It’s not quite as aggressively science fictional as her phenomenal video about a droid auction-slash-rock-concert for “Many Moons,” which she released more than four years ago, but the video for Janelle Monae’s excellent collaboration with Erykah Badu “Q.U.E.E.N.” is a reminder of just how important her contributions to science fiction—as well as to music—have been since she broke out onto the national scene:

Monae is hardly the first musician to situate her musical persona in science fiction. Psychadelia gave us Jefferson Starship. George Clinton has a long and deep engagement with spaceship iconography and science fiction more broadly. On “Roses,” a caustic anti-love song with no other particularly science fictional elements from his The Love Below album, Andre 3000 entreated the woman being addressed in the track to “come back down to Mars.” When you read music as narrative fiction, locations beyond Earth and times far removed from ours are common settings. But in a few short years, and across multiple songs and videos, Monae has created a particularly coherent universe full of robots sold as luxury goods to decadent, exceedingly well-dressed droids and rebels, institutions that house revolutionary figures, some of whom can walk through walls, and electrifying musical performances.

And the coherence of her music video universe isn’t the only thing striking about Monae’s ouvre, or that marks her as a science fictional thinker. As I wrote on Wednesday, Hollywood tends to portray technology and our loss of control of it—or misuse of it—as a major factor in the creation of radically altered future. Monae’s music videos frequently operate from the premise that cultural tools are at least as powerful as technical or physical ones.

In the video for “Many Moons,” Cindi Mayweather, an android who Monae presents as an alter ego, gives an electrifying performance at an auction of extraordinarily expensive androids. Her music, which makes reference to a wide range of social and political issues, is initially treated as dance music for frenzied, regimented revelers. But when her performance literally shorts her out, what was intended as a classy backdrop to an ugly transaction disrupts it. The musician becomes an activist through her passionate dedication to her performance. In the introduction to “Q.U.E.E.N.” a voiceover explains that visitors are at a museum where revolutionaries who disrupted society with music have been archived for public consumption. They’re resurrected by a record snuck into the facility, which frees Monae’s character to ask questions that begin in the personal, like “Am I a freak for dancing around? / Am I a freak for getting down?” and move to the political: “I asked a question like this / ‘Are we a lost generation of our people?’ / Add us to equations but they’ll never make us equal. / She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel. / So why ain’t the stealing of my rights made illegal? / They keep us underground working hard for the greedy, / But when it’s time pay they turn around and call us needy.”

Monae isn’t the only person with the idea that cultural power can create dramatic inflection points in the evolution of the future. Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad culminates in a concert by an artist who begins the book as an extraordinarily broken man and reemerges as a children’s musician. The concert starts as a marketing gig for one of the characters in the novel, but it turns into an astonishing experience that united two generations, one similar to the Millenials, and the one that followed, who have embraced digital communication but rejected drug use and tattoos. It’s an amazing conclusion to the novel in part because it’s strikingly different from much of what we see in science fiction in a number of ways: it’s set in the near-future instead of far off, it’s hopeful instead of apocalyptic, and it’s collective and artistic instead of individual and technological.

To a certain extent, the place where Egan ends is the one from which Monae blasts off. Given Monae’s extraordinarily precise sense of visual style, the concepts she’s pulled together and expressed with directors with a range of visual styles, and the way her lyrics would fit in larger narrative settings, I’d love to see what planet she’d land on if she had the opportunity to tell stories over 120 minutes instead of six of them.

There’s finally a video for one of my favorite songs of last year, from Ab-Soul’s brilliant album Control System. “ILLuminate” is a standout from that record, a showcase for the Black Hippy alum’s addictive blend of introspective cultural commentary and blunts-and-brags swagger. The video, directed by Fredo Tovar and Scott Fleishman, provides appropriate imagery — a vaguely post-apocalyptic wasteland and a group of young people keeping the darkness away with their own creativity:

The timing for the video is pretty solid, too, coming three months after Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city (and eight months after Control System). “ILLuminate” features Lamar on the final verse, and the two men’s complementary styles here provide a winsome invitation and representative introduction to the creative output of the Black Hippy set beyond Lamar. (Ab-Soul and Schoolboy Q were absent from GKMC, while Jay Rock made the absolute most of his feature on “Money Trees.”)

Ta-Nehisi Coates has started digesting the Kendrick Lamar record, and the major qualities he’s praised about it – its sincere vulnerability and the way it speaks for the unheroic and the common – should lead him and others to check out Control System as well. Ab-Soul’s version of vulnerability is certainly different from Lamar’s. Coates had a great line about Lamar being “obsessed with speaking as a civilian” in an art form “obsessed with soldiers,” and that’s a good way to understand the surface differences between Ab-Soul’s vulnerability and Kendrick’s. Soul flirts with speaking as a civilian but clings to soldierly posturing far more than his labelmate. As an example: When Kendrick pondered gang unification on good kid, it was as a threat to his own life. When Ab-Soul ponders it on Control System, it’s part of a fantasy about being able to fight off the U.S. military. “Terrorist Threats” is another great track from this record, but neither it nor “ILLuminate” are good examples of Ab-Soul’s vulnerability. That song’s insecurities about fleeting popularity and industry pressures to duplicate 2 Chainz are, in a sense, the performative version of vulnerability that TNC notes is common to rap.

The best example of the deeper, truer vulnerability in Control System doesn’t have a video yet, but it should. “Double Standards” features Anna Wise, who’s having a great run of guest vocals on excellent rap records. (She sang on multiple good kid, m.A.A.d city cuts last year, and on two tracks from Oneirology by Cunninlynguists, one of the best records of 2011:)

“Double Standards” is a lot like Kendrick’s “The Art Of Peer Pressure” in its reflective take on group dynamics and individual behavior. The simplicity of the hook strays close to the preachiness that makes that Macklemore “Same Love” joint almost unlistenable for me, even as I appreciate its value. But Soul saves it in the verses, with economical depictions of the wildly different norms about promiscuity and fidelity that prevail for men and women. Those norms are present in some of the best examples of the flawed or performative version of hiphop vulnerability Coates sees Kendrick breaking away from on good kid. Jay-Z’s “Song Cry,” Ghostface’s “Back Like That,” and MF DOOM//Madlib’s “Fancy Clown” all traffic in the crippled, one-sided understanding of fidelity that Ab-Soul rips apart on “Double Standards.”

In the final verse, he points out that we inherit these attitudes, that they are trained into us at a developing age. This isn’t the first-person storytelling of good kid, but it’s predicated on the same genuine openness and reflectiveness on experiences that are common, daily, and unheroic. It’s a different formula of the same drug, and hopefully everyone who appreciates Kendrick’s output will make time to explore Ab-Soul’s.

Idris Elba poaching eggs and hanging out on the beach and having great ties is basically the inverse of waiting for election results, so have that instead of tuning in to whatever television station is not going to actually have useful, anxiety-dispelling information to offer you yet:

Hang in there. I’ll be over on the main page liveblog keeping an eye on media coverage and other shenanigans.

The AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff joked yesterday that he and I are the only people interested in the independent television movement and the problems surrounding finding a successful business model for it that doesn’t include distribution over established networks. But the report he filed from the New York Television Festival is indispensable for anyone who cares about connecting up genuinely fresh voices, ideas, and faces with the audience we believe is hungry for them but isn’t finding them, or isn’t paying for them. Todd explains why it’s been so much harder to find that business model in independent television than in independent film:

No one has quite figured out the independent TV business model just yet—a problem even Grey will admit exists. Attending NYTVF feels a bit like how I imagine attending Sundance in the mid-’80s must have felt: There’s a whole bunch of valuable product that could attract an audience if given a chance, but no one’s yet sure how to make money from that product. It was Sex, Lies, And Videotape that helped Sundance break through into the mainstream consciousness, and I’m not sure that independent TV has found its Steven Soderbergh yet. And even considering that factor, there’s the fact that running a TV show is a vastly different undertaking from directing a film. An independent film can be released to theaters, where it will hopefully recoup its budget. An independent TV pilot will ideally lead to a larger series, and that would mean a substantial investment of network funds to keep the show going, while an independent film is, ultimately, a much smaller investment of cash. Until a show as self-evidently good as Sex, Lies, And Videotape breaks through, independent TV may remain a curiosity too costly for networks to indulge in.

I’d note that in certain ways, independent film in recent years has also been gaining access to alternative distribution methods that audiences are already using. You have to find your way to an independent movie theater, but it isn’t a totally different experience from going to the multiplex. Same with ordering independent movies on demand: indies like Margin Call and Bachelorette have gone to VOD sometimes without even going to theaters and done fine there because audiences are so familiar with the experience of ordering movies. But indie television hasn’t broken in there, because that would mean striking details with cable carriers, which is no small task of its own for producers who, and would probably be something the networks would frown on, however little competition the indies would provide. Right now, indie television isn’t getting access either networks like PBS or even bigger distribution networks like Netflix and Hulu, which would be obvious outlets for them. However easy it is to distribute on the web or through YouTube, it still requires determined consumers who are already used to looking for content outside normal channels to find those shows.

That, of course, comes second to the issue of just producing enough material independently to actually constitute a television season, much less a television episode. Todd explains, for both reasons of creativity and resources, that most shows at the festival just aren’t coming up with even a full episode’s worth of material, though the best shows, like Husbands, are coming close. He’s right it’s going to take a big breakthrough show that becomes a massive hit despite the distributional challenges—and then it’s going to take people working out the rather more complicated business infrastructure to provide the huge, long-term support indie television makers are going to need to keep turning out product.

I wrote last month about the need to see a much wider range of love stories between same-sex couples in our culture, moving away from relationships that are marked by tragedy because of the sexual orientation of the participants, and towards stories that can be purely happy, or tragic because of other factors, or the basis for heroics unrelated to the relationships. We’re in the early stages of some television shows that do that, like The L.A. Complex and Lost Girl. And now we have a music video that advances that narrative, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s gorgeous cradle-to-the-grave short film for “Same Love”:

Part of what’s fascinating and politically effective about the video is that the images are much more subtle than the lyrics themselves, which are a blunt call for equality. The couple in the film confront implied homophobia from their teenaged peers, from a couple on the street, but they also get to experience normal milestones, from teenaged fights with their parents, to public kisses, to introducing each other to their families, to an anxious proposal, to a joyous wedding. Homophobia, both internalized and external, is a factor in their relationship, but it’s far from the sum of it, and it doesn’t consume them and end in a cliche spasm of violence, as was the case for Murs’ “Animal Style” video. They just get to live, and love, and we can focus on the beauty and tremulousness and steadfastness of their relationship, above all else.

Murs’ video for “Animal Style,” a story about the tragic consequences of internalized homophobia and closeting, was planned long before Frank Ocean released the liner notes from Channel Orange that tell the story of his first love. But the timing’s been such that it enters an existing conversation that’s already underway:

The video itself plays into some very old narratives about self-hating black gay men that, while they may be a powerful dramatization of the worst consequences of internalized homophobia, are hardly the sum of the experiences of non-straight African American people. But there’s still something bracing about Murs’ willingness to play a gay man even though he’s straight and married, without any of the coyness or shock-value courting of Lil B’s I’m Gay (I’m Happy) album.

But no matter the content, one of the things that’s fascinating about the reaction to the clip is the anxiety some people appear to feel about its existence. “Since when is HIP HOP and being GAY ever intertwined,” complains one commenter on World Star Hip-Hop. “Wtf , why are rappers trying to capitalize on this gay shit now,” whines another. The idea that hip-hop has somehow been captured by a gay takeover is ludicrous, of course. But it’s amazing how threatened people feel by even a couple of positively-received efforts by rappers and R&B singers to explore sexuality and homophobia. Frank Ocean, Lil B, and Murs are a beginning of a conversation, rather than the end of it. And some people seem very nervous about the prospect of that conversation taking place anywhere, even if there’s absolutely no requirement that they participate in it, if only because they know that it means their views may no longer be dominant.

This last season of Mad Men heightened the debate about the show’s approach to race and the 1960s, bringing Dawn, a young secretary, into the office as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first African-American employee. Would these exceedingly exceedingly privileged white people have much contact with black people who weren’t their domestic help or much awareness of the civil rights movement? Did the show tokenize Dawn by bringing her into the office but building no significant storyline around her presence there? I expect all of those debates to continue next season, particularly as we see whether Matthew Weiner has long-term plans for Dawn, or for how his white folks will bend or break under the winds of change.

But in the meantime, Santigold’s new video for her song “The Keepers” may be my favorite critique of the obliviousness of people like the Drapers:

It’s a house where impeccably coifed, white-blonde people eat food that glows with poison. When shooters in a car shred the walls, they momentarily startle, then check their hair and make sure their clothes are in place, and sit back down to dinner. And when their milkman’s caught in the crossfire, they make a spectacle of his death without considering the risk outside. The house build by racism is burning down around them and they don’t even notice.Mad Men did horror stories last season, but to slightly cartoonish effect. Don Draper still had to be the person we rooted for, even as he courted rot in his jaw, even as he was haunted by his dead brother. It seems it takes someone like Santigold to do the job properly, to reveal the obscenity of moving through your swish, stylish life ignorant of the fundamental inequalities you benefit from, and unprepared to adapt to a world without them.

As a piece of political thought, I really, really like Jasiri X’s and Rhymefest’s latest track, “Who’s Illegal?”:

it’s a great explication of the work done by the word “illegal” when it’s used to describe immigrants, both in terms of how we view history, and how we judge present actions. If people are, themselves, inherently illegal, it becomes harder to judge violence done to establish and expand American borders in the past as a violation of both law and norms. And if people are illegal, the illegality of their personhood supersedes, in the imagination, illegal acts done to them by supposedly legal persons like Joe Arpaio. The idea that a person can be illegal is, of course, incoherent. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve ugly uses.

The exceedingly NSFW (and I really do mean that) video for The Flaming Lips ‘The First Time’ has been making the rounds for a while now—for those who can’t watch, it features Erykah Badu, who sings on the track, naked in a bathtub with eye makeup that makes her look bruised, and her sister, coated in variou liquids, in shots that show her full frontal nudity:

It’s an unsettling set of images, but I considered them perhaps more closely than I might have otherwise given Badu’s prior willingness to use her body in her video art. Except it turns out she’s deeply uncomfortable with the video, and alleges that Wayne Coyne produced a video that doesn’t accord with the vision he laid out to her, and released it without getting her approval on either the images or the lyrics in a violation of her contract. In a long Facebook post, she writes:

You showed me a concept of beautiful tasteful imagery( by way of vid text messages). I trusted that. I was mistaken…You begged me to sit in a tub of that other shit and I said naw. I refused to sit in any liquid that was not water. But Out of RESPECT for you and the artist you ‘appear’ to be, I Didn’t wanna kill your concept , wanted u to at least get it out of your head . After all, u spent your dough on studio , trip to Dallas etc.. Sooo, I invited Nayrok , my lil sis and artist, who is much more liberal ,to be subject of those other disturbing (to me ) scenes . I told u from jump that I believed your concept to be disturbing. But would give your edit a chance. You then said u would take my shots ( in clear water/ fully covered parts -seemed harmless enough) and Nayrok’s part ( which I was not present for but saw the photos and a sample scene of cornstarch dripping ) and edit them together along with cosmic, green screen images ( which no one saw) then would show me the edit. Instead, U disrespected me by releasing pics and rough vid on the internet without my approval. (Contract breech )

Coyne’s response has not been precisely illuminating. In a series of posts, he initially tweeted an apology to Badu’s fans who might have been offended by it, saying “We are very sorry if it has offended some of Erykah Badu’s more Conservative audience! The video was intended for mature audiences and is NOT an Erykah Badu statement.. It is a Flaming Lips video!!!” The band as also acknowledged that the video was unapproved and unfinished. But since Badu herself voiced objections, he’s resorted to retweeting affirmations of his work like “Seriously?! http://bit.ly/LyY6gF Erykah Badu should be thankful to @theflaminglips & @waynecoyne for reminding people she’s still around,” rather than addressing Badu’s claims that he violated both his contract with her and her sense of trust.

Women in American entertainment often have to go along to get along, to accommodate just one more request from a director. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to maintain your sense that you own your body under those circumstances, and I’m speaking as a white woman, rather than as a woman of color, who are subject to a different set of demands and historical circumstances. As a person in business, if you make a contract, you should honor it. And as an artist working with another artist on material she finds difficult or uncomfortable, if you want to get a good, usable performance out of that person, it seems like respect should be your first-order operating principal. Hollywood often treats hiring actresses and purchasing limited rights to their bodies as the same thing. If Coyne did, in fact, give Badu the right to sign off on the video before he released it and failed to do so, someone needs to tell him to cut down on the self-congratulation and start thinking more carefully about the right he’s asserted to use black women’s bodies for his own self-aggrandizement.