Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4, Pages 393–411

This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War”

Shana L. Redmond
University of Southern California

Black women’s resistance efforts are a treasure trove of contemporary

historical inquiry. The interdisciplinary methods that must be used to
shed light on their acts can only begin a discussion, as we follow the
(non)disciplin(ed/ary) women themselves who devised fantastic responses
to what Stuart Hall has named the “fatal coupling of power and difference”
(17), more commonly referred to as racism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore documents
the responses of women environmental activists to this coupling, arguing that
they “join forces not only as petitioners to the state in the name of injuries
sustained but also—and more provocatively—as petitioners to communities
of similar people in the name of reconstructing space so that concepts of
‘safety’ and ‘health’ cannot be realized by razor-wire fences and magic
bullet cures” (15). The themes of free speech, access to community or
public space, and safety from physical and psychic assault, especially white
supremacist violence, scaffolds much of the efforts of black women to
construct alternative worldviews during the twentieth century. The Cold
War, which roughly spanned the period between the frayed ends of World
War II in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, saw the rise of a second
Red Scare under McCarthyism (1947–1957) as well as an intense moment
of (inter)national suppression of dissent in tandem with the consolidation of
an organized black political public through a broad civil rights movement.
Post-Berlin Wall, this moment has been imagined by black artists as a fruitful
signifying site through which to investigate and rebuke the technologies of
silencing that were developed and expanded by formal political and cultural
actors during the long Cold War period.1
The lived experiences of and narratives by the African-descended
are often replayed and reimagined in and through performance, and black
women in particular have a tradition of representing and resisting the
conditions of their lives through creative uses of the black body; black
women’s performance traditions have centralized the body as evidence and
epistemology. Daphne Brooks argues that black women “might put their own
figures to work for their own aesthetic and political uses and ‘imagine their


C 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
394 Shana L. Redmond

own bodies’,” thereby “invent[ing] ways to maintain the integrity of black

female bodies as sites of intellectual knowledge, philosophical vision, and
aesthetic worth” (8).2 Wondaland/Bad Boy recording artist Janelle Monáe
offers a twenty-first century version of this practice as she uses her body to
critique and to resituate history, including the identities produced from and
within it. The video for her single, “Cold War,” generates a unique alchemy
of (re)presentation, positionality, and performance, and in so doing, puts
under stress the dichotomies of black/white, inside/outside, past/present.
In this way, Monáe adds a postmodern edge to the modern performance
traditions described by Jayna Brown, in which black women performers
and artists of the early twentieth century “combined intense intimacy and
unbrookable distance [with] . . . the ability to record what one saw or felt
from above, below, inside or outside” (228).
Self-described as a visual artist, Monáe’s most prominent canvas
is her body. She has garnered significant attention for her black and white
wardrobe, which often takes the form of a tuxedo, presenting an androgynous
aesthetic even while the high contrast color-blocking represents her belief
that “there’s no gray area with me” (Nylon Magazine TV).3 The stark
simplicity of Monáe’s wardrobe serves as a foil for a complicated gender
performance, yet it clearly reflects the demarcations of her own sociopolitical
investments. This is her “uniform,” as she describes it, one that she proudly
wears in solidarity with the working classes she was born into in Kansas
City, Kansas, and alongside whom she now labors from her base in Atlanta,
Georgia. This uniform refuses periodization as it incorporates the high
collars and puffed shoulders of Victorian women’s wear with the saddle shoes
and mod, slim-cut slacks of the 1950s, thereby demonstrating Monáe’s Afro-
materialist ability to blur the aesthetic conventions of history and dismiss the
transhistorical expectations of the female body by commenting on multiple
past moments through one ensemble.
Although she eschews color in her performance wardrobe, Monáe
describes her music as colorful, making an explicit connection between sight
and sound within her work. She constructs what she calls an “emotion picture
for the mind,” and attempts to develop a more comprehensive experience
for the viewer/listener, one that engages on multiple sensory levels and
that connects the mind to the body (NPR). Her explicit and rapt attention
to the mind of her audience is one of her grand interventions within the
pop music realm; this focus compels her to contend with historical forces
within her layered productions, in the process allowing those who watch
that battle to struggle alongside her, inducing a sense of identification that
This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War” 395

is based in social movement techniques as well as in the “freedom dreams”

discussed by historian Robin Kelley—those maneuvers within the black
radical tradition that recover historical methods to generate and mobilize
futures of alternative possibilities.4 Surrealism is one such maneuver Monáe
employs in her aesthetic choices and in her insistence on the mind as a
site of struggle and elevation. Through this process, which fuses social and
cultural movements, Monáe enters into the genealogy of what black feminist
geographer Katherine McKittrick delineates as “the place of black women
in relation to various scales: in their minds, in their bodies, in their homes,
in urban/rural centers [sic], and in the nation” (2000a: 126).
Monáe’s invention and use of scale is highlighted in the second
video release from her album The ArchAndroid, entitled “Cold War,”
which she describes as “one of my most intimate releases to date” (Neon
Limelight). At stake within this song—as a sound and sight production—is
the reconfiguration and substantiation of the emotional and bodily planes
of existence for marginalized and alienated groups. Monáe’s employment of
the Cold War as both metaphor and subject disrupts the time, geography, and
ideology that undergirds it as a hermetically sealed period defined by the
contest among state actors over capitalism versus communism. This history
is further disrupted by examinations of the contemporaneous struggles
waged by the African-descended over the meaning, formation, and practice
of the Cold War; the “Double V” campaign of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People and the high profile performances
by artist-activist Paul Robeson after his 1950 passport revocation for
suspicion of communist activity continue to demonstrate the exclusions
within the Cold War narrative and the ways in which the national fears
that characterized it make peripheral or dismiss other contests waged on a
nonnational scale.5 These omissions occlude the varying levels of national
(dis)identification that made the protracted engagement of the Cold War
what it was: a multiply situated contest of wills and political maneuvering
that was not brought to one final conclusion, but that led to numerous projects
and ends, including foreclosures of international diplomacy, the manufacture
of the “Third World” through the consolidation of world economic and
cultural divisions, and the increased local surveillance and incarceration
of activists on the Left. Monáe’s use of the Cold War as a framework for
contemporary conditions of existence acknowledges the ways in which state
powers continue to employ scale to enact competing world visions; in the
process, she highlights the tenuous relationship between national discourses
of freedom and their everyday practice.
396 Shana L. Redmond

Within “Cold War,” Monáe uses her own hypervisibility to compli-

cate that period and its aims by situating it as an ongoing phenomenon. This
repositioning of history is not a dismissal, however. Monáe is respectful of
and inspired by the past, and she demonstrates this in her borrowing from
James Brown’s footwork, in her screening of civil rights iconography during
her live shows, and in her use of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” to introduce
her entrance onto the stage. However, she articulates a distinct distance
from this past by invoking it and then deftly outmaneuvering it by constantly
challenging the narratives that fossilize that past. In “Cold War,” Monáe is
able to perform time travel through the unique aesthetics and positioning of
her body; for the first time in her “emotion picture” archive she completely
abandons her retro uniform, stripping her body of the historical fixity that
she also debunks within her lyrics. Her “Cold War” evocations are offered
primarily in present-tense statements and questions that reshape historical
inquiry by demanding a collective engagement with the Cold War as a frame
for the quotidian brutalities of difference. Her refrain, which asks, “It’s a
cold war, do you know what you’re fighting for?” disrupts the historical
narrative of the Cold War by announcing its multiplication across time and
space (“a cold war”). She additionally dismisses the sectarianism of the
Cold War (Do you know who you’re fighting for?) and replaces it with a call
to a cause (“[D]o you know what you’re fighting for?”). The perpetual
battle of belonging and accountability that she references here remaps
the Cold War terrain and its victims through the insertion of her body as
palimpsest.
The scene for her “Cold War” is a black box, which represents both
a creative play on the fallout shelters that pervaded civil defense culture
during the Cold War, and an abstracted “‘nowhere’ setting.” Like the dance
music videos of the 1990s, this black box offers a “lack of perspective
[that] is playfully futuristic,” yet, unlike these videos, Monáe’s picture is not
“outside of and beyond mundane social relations”—in fact, she uses this
unarticulated space to expose the myth of the mundane through evocations
of her reality (Bradby). She begins with the visual; in this black box, the
only color contrast is Monáe’s skin, offering an incisive critique of binaries
and uncritical identity consolidation through the introduction of not one,
but multiple, blacknesses. Here she uses our gaze to establish both the
relation and the difference between her environment and her body. We look
at Monáe head on and seem to catch her off guard as she speaks with another
off-camera entity when we arrive at her scene. She looks back and forth and
begins to remove her robe as the screen goes pitch black, announcing the
This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War” 397

reason that we are all here: “Janelle Monáe, ‘Cold War,’ Take 1.” She returns
from the title screen bare and unaccessorized, setting the tone for a video
that uses both visual and musical cues to heighten the crises that it draws
upon.
Monáe takes advantage of the tight framing of the camera by
employing striking affective gestures. As she begins her voiceover her
eyes widen, and she turns to profile where she squints, letting us know
that she has vision too—a vision described by critic Eric Harvey as “not
remotely sexual, as much as it is knowing.” She returns to face us and
inhales, offering her opening line: “So you think I’m alone?” This question
is haunted by the histories it considers.6 As Geoffrey Smith argues, the
“political demonology” of the Cold War was reliant on two phases of
US political displacement: the first based on race and the second on
ethnicity and vocation. Both phases, according to Smith, “tended towards
segregation,” including “social isolation, medical testing for exclusion, and
even politically generated deportation.” These sociopolitical prohibitions set
the stage for an early Cold War period that emphasized differentiation and
containment. In his work on James Baldwin’s 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room,
Douglas Field argues that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s scrutiny
of Baldwin “is indicative of the ways in which government organizations
during the Cold War scrutinized American citizens (both home and abroad)
for evidence of subversive political activity to maintain rigid distinctions
between an identifiable Self and Other.” The federal government’s rabid
maintenance of Jim Crow in the American South, constant surveillance
of civil rights organizations, and collusion with European colonial powers
made clear which camp the African-descended belonged to. While these
exclusions shaped the formal political opportunities for people of color, they
also fostered alternative political acts and solidarities that challenged, and
ultimately overturned, de jure practices of segregation. Monáe signifies on
this practice of collectivity through her reconstruction of a Cold War history
that “brings wings to the weak,” and that forecasts that “the mighty will
crumble.” Her contemporary artistic forum—the music video—also relies
on a shared community as she performs for, to, and alongside a diverse
public. Her black box setting may lead us to believe that she is in fact alone
until we remember that she is in dialogue with us—another character in her
production.
Monáe’s questions to us throughout the song are met with definitive
statements as she narrates a story of dispossession and alienation. Her
second verse, which argues, “If you want to be free / below the ground’s
398 Shana L. Redmond

the only place to be / ’cause in this life / you spend time running from
depravity,” details a space not of death (“below the ground”) but of safety
that is shared by a self-selected group who choose freedom over flight
(“running from depravity”). It is an underground, a shelter, where political
consciousness might best be fostered and utilized safe from the culture wars
fought outside. Monáe’s spatial realignments signal a powerful departure
from conventional narratives of black suffering; unlike much of the disaster
and tourist photography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which
purports to display black reality without allowing the subject to speak, we
are forced, through viewing her moving image, to brace ourselves for her
next utterance as she looks us in the eye and uses her emotional intensity
to displace our intentions for her body. Through this effort she becomes
the subject through which the forces under consideration are elucidated.
Raw emotion punctuates this possession; at the moment of revealing, “I was
made to believe there’s something wrong with me / And it hurts my heart,”
Monáe’s eyes well up with tears. She breaks character as the emotions
escalate, missing the lines of her playback, and shaking her head and hands
in acknowledgement of the emotions that originally inspired the song’s
composition and that are now replayed in the act of performance. This rupture
dismisses the standard ventriloquism of music video lip synchronization in
favor of vulnerability before a knowing audience, signaling her investment in
using her own “Cold War” for new ends: it is no longer a contained project
(war) or a historical object (music video) but it is, through her, an entire
field of play and performative engagement that traverses period, ideology,
and method. This radical act of self-exposure spurns the longstanding
surveillance practices of the United States and offers an alternative to the
subterfuge used by oppressed peoples.
Monáe’s performance refuses the acts of dissemblance that have
long characterized black women’s participation in the public sphere. Darlene
Clark Hine argues that black women employed dissemblance throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way to respond to rape, violence,
and the threats thereof, thus “creat[ing] the appearance of openness and
disclosure but actually shield[ing] the truth of their inner lives” (912). These
refusals produced a “self-imposed invisibility” that allowed them to “accrue
the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in the
often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle” (Hine 915). Monáe
relies on invisibility in “Cold War,” insisting that “Being alone’s the only
way to be / When you step outside / you spend life fighting for your sanity.”7
Her words echo the sentiments of Mary Church Terrell, who early in the
This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War” 399

twentieth century announced to her constituency in the National Association

of Colored Women’s Clubs that “our peculiar status [as black women] in
this country . . . seems to demand that we stand by ourselves” (Hine 917).
Monáe’s staging of interiority, however, is already undercut by her choice of
forum: it is not a platform from which she speaks only to other black women,
but a music video that comprised both a sonic announcement to be replayed
again and again, and a moving image that catalogs and exposes her for all
time to anyone who would watch/listen. There is a dramatic tension here;
while Monáe acknowledges dissemblance as a strategy, she also forestalls
its efficacy through that revelation, effectively lifting the veil of secrecy that
allowed for black women’s sociopolitical subterfuge.
Monáe’s performative unveiling sensitizes us to questions of truth
as the layers of history, identity, and resistance collapse on one another. Yet
her engagement with and demand for the rights of access and voice are
consistent throughout. Her performance makes the space to critique how
dissemblance may have “contributed to the development of an atmosphere
inimical to realizing equal opportunity or a place of respect”; yet the method
of exposure—performance—signals another intervention (Hine 915). The
music video, which has offered a platform for display and critique since
the 1970s, is used by Monáe in “Cold War” as a confessional site, a shelter
where the struggles of the ordinary black women described by Hine, and
embodied by Monáe, might be discussed and responded to. Too often safe
spaces are limited in their availability for the disenfranchised, yet Monáe
is able, through various creative and organizing techniques, to construct a
“Cold War” free speech zone—a task and location little known during the
historical moment that the song references. Her “Cold War” imagination
therefore creates an alternative reality that is recognizably different from
those of her contemporaries within the shared “superpublic” described by
Richard Iton, in which black bodies and performances are conspicuous in the
visual cultures grown from hip hop and the Internet. Monáe’s willingness to
challenge history situates her as a spectral figure representing the unfinished
work of the past, even as she leads a cohort in the present and envisions a
future beyond her own critique.8
This is not to say that Monáe as artist or as subject is therefore solely
relegated to the future. Many descriptions of her sound and appearance have
played on her ability to advance a narrative of futurity; indeed, she invites
readings that lead us beyond what we currently know and practice, offering a
sightedness capable of imagining yet-realized alternatives. Yet her attention
to and dexterity with the past should not be underestimated, nor should her
400 Shana L. Redmond

Afro-futurist projections be understood as a desire to detach from time. She

is grounded in a way that makes her art’s labor one of struggle, not of escape.
Monáe collaborator and musician Chuck Lightning has said that they, as the
Wondaland Arts Society, were not interested in “futuristic” music but instead
in a “return to the drum,” to make music that exposed its roots and that would
“stand the test of time.” Indeed, The ArchAndroid offers pieces in the traveled
styles of Western orchestral compositions (“Suite II Overture”), traditional
English ballads (“Oh, Maker”), psychedelia (“Mushrooms & Roses”), and
punk (“Come Alive (War of the Roses)”), to ensure that the album’s ingenuity
is not lost in translation, yet continues to advance innovative interpretations
of sound and of the histories that produce them. In that way, Monáe is an
Afro-materialist whose sonic and aesthetic projects reflect a knowledge of
and a respect for the traditions that built her contemporary circumstance,
even as she employs her rapidly passing present to construct ideas and
musics to collide with the approaching future.
“Cold War” is a production that highlights the lived realities of the
marginalized through articulations of alienation, effectively remixing Cold
War debates over isolationist military and economic strategies. Monáe’s
provocative introductory line—“So you think I’m alone?”—gives listeners
pause, as we interrogate the possibility that we have mistaken her solo voice
for solitude. She debunks our interpretations, however, as she affirmatively
answers the question and owns it, singing, “But being alone’s the only
way to be.” The “outside” that Monáe describes as battleground is a
nonsituated space that is only delineated through our engagement with her
lived experience. Her play in the inside (body)/outside (world) dichotomy
within “Cold War” draws us into her “Afro-alienation,” which Brooks argues
is a “specific strategy of black Atlantic performance” that provides for
alternative political practices and ways of self-making (4). In this way,
Monáe narrates the wars of position inherent to the lives of black women
and demonstrates how “oppression has mobilized black displacement and
initiated new geographies that are, consequently, raced and gendered as well
as internally and externally lived” (McKittrick 2000b: 225).
Monáe’s performance follows those of a number of other black artists
who employed this strategy, including Michael Jackson, whose 1996 single
“Stranger in Moscow” illuminates a similar experience of estrangement and
dispossession. Written after criminal allegations were leveled against him,
“Stranger” narrates Jackson’s loneliness through his position as a foreigner
abroad. His “outside” is Moscow, the cultural and political center of the
former Soviet Union and a hub of the Cold War, which he displays in his
This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War” 401

video as a series of missed connections and dismissals as people disregard

each other while passing on the street. Jackson uses his narration and
character vignettes to offer insight into poverty and discrimination, but
it is his racialized and surveilled body that most dramatically manifests
the condition of abandonment that he describes. At the end of the video
we see and hear his breaking point as he cries out with his face to the
saturated sky, “I’m living lonely!” While his pain is evident, his body and
its sounds also display defiance through a performance that reimagines
the relationship among blackness, space, and freedom, thereby upsetting
discursive representations of the black body as literally and figuratively
fixed. Jackson’s autonomy in Moscow is part of a historical trajectory that
allowed men distinct advantages within the international realm, including
W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, who enjoyed freedoms in the Cold War
Soviet Union that were absent in the United States. Monáe’s “Cold War”
imagery projects a feminine body into that enterprise, marking her freedom
as both raced and gendered. Both Jackson and Monáe reclaim blackness as a
central position within ongoing local, national, and international struggles,
demonstrating the intersectional subjectivities and complex locations from
which other conditions of inequality are addressed.
“Cold War” facilitates and relies on a reimagining of the Cold War;
it is no longer an international struggle over the expansion of communism,
nor is it fought in hidden theaters of influence abroad. Monáe’s treatment
locates the contest at the level of individual experience, confirming President
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 statement that the Cold War was a battle for
“the soul of man himself.” Monáe’s reinvention of the war makes the soul
and struggles of interiority central to the ongoing battles fought anywhere
within the reach of her voice. She accomplishes this revision through the use
of her body—a black, female, and explicitly working class body. Her black
and white stage uniform may be stripped away in this scene but its imprint
is everywhere present as we examine her flesh: a body made from the labors
of a janitor mother and garbage-truck-driving father. This body is now the
landscape for cold war battles and marks a new frontier in its debates. “On
the one hand,” according to McKittrick, raced and gendered geographies
“reach far beyond the nation or existing maps, and on the other hand, rest
on very specific locations such as black women’s bodies, sexualities and
subjectivities” (2000b: 225). Monáe’s spatial dislocation of the Cold War
therefore does not fix it in any one locale but instead highlights its duality
as a radical everywhere-ness and a concrete experience by mapping its
negotiation onto the nonnationalized body of the black woman.
402 Shana L. Redmond

Vision takes on a new aesthetic dimension when combined with

sound. In her article on women in dance music, Barbara Bradby discusses
the “bait and switch” of women’s bodies and voices. In her example, the
“fatter, older looking, more ‘maternal’” (170) soul singer Loleatta Holloway
was robbed of her voice, which was then “technological[ly] superimpos[ed]”
(172) onto the body of a young model within a music video that sampled
Holloway’s voice. This scenario, according to Bradby, “deconstructs our
assumption of the singing voice as emanating from an individual rooted in
a body we can see, and re-roots that expectation into plural bodies, or the
female body seen/heard in different ways” (171). The fact that both of the
women in question are of African descent warrants little notice in Bradby’s
analysis, but it is for my purposes entirely relevant, because this kind of
ventriloquism is emblematic of black women’s performance practices. Theft,
sexism, and ageism aside, this practice of sampling shares in the histories of
black women such as Nina Simone who borrowed the political thought and
practice of Lorraine Hansberry for her 1969 anthem “To Be Young, Gifted
and Black,” or contemporary jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson whose dusky-
voiced remake of Billie Holiday’s antilynching standard “Strange Fruit” was
mediated by the technique of Abbey Lincoln.9 Monáe also picks up on this
tradition, yet instead of taking on identifiable voices, she instead licenses
and lends her own to others in their efforts for recognition, making her
voice available “as plural bodies, or the female body seen/heard in different
ways.”10 Her (presumably) naked body makes her every-black-woman(ness)
possible in the visual realm by exposing the black derma that connects her
to the histories of those before her and to the conditions of those with whom
she shares the present.
There is an immediate sexual energy present in the revelation of
Monáe’s physical body that also underlies her performance as she uses
that body to construct a queer power based in eroticism. Her solitary
and nonreproductive body stands in as the heroic android alter ego Cindi
Mayweather, demonstrating the sheen of the machine through her perfectly
coiffed bouffant and meticulous, though relatively minimal, makeup. The
camera’s framing of her head brings these aesthetic elements to the fore
while also relegating our optic energy and analysis to her mind and thus to
the intellect that characterizes the grand division between human and robot.
Her concept in “Cold War,” however, does not replicate the covers of her
other albums, on which she is wired and missing limbs or extravagantly
adorned with futuristic Emerald City-esque headgear. Instead, “Cold War”
exposes us to the very humanness of her form, and in so doing plays to the
This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War” 403

erotic, that “deeply female and spiritual plane” theorized by Audre Lorde as
“the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of
our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once
we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced
the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and
self respect we can require no less of ourselves” (340). Monáe recognizes
this elevation in her own art and argues that her album is “intended to
evoke certain emotions that we have but haven’t been in touch with in a
long time” (Neon Limelight). The ArchAndroid’s future vision therefore
traffics in eroticism and Monáe’s “Cold War” is the moving frontispiece
that illustrates how her “emotion picture” will confront the conditions that
make her radically re-envisioned world necessary. She is the heroine of this
unfolding history because she is able to successfully translate her emotional
acumen into erotic power, in the process exhibiting June Jordan’s edict that
“We are the ones we have been waiting for” (279).
In “Cold War” Monáe wields her erotic power to counter and to
provide an alternative to the dominant paradigm of black female sexuality
within the music video genre. Black women have been especially vulnerable
to representation, or to “the level of cultural fantasy about women,” through
their depictions as objects of desire within music videos (Bradby 160). That
desire, which is assumed to be reciprocal, is used as evidence of heterosexual
black masculinity; as Mireille Miller-Young argues, there is a “productive
dependence on black women, specifically their sexualized bodies, by black
men in authenticating their claims and representations of manhood.” In her
efforts to move beyond a bourgeois middle class respectability model of
music video analysis, Miller-Young uncovers how black sex workers, and
women in particular, “both challenge and are constituted by the racialized,
gendered, and sexualized terms of representation in pornography and hip
hop” (266). Monáe explicitly rejects the stereotypical frame for hip hop
videos, with their high-priced locales and scantily clad women, and her
video is nowhere near pornographic. The body is central to her production
nonetheless, which makes her vulnerable to the conditions of history that
mark black women’s bodies as always sexual, always illicit. In “Cold War,”
she again reflects on those historical conditions and offers an alternative to
the egregious objectification of black and brown women’s bodies through
allowing visual access only to the area above her collarbone. Through that
visual disembodiment she disrupts the narrative of gendered black nudity in
contemporary music video culture.
404 Shana L. Redmond

The negative consequences wrought by nudity on individual careers

and on collective representations disproportionately impacts women. Men’s
heightened access to the means of (cultural) production ensures that the
nude body on display is most often imagined by and through a male,
proprietary gaze. Monáe’s disruption of this trend is evident in the way
that she performs her body within her video for “Cold War.” With director
Wendy Morgan, Monáe debunks the reigning popular imagery of the nude,
black singer within black music video culture. “Cold War” is a striking visual
counterpoint to 2000’s infamous and wildly successful video for “Untitled
(How Does it Feel),” directed by Paul Hunter and Dominique Trenier. In the
piece, R&B icon D’Angelo is shot from various angles offering an unbroken
360-degree visual field of play from back to front, left to right, and top to
midsection. This limit at the midsection caused a great outcry from many of
the singer’s admirers, who hoped for that peek just beyond the frame, but it
is this strategic equatorial line that also keeps the video from slipping into
the pornographic—although it did not keep the video from being protected
on YouTube, where you must “verify that you are 18 or older by signing
in or signing up.” This demand, which requires that viewers subscribe to
access material otherwise considered “inappropriate,” is but one method in
the regulation of sexual economies developed from black bodies. It is this
economy’s use of black women’s bodies as “exchange resources” in service
of a heteronormative black visual culture that the imagery of “Cold War”
refuses (Reid-Brinkley 248).
Monáe’s image is not her only departure from D’Angelo. The sonic
entrance for “Untitled” is a throwback soul man “one time”: a punctuated
collective hit from his musicians used to introduce the rest of the musical
phrase, which is held together by a high hat tap on beats two and three in
3/3 time. The slow soul of “Untitled” is radically different from Monáe’s
moderately paced, Atlanta-based, synthetically drummed “Cold War.” The
slow bass and electric piano entry is broken by her voice, which announces
the move to the drum and a background explosion that sonically grounds
the war motif. In contrast, D’Angelo’s smooth entry for “Untitled” signals
an otherwise uncertain visual scene. The video begins provocatively with
the back of D’Angelo’s head—the inverse of Monáe’s facing her audience—
showing a close-up of his cornrows; the camera then rotates around his head
to focus on his downcast eyes. As his lyrics begin, “Girl it’s only you,” the
camera pans down to his lips, demarcating the location of the sound and
introducing our shared desire as he licks his lips.11 Resisting his question,
“Won’t you come closer to me baby?,” the camera pans away from his face,
This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War” 405

zooming out to expose his defined chest and abdomen, building anticipation
and arousal, and only halting once he announces, “You already got me right
where you want me baby.” That location—“where you want me”—lies below
his belly button but above his genitalia, highlighting an erogenous zone that
incites the viewer’s imagination. Further images of D’Angelo grabbing his
own nipple while beads of sweat fall from his abdomen, combined with a
rich soul soundtrack, evidence the many carnal elements of his performance.
There is a different and contrasting sensory production at play within
“Cold War.” The visual focus on Monáe’s face disrupts the historical contin-
uum of black women’s hypersexuality and instead initiates an engagement
with their political and emotional expertise.12 The relationship between
viewer and viewed is negotiated through Monáe’s constant challenge to the
beliefs of those holding the power of the gaze, as she repeatedly asks us
to interrogate our positionality and level of engagement (“Do you know
what you’re fighting for?”). D’Angelo, on the other hand, encourages,
through lyrics and imagery, a visceral response to his performance. Although
physically absent, black women’s bodies and sexualities are integral to his
performance, since he relies on them as consumers and, through his returned
heterosexual gaze, as those to be consumed. One of the most striking
elements of the video for “Untitled” is D’Angelo’s ability to displace a
marketable female sexuality within his love song; instead, his disrobed body
becomes the object of desire and the gaze. While this act functions as a
compelling disruption of the pervasive hypersexuality of black women’s
representations in music videos, D’Angelo does not fundamentally alter
the terms under which black women’s bodies have been caricatured and
fetishized—he simply inserts his masculine body as proxy, thereby allowing
the dynamics of sexual conquest to remain intact. These relationships are not
present in “Cold War,” for while Monáe’s body is similarly disrobed, it is not
hailed as an object of desire but as a subject whose situatedness and focus on
her own experience reveals the terrain of political and ideological struggle.
While Monáe attempts to “find [her] peace,” D’Angelo appears more
interested in getting a piece. Monáe’s aesthetic counternarrative therefore
privileges Lorde’s feeling over D’Angelo’s sensation, marking her erotics as
power and her body as battlefront, not as playground.
The combination of sight and sound allows both Monáe and
D’Angelo to project densely stimulating and provocative performances for
their audiences, who delight in the many pleasures contained therein. My
intention here is not to set them up as dichotomies—D’Angelo bad and
Monáe good—but instead to highlight the ways that Monáe plays with scale
406 Shana L. Redmond

to adjust the relationship between body and mind, and between history and
lived experience, breaking the contrast that exists between the two by using
her sexualized black body as a different type of ideological template. Her
knowing body is elastic in its interpretation, but only through the conditions
of history and of her own performative sexuality, which also acknowledges
and uses the past as present text. Like the video for “Window Seat,” in which
singer Erykah Badu situates her naked black body at the scene of President
John F. Kennedy’s assassination, thereby becoming a symbolic part of that
history and making it (differently) relevant again in 2010, Monáe inserts her
disrobed body into Cold War historiography as she performs an alternative
geography that produces space and its meaning through her own sexualized
and racialized body.13
Monáe has developed, within a relatively short period of time,
a sound/sight corpus of black feminist knowledges that take advantage
of social movement methods—notably the use of her own experience as
evidence—to inspire and instruct those around her. Her embodied protest
challenges the popular black political cultures of the contemporary moment,
which have been deftly disciplined by formal political structures like
the Obama White House; in the process, these actors dismiss the rich
heterogeneity of the black public sphere by conceding too much of their
intellectual authority to those whose sociopolitical strategies long ago
diverged from traditions of black struggle.14 Monáe’s challenge to those
who have forgotten, lost, or ignored their own voice and agency, and her
maintenance of black diasporic arts traditions in which “the cultural realm
is always in play and already politically significant terrain,” is a “fantastic”
disruption to black political lethargy, and evidences an intelligent design
rooted in black feminist constructions that wed body to mind and experience
to history (Iton). It is within these methods and conjunctions that the future
spaces of political possibility might be realized.

Notes
1. As Jacques Attali argues, power recognizes the significance of noise
and listens intently to receive political forecasts. To manage dissent, power,
and its extension the State, employs a “technology of listening in on” inclusive
of “eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance” (7). Musicians are
therefore unique targets for State violence because “even when [they are] officially
recognized, [they] are dangerous, disturbing, and subversive” for the alternatives
that they make audible; “for this reason it is impossible to separate their history
This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War” 407

from that of repression and violence” (11). Surveillance and censorship dominated
the response to alternative political visions during the early Cold War period under
McCarthyism. The State Department as well as cultural brokers in Hollywood
and elsewhere were responsible for packaging a singular national response to the
unfolding international crisis, and in the process forestalled other struggles and
methods of critique and intervention.
2. These practices follow a tradition of performance within black women’s
history. Tera Hunter documents the central role that enjoyment and performance
(especially dance) played in the subversive practices of black women workers in
Atlanta after the Civil War, thereby allowing their bodies to find release in a
violent, patriarchal, and racist US South. Jayna Brown elucidates the transatlantic
(and Pacific) performance practices of a wide variety of black women performers
in the first decades of the twentieth century, all of whom displayed a “creative
disobedience” to white hegemony through their many talents (7).
3. Despite her relatively simplistic ensemble, Monáe earned a spot on Vanity
Fair’s 2011 “Best Dressed List,” an ironic award for an artist who chooses to keep
her aesthetic simple to highlight the complexity of her artistic productions.
4. Twentieth century black social movements have taken advantage of
“mobilizing structures” to advance critique and transformation of sociopolitical
conditions domestically and abroad. Doug McAdam describes these structures as
“collective vehicles, formal as well as informal, through which people mobilize
and engage in collective action” (ix). Some of the vehicles involved in this
effort include electoral politics, propagandistic literature, direct organizing, and
communal performance. The ends envisioned are various and creative in the
futures that they propose but generally seek, on various scales, the enforcement of
international human rights law, namely the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
which includes four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom from
want, and freedom from fear. The fulfillment of these freedoms meant, at its most
basic level, equality for all in the United States and abroad. Surrealism, which
developed in the 1920s, was, according to Kelley, employed by black artists like
Cold War writer Richard Wright as a means toward liberation. It is from surrealism
and other politico-artistic reserves that Monáe draws her distinct performance
imagination and practice.
5. These examples skim the surface of the Cold War protests waged by
the African-descended in the United States. Their efforts documented dissent to
the nation’s practices of radical racial exclusion and violence, limited political
expression, and global war-making. The “Double V” campaign championed
“victory at home and victory abroad” during World War II while it insisted that the
US military be integrated and allow black servicemen decision-making positions
within its ranks. Singer-actor-activist Paul Robeson became one of the most visible
408 Shana L. Redmond

black artists of the Cold War period—first as a performer of international acclaim

(WWII) and later as a free speech and antiwar advocate whose political work was
demonstrated on the stage. He performed a number of high-profile concerts during
the period of his passport revocation (1950–1958)—including two concerts at the
Canadian border—where he decried racism, antilabor legislation, and perpetual
war-making by the United States through his repertoire of spirituals and world folk
songs.
6. Sociologist Avery Gordon’s dynamic theorization of “haunting” argues
that “to be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects” that cannot be
disarticulated from the present (190).
7. Monáe’s reliance on invisibility recalls Ralph Ellison’s famous Cold War
antihero, the nameless narrator of his 1952 classic Invisible Man. Unlike him,
however, Monáe does not linger in her obscurity, she instead uses it as a strategic
tool and proceeds to situate herself as a part of a collective whose moment of
exposure is impending.
8. Monáe acknowledged a tangible and embodied relationship to the past
when she commented that, “Most of the people who are dead live in me,” offering
James Brown as an example (Nylon Magazine TV).
9. I do not want to belittle the troubling details of this scenario or dismiss
the issues with sampling. I agree with Bradby that this music video—Black
Box’s “Ride on Time” (1989)—must be critiqued but can also, if read in another
way, expose important postmodern feminist constructions that might disrupt the
historical association of women’s bodies and voices to romance and to the maternal
(171).
10. This practice is recognizable in the repertoire of Monáe contemporary
Erykah Badu, who often samples previous recordings of her own voice in her new
releases.
11. Monáe also lightly wets the corner of her mouth before her vocal line
begins in “Cold War.” Her slight movement is more of an announcement than a
provocative gesture, as she draws our attention to the sound that will soon emerge.
12. Soul singer Jill Scott used this technique in her August 2011 video
“Hear My Call,” from The Light of the Sun (Blues Babe Records, 2011). She plays
on the emotional distress of her lyrics, which outline her hurt and despair in love,
through significant facial expressions, and, like Monáe, is brought to tears. Scott,
however, is clothed and wears two separate outfits in the video.
13. McKittrick (2006) argues that black women’s productions disrupt the
fiction that geography or any material space “just is” an untouched, nonpoliticized
space (xi).
This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War” 409

14. The election of Barack Obama, the first African American president
of the United States, has consolidated much of the national black political energy
as a majority of the African-descended in the US rally to support him as both
icon and alternative to the conservative reign of former President George W. Bush.
Much of this support, however, hinges on President Obama’s ability to affectively
produce a particular kind of black masculine leadership. As Erica Edwards argues,
“One of the most compelling fictions of twentieth-century black political culture
is the fantasy of charismatic leadership, the idea that political advancement is best
achieved under the direction of a single male leader believed to be gifted with a
privileged connection to the divine.” Under these conditions, freedom of expression
and dissent is under threat: “When leadership is structured around a charismatic
aesthetic, it is often a male presence that bears—or, at least, is believed ought to
bear—the single gift of grace. In that scenario, political desire that runs counter to
the passage of authority from God to a masculine presence to followers is rendered
abject, dangerous, and murderous, and so is often violently squelched” (1085).

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Filmography/Discography
Monáe, Janelle. The ArchAndroid. Atlantic Records/Bad Boy: B002ZFQD0E,
2010.
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www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/
watch%3Fv%3DSxVNOnPyvIU>.