Music is the Message: Janelle Monae’s Anthem Will Not Be Ignored
It isn’t that the news didn’t move me. The names had started to wash over me like everyone else. New day? New story about a black American suffering at the hands of police. New day? New controversy about what these stories do or don’t mean for a concerned public. The details of each individual arrest might leave room for debate, maybe, but they very often quiet clues about systemic problems lurking beyond that day’s headline.
I wondered if the America I believed in was a lost cause. Then a song from Janelle Monae slapped me around a little bit and insisted that I “come to.”
I wondered if my original disposition was what it felt like to get old. Watching the news with no idea where to start and a hundred questions about how we ended up here, again, I just shook my head as I felt smaller and more helpless each day. My grandmother had done this too. I could remember her sitting in front of the TV, throwing her hands in the air and asking, “why?” When she got up to leave the room, she would explain that she saw big trouble ahead and she couldn’t take it anymore.
Now I saw things getting worse and couldn’t imagine how they could be any bigger.
Big trouble like a country that has one experience on offer for white Americans and another for black Americans.
Big trouble like people not feeling safe in their communities because of the color of their skin.
Big trouble like a supposedly free people accepting that they should dress a certain way and act a certain way in certain contexts in order to live through them.
Janelle Monae’s talent and expectations of us are just as big as all of that. Maybe bigger. Her anthem, “Hell You Talmabout?,” matched the downward force of feeling helpless with an upward pull of believing we can do better. We had to do better. Those headlines couldn’t drown out her voice, Monae heard an anthem that needed a people to carry it.
“We recorded it to challenge the indifference, disregard, and negligence of all who remain quiet about this issue,” Monae said.
“Hell You Talmabout?” is vastly different from Monae’s usual sound, a comprehensive, multi-track, fully instrumented and synthesized experience. The sound of her anthem is simple, grounded in a shared experience and weighed down by collective frustration. A drum cadence fixes your gaze on boots pounding the street, a march headed in your direction. The choir offers a hand up as Monae and other artists shout the names of unarmed black Americans killed by police officers.
There is only one lyric besides these names, the artists shout, “Say his name! Say his name!” The whole enterprise appears to consist of these three tracks. Drums, choir, and “Say her name!”
The artists aren’t just reading names either. They’re shouting them. Repeating them. Insisting that they be heard. Insisting that they be said again and connected to the events of the moment. Not just headlines, but people. This wasn’t just a string of stories, one unarmed black man or woman followed by another and another, but stories of individual people with families, with ideas of themselves and with expectations of living in a free country. Expectations that were unmet.
Expectations that mark our country’s failure to achieve that status of a free country because free countries guarantee a right to live. This failure shows a disastrous comfort with a status of “almost” where things are “good enough” for most of us.
With its simple composition, the song is a raw experience. Raw emotion. Raw power. The type of power left when all appearances of decency and civilized behavior have been trampled. It’s an anthem that calls out for respect, addressing both a question of whether or not we respect the individuals killed and whether or not we respect those democratic principles we say we live by.
Monae’s anthem helped me hear this question of democratic principles as a matter of my own life or death. This was a question for all of us, for the American people as a whole.
Our wholeness is precisely what is at stake. Would-be influencers who thought they were doing something by responding to #BlackLivesMatter with #AllLivesMatter claim this as their point. They are looking out for all of us. But those efforts appear shallow and thoughtless alongside Monae’s work that shows exactly who is left out when we settle for “almost” and “good enough.” It shows who is always left out of those calculations no matter where in this country those calculations are made. It shows that the #BlackLivesMatter movement isn’t about denying that cops’ lives matter or that my fairly average, white, middle-class life matters. Monae’s “Hell You Talmabout?” demands attention for a movement to be counted among those lives, to have weight in all those calculations of what matters. It’s an anthem that requires standing up together to resist the headlines that would crush each one of us sitting alone with the day’s events.
The power of the song seems to pulsate with anger and fear but there’s a democratic plea at the heart of it. Monae reminds us that we can do better by the people lost and by our own ideas of what it means to be a free people. We have to do something.
***This post was written in response to Politicolor Sketchbook’s Call for Submissions, Music is the Message. If you enjoyed my effort to write out what I experienced through this song, please recommend this post here, share it and leave me a comment about a song that moved you.***
