Abstract
AbstractJanelle Monáe—whose output spans the genres of R&B, psychedelic soul, hip-hop and Afrofuturist funk—is a prime example of a musician with scalar agility. Through a range of simple and complex musical techniques in a series of ‘Metropolis’ concept records, she has produced a multi-scalar ‘sonic fiction’. The scalar qualities and relations of this musical world—and her ability to musically subvert, split and reimagine the relationships between scales such as the body, the metropolitan, the global and the universal in tracks such as ‘Dance or Die’ and ‘Cold War’—make her work politically transgressive and capable of unsettling the present scaled reality.
Publisher
Springer Nature Switzerland
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