style of performing with widening, unblinking eyes, and, most notably, in her singing voice. She uses a technologically produced ‘robotic’ sound in her singing, ¨such as on ‘Mushrooms and Roses’ (2010) in which she sings of ‘lonely droids’ and their romantic dreams featuring ‘kisses and electricity’. Of course using a robotic voice sound is not new, nor is the ‘robo-diva’ persona (R. James, 2008). More distinctive, however, is Monáe’s use of her un-technologically-mediated voice to create a robotic sound. She often sings in a machinic, expressionless and repetitive style, such as in the verses of ‘Tightrope’ (2010) where she raps rhythmically, rarely varying from a single pitch, or in ‘Electric Lady’ (2013) where the introductory ‘lec-le-le-lec-le-lec-le-lec-lec-tric—lay-le-le-lay-le-lay-le-lady’ resembles a digital sample or robotic glitch. By embracing ‘her role as the mediator … between androids and humans’, Monáe ‘foreground[s] the contingency of the human, particularly of the black female body’ (English & Kim, 2013, 228; 218; see also Eshun, 1998). Monáe’s music manifests ‘the malleability of the very concept of “the human”’ (Valnes, 2017, 1). Through various musical techniques she explores the idea of bodies in terms of what Blackman has described as ‘bodies as assemblages of human and non-human processes … extending our concern with corporeality to species bodies, psychic bodies, machinic bodies and other-worldly bodies’, questioning ‘our expectations of clearly defined boundaries between the psychological, social, biological, ideological, economic and technical’ (Blackman, 2012, 1; see also Cimini, 2016).

There are important political implications to this, especially when considered in terms of scale. As Szaniawska (2019, 40) points out, Monáe’s work is concerned with ‘Black women’s exclusion from the category of the human’. Her music allows her ‘audience to imagine a revolutionary potential that the Black female body could yield’, especially the ‘freedom to move … between different embodiments’ (ibid.). This works as a political strategy because it recognises the messy, structured realities of the world and, crucially, different bodies’ differential relationships to the scales of social life. Monáe’s music explores the potential of individuals and bodies of different kinds, but it is not in the realm of pure potential and fluidity of identity. Monáe’s Cindi Mayweather is a messianic figure, but it is significant that she is destined to lead the oppressed worker class of android Others. Monáe’s world-building is based around intersectional inequalities and differential access to spaces of power. As Yates-Richard (2021, 39) puts it: Monáe does reference ‘“black bodies”, but suggests that these bodies inhabit this future space-time differently’. Her musical explorations ‘of black cyborg womanhood expose, critique and reimagine “modes of the human”, while also refusing notions of virtual disembodiment as freedom’ (Yates-Richard, 2021, 47).

This is particularly clear when Monáe’s music explores the relationships between scales. An interesting song to analyse in this light is ‘Cold War’, the second single from her debut album The ArchAndroid (2010). Redmond (2011) focuses especially on the ‘Cold War’ music video to ‘highlight the ways that Monáe plays with scale to adjust the relationship between body and mind, and between history and lived experience’, inserting herself ‘into Cold War historiography as she performs an alternative geography that produces space and its meaning through her own sexualized and racialized body’ (Redmond, 2011, 405–6). Redmond emphasises ‘Monáe’s invention and use of scale’, suggesting that the ‘Cold War’ historical framework enables Monáe to explore how ‘state powers continue to employ scale to enact competing world visions’ (Redmond, 2011, 395). Much of Redmond’s analysis relates to the juxtaposition between global-historical lyrical themes and the music video’s intimate focus on Monáe’s disrobed body, but there is more to be said about how ‘Cold War’ musically explores the relationship between the individual and global scales. As Gipson (2016, 100) points out, ‘Cold War’ is an ‘intensely personal’ song. But it is a strange kind of ‘personal’ song in the sense that Monáe uses few of the musical techniques or features that are commonly used to convey personal intimacy or depth of emotion. There is a largely steady, fast-paced rock beat, and instrumentation that sounds ‘flat’ and almost distant. What is remarkable is how little complexity or detail can be heard in the accompaniment, especially in comparison with the rhythmic and melodic variety of her other tracks. The synthesised chords are steady with no rhythmic variation. There is also very little space, and Monáe never uses the techniques of close-to-the-microphone vocal recording that are conventionally used to generate a sense of emotional intimacy (see Kraugerud, 2021). Instead, she sings—at least during the verses and chorus—at a stable, high volume, almost battling to be heard over the backing instrumentation. All of this contributes to her expression of the relationship between the individual and the global or perhaps more properly the inter- or transnational ‘large-scale’ context, of which the Cold War is a lyrical metaphor. We see this too in the juxtaposition between the grand-scale lyrical content of the bridge section, which sounds almost like a saga or sermon (‘May all evil stumble as it flies in the world/All the tribes come and the mighty will crumble’), and the more personal verse that follows: ‘I’m trying to find my peace/I was made to believe there’s something wrong with me/And it hurts my heart’. This line—‘I was made to believe there’s something wrong with me’—functions as the emotional and musical climax of the song (which has a rather unconventional ending, as a key change leads not, per convention, to a more triumphant repetition of the chorus but instead to an immediate fade to close). The phrasing—being ‘made to believe’—implies impersonal forces acting upon the individual, causing pain, and reinforces the wider message of the song, which is about how people can be made to live in a state of vigilance in a context of constant implied threat. The unemotiveness that Monáe uses here—and elsewhere in her oeuvre (see, e.g., Valnes, 2017), often represented by the robotic singing style and persona described above—functions in ‘Cold War’ as a political critique of an individual-world relationship that forces people into vigilance and defensiveness. Monáe’s exploration of this individual-world relationship should also be understood in relation to the more positive kind of ‘universal’ musical space she creates in other songs. In ‘What An Experience’ (2013, in which she sings of how ‘the world’s just made to fade’) and ‘Say You’ll Go’ (2010, in which she references Nirvana, Samsara, Dhammapada and Noah’s Ark), for example, she sings about the purity and spirituality of love in a kind of abstract, placeless space characterised by musical simplicity and a subtle or non-existent rhythm section. Here, a positive universality, a scale beyond the social, equates essentially to abstract placelessness and contextless, while ‘Cold War’ has a more cynical or critical take on the relationship between people and their wider socio-political reality.

In Monáe’s musical world-building, the individual-context relationship varies, including within a set scale. It is notable that Monáe’s musical world is on the urban or metropolitan scale, organised around a science-fictional ‘Metropolis’ (although arguably the conventional ‘urban’ category does not fit Monáe’s Metropolis). ‘Metropolis’ is the name she gives to her four-part series of concept records that explore this world dominated by a metropolis. The album cover of 2010s The ArchAndroid, which contains suites II and III of the ‘Metropolis’ series, features Monáe wearing a cityscape headdress that is clearly inspired by Fritz Lang’s classic science-fiction movie Metropolis (1927), which depicts class conflict in a futuristic urban dystopia. In Monáe’s world, Metropolis is the last remaining city on earth. She is committed to the idea of the metropolis—with its imperial connotations of a powerful city acting at a distance on other places—as a terrain of political struggle. She does not see it as an inherently dominating concept; rather, she wants to save and transform it, and her ‘Metropolis’ series of musical productions are committed to exploring cultural-political struggle at the metropolitan scale. Crucially, however, Monáe produces the metropolitan as a key scale of political contestation by representing it not as a single, stable category but as heterogeneous, with different kinds of spaces within it, where struggles over it take place. For example, Monáe depicts Metropolis as a source of threat in ‘Dance or Die’ (2010). This sense of threat or watchful tension in an urban setting emerges as the song begins with a low, minimal bass-line and quiet, spare percussion from a conga drum, with occasional synthesised noises that evoke passing traffic. When Monáe’s vocals first come in—rapping about ‘running for your life’ and how ‘war is in the streets’—they are recorded in a low whisper, close to the microphone, as if she fears being overheard. After the multi-voiced chorus comes in to establish the premise that the Metropolitan dwellers are awaiting ‘the one’ (i.e. Monáe’s android-saviour alter-ego Cindi Mayweather), Monáe’s rapping becomes louder, higher-pitched, more confident, and the relationship of threat between the singer and the metropolitan space is reversed by the end of the song.

Monáe’s listeners also come to understand Metropolis as comprised of different kinds of spaces. She refers to both ‘the kingdom’ and ‘the nation’ in ‘Dance or Die’, and describes the strength and transgressive power of a ‘Ghetto Woman’ (2013). There are also collective spaces of live performance within Metropolis, and this is where she presents and explores radical, countercultural political potential. ‘Tightrope’, for example, establishes this kind of space through occasional addresses to an imagined audience (e.g. ‘ladies and gentlemen, [introducing] the funkiest horn section in Metropolis!’), and through a rapped dialogue between Monáe and her collaborator Big Boi that also features extensive backing vocals, including call-and-response with a choir. Her first vocalisation is a loud, high-pitched ‘wow!’, introducing herself more radically and boldly than in ‘Dance or Die’. Indeed, ‘Tightrope’ is musically unruly, with different sections and breakdowns in which different instruments come to the fore. Unlike in ‘Cold War’, ‘Tightrope’ features funk-style syncopated rhythms and complex instrumentation to establish this sense of collectivity and the radical potential that comes with it. Here is a space of live musical performance within Metropolis that is also heard as a threat to how the metropolitan is defined.

All this is part of Monáe’s scalar agility: her ability to produce a multi-scalar world through music, and to explore different relationships between different scales of social life. Her scaled musical productions enable analysis and critique of how different bodies have different kinds of experiences of, say, the urban or metropolitan scale, which is itself internally differentiated, emphasising too that hegemonic categories of social life can be challenged and relationships between scales transformed. Even the city streets are presented not as a straightforwardly threatening space—rather, the relationship of threat changes musically. Her music explores a global or transnational geopolitical context that is presented in terms of its oppressive power in relation to the individual, but there is also a ‘universal’ space of emancipation. Monáe’s ‘scalecraft’ is her ability to produce these complex scales and scalar relations in music. Sometimes she does this relatively simply, such as when the collective space of radical musical performance is produced through syncopation and complex rhythmic interplays plus unstructured backing vocals and more obvious features like addresses to an audience and crowd noise, or when the universal, abstract space is represented through musical simplicity and a lack of structure and rhythm. She also represents scalar relations through innovative, unconventional, complex musical choices to explore deeply personal and emotional themes, such as in Cold War. Fundamentally, Monáe’s musical multiplicity of scale is her political strategy for producing new scalar relationships in the real world. It is the multiplicity of the body and of the metropolitan that is crucial, as well as the multiple relations to and between these scales. For Monáe, bodies are always already mediated and have different relationships to the spaces of social life. The relationship between the individual, the metropolitan and/or the global is not stable. This means these relationships are open to contestation and can be made anew, including through cultural practices. This is what makes scale a cultural-political question and a terrain for struggle. Monáe presents an Afrofuturist vision of a territory organised around a ‘Metropolis’, but the Metropolis is unstable, in question—and her music centres that question, showing where the tension and radical political potential lies. This is musical world-building, and that world has a scale, or rather complex scalar relations that Monáe explores musically. Monáe’s musicking may also be seen as example of a kind of ‘decolonizing literary experimentation’, following Brydon (2016, 30), albeit with a musical rather than literary mode of exploring ‘alternative scalar relations along with the vitality of nonscalable worlds’ (ibid.). In particular, Monáe’s music is involved in ‘the production of non-nested modalities of scale’ (Brydon, 2016, 31), with the Metropolitan neither neatly subordinate to the global or universal, nor equally accessible from a single ‘individual’ scale. The political potential of this—the connection between the musical world and the scales of social life—is realised also through the several connections Monáe makes as a pop musician between her cultural productions and the real world. In Monáe’s ‘literal and figurative “Kansas City”’ (Jones, 2018, 43), music and other cultural productions and practices are the means of political transformation. Monáe’s WondaLand Arts Society works with the same aims and methods in this musically produced world and in reality (English & Kim, 2013, 226), and she understands her futuristic ‘sonic fictions’ (Eshun, 1998) as capable of unsettling and resisting the present scaled reality.