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a voiceover explains that visitors are at a museum where revolutionaries who disrupted society with music have been archived for public consumption.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 are a lot of reasons I am not the target audience for a movie about college a capella, but you know what’s an awesomely quick way to ensure I will never, ever see Pitch Perfect? Make fun of people who are trying to prevent rape on college campuses both by suggesting that they’re over-earnest and that there are a lot of fake allegations:

Try harder.

I was hatewatching Smash this morning, and I realized the show is managing to be the second example for two mini-trends that have been bouncing around episodes in recent weeks—the sneaky bisexual, and the blonde being abused by her creator.

The fairly clear implication of last night’s episode was that assistant-turned-wannabe-producer Ellis was willing to sleep with a star’s agent to get her to consider playing Marilyn more seriously than she had previously, even though we know he has what appears to be a serious, live-in girlfriend. Much like Revenge‘s bisexual, loner tech billionaire Nolan, Ellis’s sexuality is presented less as a means of personal expression and more of a strategic tool. Ellis is one of the most irritating characters on television, a relentless climber without an iota of personal attachment, whether it’s to another human being, to ideas of merit and talent, or to the work and the subject matter itself. If Smash has been successful at anything, it’s managed to communicate the other characters’ investment in musical theater. Ellis just seems to want power because it’s there. And perhaps its best scene was a fight between Tom and Derek that turned into a sophisticated debate between how gay men and straight men see Marilyn Monroe and the theater. So it’s particularly disappointing that the show defaulted back to the old stereotype of the Evil Bisexual.

Nolan’s portrayal on Revenge has been more nuanced: he’s clearly very personally invested in helping Amanda/Emily at minimum in memory of her father (thought it would be nice if the show spent some time articulating how Nolan and David Clark got so close in the first place). He’s got an actual attachment to the cause at hand. And when he seduces Tyler, the unstable imposter who’s insinuated himself in wealthy scion Daniel Grayson’s life, Nolan appears to feel at least some sense of sympathy with the other man—there’s an actual frisson of attraction there, not merely convenience. But it’s true that Nolan doesn’t appear to have much of a life of his own, at least in the slice of time we’re seeing him. He’s not allowed genuine romantic attachment, or even business moves that don’t serve Emily/Amanda’s interests. His whole life, not just his sexuality, are at her disposal, though the show has clearly demonstrated the limited scope in which that arrangement can remain comfortable.

Smash is also in company with Mad Men in taking out some nastier emotions on its signature blondes. As much as I think that what Mad Men is doing to Betty Draper, turning her fat and even more miserable than usual, has some basis in Matt Weiner’s distate for the character, I also think it makes sense as an arc. The woman who had, as the only tool at her disposal, beauty, finds it can’t bring her happiness, and then loses her power. There’s an un-vindictive plot available in there if this means that Betty ends up forced to address some deeper issues. Only time will tell if the show avails itself of that option.

By contrast, Smash is being just nasty to Ivy, and that nastiness comes from a profoundly illogical place. Prednisone does have side effects, but the show seemed to take a real leap in turning its most professional and disciplined character into a pill-popping, drunk, show-flubbing hot mess. More to the point, turning Ivy into a joke minimizes her disappointment in a way I think is unfortunate: she’s legitimately heartbroken at the loss of her first big chance. If the show wants this to be an even fight between Karen and Ivy, which is the sense I’ve gotten from the show’s renewal and the dismissal of its showrunner, it’s got to make Karen more legitimately compelling, not undermine Ivy in a way that denies her character consistency.

The bridge is yours.

-Sounds like this is the show that AMC should have made instead of Hell on Wheels.

-If I were Julie Taymor, I’d want to put the memories of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” behind me as quickly as possible, but then, what do I know?

-Counterstrike will play a critical role in our eventual settlement of Mars.

-Christo’s “Over the River” is on!

-Conquering amblyopia with iPad games.

There’s something funny about the fact that it remains reportable news that a science fiction movie, in this case, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, is getting released as if it might actually be a contender for Academy Award nominations. When it comes to the movies that win Best Picture, in recent years we’ve tended to like stories that are from worlds not precisely our own, be they pre-World War II England, the specific milieu of military bomb defusers, Indian television studios, a moralized modern West, Middle Earth, or a musical-theaterized Chicago (Crash, The Departed, and Million Dollar Baby are notable exceptions over the past 10 years, in that they lack an element of distance or strangeness to them) and that have either a specific message of contemporary social significance or a metaphor for it. There’s precisely no reason that science fiction and fantasy can’t hit those sweet spots other than genre snobbery: exploring a vision of industrialized space is at least as useful and realistic as exploring a gangland Chicago where everyone bursts into song all the time.