Anyone who has ever seen or heard Janelle Monáe is aware of that she’s very a lot on the market in the very best methods attainable. Now, we all know simply how far on the market she is: Circa 1972 at a David Bowie live performance.
Sure, as she revealed throughout in a current chat with Lucy Dacus for Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians collection, Monáe is a time traveler. (So, is that extra Invoice and Ted or, like, The Time Traveler’s Spouse?) And in some unspecified time in the future in her early profession, she harnessed the space-time continuum itself to go see Bowie and his band carry out throughout the tour for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
“I traveled again into the Seventies and I noticed him do Ziggy Stardust and it was unimaginable,” Monáe stated. I imply, I possibly would’ve as a substitute stopped the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or shuffled Child Hitler off this mortal coil. Nonetheless, a pleasant live performance after some chrono-skipping sounds beautiful, too. Try the clip under.
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Now, you’re doubtless feeling precisely like Dacus appeared: Slightly shocked, and possibly even a tiny bit incredulous as well. However open your ears and your thoughts, as what Monáe says subsequent actually issues.
“I used to be backstage, and that is what I wish to do,” Monáe continued. “And so I jetted again to, you recognize, the 2000s. And I used to be like, ‘I can have the musical, make the music, create the lyrics, and create neighborhood round transformation and being queer.’ And never even simply in sexuality, however in how we see the world.”
Sure, slack-jawed reader, this complete factor is probably going a artistic little metaphor for Monáe’s personal connection to Bowie’s music, and the way it gave her the braveness to embrace her personal chameleon-esque powers of creative reinvention and genre-smashing private progress. (I imply, she nigh actually reworked into Michael Jackson on the 2025 Grammys.) Monáe merely skilled the Skinny White Duke in such a deeply private method that she may as nicely have moved by means of time itself, and we’ve all felt that method about an artist. (However none of us bought the prospect to share that story in a technique to unnerve Lucy Dacus.)
And much more than her personal artistic inspirations, she got here again from the ’70s with one important lesson for the remainder of us (with an in any other case tenuous grasp on the timestream):
“Let’s go outdoors the mundane and what folks know us as,” Monáe stated. “Go away room to permit your self to rework.”
In a day and age the place so many individuals’s identities are being policed and/or erased, Monáe’s little fable appears particularly necessary. We should settle for ourselves absolutely, be keen to embrace the optimistic energy of progress and alter, and develop into who we wish to see out on this planet.
Until, in fact, she was being literal together with her experiences. And at that time, we must always all most likely proceed to idolize Monáe lest all of us discover ourselves all of a sudden “un-born” by some means.
Try the complete dialog under (earlier than it’s seized by the MIB, in fact).
.@JanelleMonae is an authorized time traveler and noticed David Bowie on stage. 🛸
“Yeah, I used to be backstage and I used to be like ‘that is what I wish to do.'” pic.twitter.com/8UKt5bTWiy
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) October 20, 2025
