Latest news with #Afro-futurist
New York Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Janelle Monáe Is a ‘Time-Traveling Dandy' at the Met Gala
Janelle Monáe was feeling euphoric on Sunday when asked to break down her look for this year's Met Gala, which celebrates Black dandyism. 'I feel like a kid in class ready to give the presentation,' Monáe said. After all, 'she truly is the modern day dandy,' said Thom Browne, who designed her look. Since Monáe started releasing music in the 2000s, tailored suiting has been core to her style. She adds her own flair with sculptural layering and accessories like whimsical hats and bow ties. Growing up, Monáe observed her mother, a janitor and part-time banquet server; her father, a sanitation worker; and her grandmother, a cook, in their uniforms, which included black slacks, white button-down shirts, bow ties, jackets and cummerbunds. When the singer, actor and author started cultivating her style early in her career, she knew she wanted to honor her working class parents, her ancestors and herself. 'I'm a very free-spirited person,' said Monáe, 39. 'I've spent a great deal of my career — I've tried to at least — just redefining who you can be in a suit.' Redefinition and self-expression are central to dandyism, a style of elevated dress once imposed upon enslaved people, and remade by Black aesthetes into a tool of self-actualization, revolution and subversion. For her Met Gala look, Monáe hoped to play a character she conceived, as she does every year for the event, she said. This year, it was 'the time-traveling dandy,' a visual representation of how she is informed by her past while considering herself a staunch Afro-futurist. 'We asked ourselves, 'What would elements of dandyism from the past, present and future look like?'' Monáe said. That includes literal elements of time, like a monocle that is also a moving clock, and a watch. But also, an oversized trompe l'oeil cape, embroidered with radial outlines, which will give the illusion of a rectangular portal. When she removes it on the red carpet, it will be as if she is emerging from a time machine: 'It feels like you're getting a glimpse of somebody moving through time,' she said. Monáe, who identifies as nonbinary, also conveys how dandyism transcends gender. For this look, she collaborated with Paul Tazewell, the costume designer who recently won an Oscar for his work in the film 'Wicked.' Mr. Browne said the cape is a reference to Fritz Lang's futuristic film 'Metropolis.' Monáe's derby hat evokes Gladys Bentley, a blues singer who was known for adopting more masculine styles of dress in the 1920s. And beneath the cape, Monáe will wear a deconstructed sport coat and skirt — the right half in black and white pinstripes, the left half in a red wool crepe fabric. 'You almost go from the traditional male to the red exuberant female, all on the same figure,' Mr. Tazewell said. The deconstruction in the suit was also symbolic for Monáe. 'I've tried to deconstruct systems for many years through my work, through my art and activism,' she said. 'I want to deconstruct respectability politics around suiting and around how Black people can show up in the world. I wanted to show that we get to decide who we are.'
Los Angeles Times
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Adult Swim's ‘Oh My God ... Yes!' imagines a group of besties in futuristic South L.A.
Set in South L.A. somewhere in the not too near future, 'Oh My God ... Yes!' — subtitled not without reason 'A Series of Extremely Relatable Circumstances' — is the devilish Afro-futurist surrealist animated action series you didn't know you were waiting for. It premieres with two episodes Sunday on Adult Swim, home of the odd and sometimes, but not always, offensive. Created by Adele 'Supreme' Williams ('My Dad the Bounty Hunter'), it takes the 'girlfriends in the city' premise and adds humanoid robots, anthropomorphic animals and gayliens (that's 'gay aliens,' their preferred term) to the cast, and spices up the action with apocalyptic violence, satanists, a teeth-pulling game show host and robots that on the basis of a glitchy video are determined to fulfill a prophecy from 'the late, great rapper, turned martyr, who for some reason we revere as a god, Tupic [sic],' who they believe has instructed them to eat the rich. (The sonorous Keith David plays their leader.) Sunny (Williams), Tulip (DomiNque Perry) and Ladi (Xosha Roquemore, Tamra from 'The Mindy Project') are our ordinary heroines, built on superhero frames (with a touch of Don Bluth, to my eye). Without much effort, one might find them vaguely analogous to the Powerpuff Girls: Tulip, the Bubbles, sweet, childlike, given to fits; pistol-packing Ladi, the Buttercup, more than ready for a fight; and Sunny (a 'noted influencer'), the Blossom, if Blossom were less competent and more interested in money, and if they were not out to save the world, but only themselves — though in doing the latter, they might do the former. (And if they drank.) Each episode runs 11 minutes, the classic length of the old Popeye and Bugs Bunny and Road Runner theatrical shorts — brief enough to not wear out an idea, long enough to express one, but timed to keep the gags coming fast. And like those shorts, in which characters were continually being pummeled, flattened, shot, blown up, run over and the like, 'Oh My God' dives into 'cartoon violence,' if more graphic and disturbing in the execution. Sex isn't new to animation either if you know your gartered Betty Boop or the tongue-flapping Tex Avery Wolf; that sort of thing, too, is more explicitly expressed everywhere in the pop culture nowadays, as it is here. You'll know your tolerance for either, and no shame if it is low. The series is very much in the Adult Swim house style, where the extraordinary is stirred in with the extraordinarily banal, going back to 'Space Ghost Coast to Coast,' 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force' and 'Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law,' forward to 'Metalocalypse' and 'The Venture Bros.' and 'Lazor Wulf' (a sort of slacker cousin to 'Oh My God'). A line like, 'The people of South Central will never embrace your Antichrist,' perfectly captures that aesthetic — you might even call it a philosophy. Certainly it is inspiring in its way. For beyond such concepts as a President Vending Machine (feels timely), a badly rapping 'Fervid Idealist Eating Hornswoggle' spider (Is that an acronymic reference to the Swedish neo-soul band Fieh? It seems unlikely, but not impossible.), a push broom boyfriend, a removable uterus, a 'closure cookie' that instead of delivering closure only makes you want closure more and turns you into a monster in the bargain, the series is grounded in relationships and (somewhat extreme) feelings. Friendship, family, love, grief, self-acceptance — these concerns make it real, not just really strange.
