Janelle Monáe - Pynk (feat. Grimes)

It's no news that human culture has had a special appreciation for phallic symbols since they started creating forms of art. In a male dominated society, those symbols of the male genitalia have mostly been associated with power and domination in an aggressive way, but on the other side of the spectrum, female reproductive organs have been hidden and stigmatized. Jokes about penis are everywhere, while we keep blushing when somebody mentions the word "vagina".

For Janelle Monáe, one of the most ferocious feminist queer music artists nowadays, it is time to empower the conceptions we have about vaginas. It is time for women to feel pride on the most intimate part of their bodies, and it's time for men to stop thinking of them as simple holes to be filled. Pynk, that color that's associated with femininity (but surprisingly, not always but only in modern times, as a social construct), is used as a symbol for what Monáe herself has called as "pussy power".

Monáe goes exploring all the possibilities of a vagina, from pleasure spot to the place where life begins. She wants to strip the word and the vagina itself of the modesty and shame that it carries, and empower women by making them feel comfortable in their own bodies. She's very sensitive and elegant at tackling female sexuality, but never condescending; if she never mentions the word itself, it is not necessary because every single line here make us think of vaginas, but not in a sexualized way, but in a tender and vibrant humanity; with this language explorations, she encourages women and society to explore new ways to represent women sexuality.

Musically, she goes with a soft and bubbly synth at first to then erupt with guitar riffs accompanied by Grimes, an artist that has already worked with Monáe in a quite different track called Venus Fly from Grimes' 2015 album, Art Angels. If Claire Boucher is not all over the track and let Janelle shine, we can feel her presence and her influence on the undulating pop synths of the track, a change of the usual R&B in Monáe's music.

Above all, Pynk is a celebration of womanhood, of all the path that feminists around the globe had endured so in 2018 we can have a black queer woman singing about the beauty in her vagina, about the pleasure that it makes her feel (on her own or in the company of a lover, no matter if it's a boy or a girl), and about the power that owning herself has brought to her life and her craft as an artist.