Two new installments in Janelle Monae’s neo-soul/dance interpretation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis are due to be released in 2010 as Suites II & III: The Arch Android. Monae, a Kansas City artist signed to Sean Combs’ Bad Boy Records, released her debut album, Metropolis: The Chase Suite, in 2008. Through her android alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, Monae stands amidst autotune, Baltimore club/ghettotech, and Sasha Fierce as the avant garde flagbearer of an increasingly popular “urban” cyborgism.
Monae’s lyrics do not reference Lang’s film in any direct sense. Neither does her android sing with autotune. If her songs in and of themselves call to mind anything, it is the lamentations of nineteen-seventies soul musicians faced with America’s accelerated urban decay. Monae juxtaposes soulful meditations on inner-city drug use and intergenerational poverty with glossy visual imagery best compared to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or The Matrix. Her first single, “Many Moons,” is a musical assemblage of the metropolitan underground — as viewed through the eyes of a black American and spoken through the mouthpiece of an android:
Civil rights, civil war / Hood rat, crack whore
Black girl, bad hair / Broad nose, cold stare
Tap shoes, broadway / Tuxedo, holiday
Gun shots, orange house / Dead man walking with a dirty mouth
Spoiled milk, stale bread / Welfare, bubonic plague
Microphone, one stage / Tomboy, outrage
Street fight, bloody war / Instigators, third floor
Heroin user, coke head / Final chapter, death bed
Plastic sweat, metal skin / Metallic tears, mannequin
It is the dystopian tenor of the Metropolis suites that distinguishes Monae from her more celebratory predecessors and contemporaries. Monae has referred to her new work as a “self-realization album” with a theme of revolutionary empowerment carried through her messianic cyborg protagonist. Mayweather’s staunchly political articulation of the cybernetic stands in relief to the simpler, purely sexual side of techno-empowerment represented by Sasha Fierce, Knowles’ leotard-clad cyborg libertine. “We’re dancing free but we’re stuck here underground,” sings Cindi Mayweather. Technology is not only that which empowers, but also that which enslaves the masses.
In this regard, the narrative Monae has crafted might be more aptly compared to Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) – which popularized the word “robot,” deriving from the Czech word for forced serf labor, robota. Čapek and Monae’s common vision of android serfs that rise up in revolt is particularly interesting when we think about the evolution of the city center and that which we call “urban” – dominated by the information economy, emptied of manufacturing jobs, displaced by the service sector – a space defined by skyscrapers with penthouse offices and basement mailrooms. And full of computers …
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