“Let’s clarify that”: Exploring Janelle Monae’s unique time travelling philosophy
You have to commend Lucy Dacus and her ability to keep a straight face when Janelle Monáe revealed in a conversation for Rolling Stone that she’d travelled back in time and seen David Bowie perform on the Ziggy Stardust tour.
If I’d been in the same situation, I could tell you that my brow would have been doing a considerable amount of gymnastics at this claim, and the amount of candour with which Dacus handled this confounding revelation only makes me appreciate her warmth and kindness more. I’ll happily entertain a good time-travel tale in a science-fiction context, but if you’re sitting opposite me and claiming that you’ve managed to sneak through gaps in space and time, I am going to scoff and resort to extensive ridicule.
As a child of the ‘80s, Monáe did not see Bowie perform in the early 1970s, and I hope we can unequivocally agree on that. If time travel was even indeed possible in my time or Monáe’s time, which is to say, the same time, then why haven’t we all gone back to witness the Ziggy Stardust tour for ourselves?
You’d presume that this wild claim was made with a reasonable amount of jest, but when you realise that Monáe isn’t spouting nonsense for the cameras and actually has a history of discussing her theories on time, then the concerns start to develop.
The thing is, as head-scratchingly insane as her scientific musings are, there’s an element of philosophical truth in the claims she’s made in the past. In an interview with Rock Cellar in 2022, Monáe was asked about her thoughts on afro-futurism and how this perspective has shaped her artistry from her youth until the present day, but her response was perhaps something that no interviewer could have prepared themselves to deal with as an off-the-cuff remark.
“Well, I’m still a kid. Let’s clarify that,” she began, before launching into the more far-fetched aspects of her beliefs. “I identify as being timeless. Timeless, timeless. You know? I think that my cells respond to feeling and believing and knowing, but I’m timeless. I’m a time traveler. I move through space. I move through time.”
Hold your hot takes, though, because Monáe’s insistence on being able to bend the fourth dimension as she fancies then takes its more philosophical turn, as she then begins to question the very reality of our own concept of time. “What is time, actually?” she continues. “It’s whatever we say it is. It’s wherever we say it is. What agreement we have in whatever community we’re in.”
To be fair to her, astrophysical studies on how the Earth has a cyclical rotation pattern relative to other celestial objects are the only reasons why we’ve decided to invent the concept of time, and there’s no empirical evidence for time to be a tangible thing. All of our concepts of time are based on what we perceive as individuals, and so if the timeline that Monáe has invented for herself permits her to have travelled back to a point over a decade before her birth, then good for her.
If you’re willing to contort the predetermined conditions of how society has forced you to understand time, then go ahead, you go and see Bowie in 1972 and tell me how good it was. As for me, I’ll stay right here, smugly waiting for you to report back.
