A feature-length emotion picture 🎥

Here is the latest Janelle Monáe video drop, in case you missed it. Worth paying close attention since the album drops this Friday, and also because Janelle’s planning to make all the Dirty Computer videos into a 44-minute Lemonade-style film– sorry, ‘emotion picture‘. Way to merge an album with that Moonlight Oscar.

If you haven’t seen Amy Schumer’s new movie, I Feel Pretty, here’s a quick synopsis: Amy Schumer bumps her head at SoulCycle and from that point forward imagines that she is impossibly thin and beautiful. Overall a v 90s slapstick exploration of a blonde girl’s body image issues, which is disappointing in light of 1. more pressing body issues presented by things like queerness, class difference, race, and 2. the much-better comedy she’s done before.

In light of all the misses, a piece you should really read is Alison Herman’s bit from The Ringer, “Did We Get Amy Schumer Wrong?” Here’s the gist: when Amy had her show, Inside Amy Schumer, on Comedy Central, it was funny and sophisticated, taking on the social constructs that create ‘body image [issues and] internalized misogyny.’ Everything of Schumer’s before and since has been, well, dumber, and no surprise: at Inside, she had a star cast of writers: Jessi Klein, Tig Notaro, Tami Sagher, Christine Nangle, and Gabe Liedman, and now she… doesn’t. That’s a real Wizard-of-Oz trick, Hollywood– you got us.

Talk about finding yourself the right way. More assigned reading for you is Jenna Wortham’s profile, How Janelle Monae Found Her Voice. Block out 20 minutes to read the full piece today– it’ll give you all kinds of fantastic details on things like Wondaland and release parties, but here’s the guiding theme: for years Janelle Monáe felt closeted, placing the parts of herself that were uncomfortable to talk about on an imaginary android alterego who, she imagined, lived in a realm devoid of demographic classifiers like gender and race. She’d hint at queerness through lyrics about ladies but then throw a dude into the narrative to throw you off the scent.

On Dirty Computer, though, she embraces queerness and blackness through her own body– no android– hoping fans can see parts of themselves onscreen and onstage. Which I think tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Janelle Monáe: you’ll learn in the Wortham profile that Janelle has taken the stage over the past few years at The Women’s March and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which seem to have been as powerful for her as they were for the rest of us as a means of internalizing shared struggles and a will to overcome them. Not that it’s all so causal, but those stages seem to have helped her understand our collective need for a voice, which she’s now decided to own and elevate– which in turn empowers her listeners to amplify their voices too. So next time you wonder if protest is actually effective…

Oh look, I found a little PYNK for you. It’s from Lovepop, a company that makes sculptural pop-up cards that are way splashy. Here for all your love-expressing needs (whether that’s for yourself or, say, your mom or spring bestie), you can get some here.