Freakifying history: remixing royalty

Abstract

Afrocentric revisions of world history have given way to Afrofuturist imaginings of the future. In the 2013 video for the song 'Q.U.E.E.N.', black American artists Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu offer an Afrofuturist redefinition of queenliness. While visually and lyrically presenting themselves as queens, they repeatedly ask 'am I a freak for getting down?' The idea of being a 'freak' and its associations with sexuality, abnormality, and deviance has a long history within the African diaspora that centers on the intersection of different forms of spectacle and performances of (un)respectability. By situating the video within the context of Monae's Electric Lady album and a larger lineage of musical and visual performance, this article explores the relationship between remixes of royalty, respectability, and spectacle in black artists' use of African diasporic and Afrofuturistic imaginaries, while arguing for the sociopolitical power of the conscious performance as a 'freak'.