TAKING CHARGE
IN EVERYTHING SHE DOES, JANELLE MONÁE IS BOLD
JUST WATCH HER her show-stopping 2020 Oscars performance, which saw her rolling around in the aisles of the Dolby Theatre. There, she beguiled Tom Hanks with a rendition of Mister Rogers’ theme, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? . She rewrote her 2010 song Come Alive to reference #OscarsSoWhite and the ceremony’s biggest snubs ( Hustlers , Queen & Slim , Dolemite Is My Name , female directors at large). She thrust a microphone at Leonardo DiCaprio, which he just about managed to “la-la-la” into.
That fearlessness runs through all of Monáe’s work. After a near-decade of releasing genre-melding, sci-fi-inspired R&B records — indebted to everything from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner — she kicked off her screen career in 2016 with the double whammy of Moonlight and Hidden Figures . From there, she has continued to be an active part of telling stories of the Black experience and Black history, in biopic Harriet , about 19-century abolitionist and former slave Harriet Tubman, and now as the lead in Antebellum — a socially conscious frightfest firmly in the post- Black horror boom. Monáe plays Veronica Henley, a successful modern woman who becomes trapped in a new reality steeped in the horrors of plantation-era America.
