Category: Grace Jones

  • Girls in Cars

    Aside from the cheerful candy-colored queer eroticism of Janelle Monae’s video for “Pynk,” one of the things that strikes me is the way Monae flips the trope of women in a car into a narrative of black female pride and empowerment. Women in cars are, of course, a well-worn visual feature of many rap music…

  • Funk and Futurism

    Earth, Wind and Fire as part of the cycle of creation. What is Afrofuturism? Briefly, the term denotes an African American ideological current associated with aesthetic references to outer space, non-Western cosmologies, religious and historical revisionism, and a stringent critique of the socio-economic plights of African Americans (and diasporic and continental Africans more broadly). Earth,…