Ravinia 2025 Issue 1

JANE L L E MONÁE “Like most people, I’ve been so trained to see women or men—the binary stuff has just been the norm,” Monáe told Vanity Fair in 2022, after she came out publicly as non-binary. (The bisexual musician-actor uses both they/them and she/her pronouns.) “I’m growing in public. I have had to discover things about myself in the middle of being famous.” That’s one of the ways Monáe connects naturally to Jones: Both are avant-garde artists who challenge gen- der norms. Of course, they have plenty of differences too, including those of geography and generation. The 39-year- old Monáe (she turns 40 in December) was born in Kansas City, where she grew up in a blue-collar household. Some of her earliest experiences making music came from singing in church; after high school, she moved to New York to study musical theater at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, but ultimately decided to pursue a career making her own music. Monáe’s early career was already impressive, garnering critical praise and modest Billboard success for her EPs, which blended R&B, funk, and high-concept sci-fi themes—a rich vein she continued to mine after attaining mainstream success, as evidenced by her third studio album, 2018’s Dirty Computer . But her breakout moment came six years earlier, when she provided guest vocals on a smash song that wasn’t her own: “We Are Young” by the band fun. An indie-pop ear worm with a stadi- um-rock hook, the crossover hit slowly climbed to the top of the charts in multiple countries, was featured in TV shows and a Super Bowl commercial, and won the 2012 Grammy for Song of the Year. And there was Monáe, her name featured in the credits and her visage popping in the video: Amid a slo- mo bar brawl, the suit-and-tie clad sing- er walks with a calm resolve through the chaos, her perfectly sculpted face dra- matically lit, giving Garbo-meets-Dan- dridge glamour. Clearly comfortable before a camera, she began to divide her time between recording and film acting. In 2016, she portrayed the mother figure to the protagonist in the beloved indie film Moonlight , which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. That same year, she played a NASA engi- neer in Hidden Figures , costarring with Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson. Her flashiest role to date arrived in Rian Johnson’s 2022 mystery-comedy Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery , which prompted Vanity Fair to gush about her dexterity: Transcendent and infectious, Monáe is “a versatile performer who keys into the souls of her characters and brings them to vivid life.” She even manages to do all of that just by walking a runway. At the Met Gala in May, she turned heads dressed as dandy with a steampunk suit. As she told Vanity Fair , “I try to deconstruct social norms, and I’ve tried to decon- struct respectability politics, even when it comes to wearing a suit.” Native Chicagoan Web Behrens has spent most of his journalism career covering arts and culture. His work has appeared in the pages of the Chicago Tribune , Time Out Chicago , Crain’s Chicago Business , and The Advocate and Chicago magazines. “ I try to deconstruct social norms … even when it comes to wearing a suit . ” RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JUNE 6 – JUNE 15, 2025 12