Live, Laugh, and most of all, Love
V Monét shares inspiring words to keep us sane and active amidst the dystopia of 2024
Victoria Monét is one of my all-time favorite artists. My number-one, most-listened-to song this year was “Coastin’,” and I have watched her entire 2-hour Coachella set at least five times by now. Besides Beyoncé, Ms. Monét is the last of a dying breed committed to real performance and artistry. She channels the moves of Janet Jackson and the swagger of Usher. The body is tea. The live vocals are smooth. And the lyrics are cunning. Victoria has the perfect alchemy to be a star, but first and foremost, she is a student. It is very apparent that she has studied the music and artistry of the greats that came before her. This is what I most appreciate about V Monét. In this week’s song, Victoria delivers a timely message in our ever-chaotic world plagued with neoliberal loneliness, climate disasters, controversial election results, and the ongoing lack of acknowledgment of the Palestinian genocide.
“I'm watchin' the news and turnin' it off. Tryna pay attention, but what does it cost? And the remedy seems so very far. We gotta be brave enough to love from where we are.”
After hearing this song for the first time, I didn’t expect any songs of this nature to be on her deluxe version of her perfect album Jaguar II. Typically, Victoria’s music is more traditional to that of the R&B and Hip-Hop genres, featuring lyrics of romantic love, lust, self-confidence, etc. However, I’m sure people were just as surprised to hear MJ release “Man in the Mirror” and “Black and White.”
Yet, I was actually less surprised by who released this song than I was by when it was released. The timing of it was a bit uncanny for me personally. Just that week, I was reading one of my favorite philosophers, Bertrand Russell, and his wise words really resonated with me. In a collection of his lectures Why I Am Not a Christian, Russell highlights how the dogmatism of religion has, in practice, caused greater divisiveness in society rather than uplifting humanity as a whole. Whether or not you agree with that claim, one of Russell’s key arguments is that an ideal society is one where everyone is guided by two indispensable ethics: knowledge and love. His words echoed in my mind throughout the week leading up to Victoria’s release of this song: “The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge,” Russell writes.
The reason I enjoy reading Russell is because our philosophies follow similar timelines. I have arrived at many of the same conclusions as he has around the same ages he did. Russell’s words remind me of a sort of maxim that I preached to myself while I studied philosophy: empathy. One of my least favorite aspects of the discipline of philosophy is disagreement and contrarianism. For some reason, it appears that human nature pushes us to desire disagreement first over harmony. I don’t know if this is a newer phenomenon or an exacerbation manifested from the high volume of internet-based discursives landscapes. But, I’m sure we’ve all seen this play out: professors shit on other professors’ ideas in formal, “academic” writing; content creators stitch other TikToks ready to insert their think pieces in opposition; or students in seminars raise their hands to speak in hopes of embarrassing the student(s) that spoke before them. No matter the form, people take pleasure in proving others wrong. This is something I noticed while in undergrad, and it really motivated my personal philosophy, which is much more rooted in a subjectivist approach.
More often than not, I reject the notion of a binary logic. Everything does not have to be either true or not true. Logical statements can exist in limbo or relativism. More importantly, no singular person has the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of metaphysics; each of us only has a piece to the puzzle. Even if some have more than others, the puzzle can not progress to completion—if such a binary status remains within our logics—without access to the pieces that every single person offers. In other words, every experience on our planet is valid. Each of us knows some truism about the world that others may not, and while we are all wrong at times, in order to progress as a society, we should opt for an ethic of radical empathy whereby no matter what our initial reaction is, we should try to understand differing perspectives and lives lived. This isn’t to say that every perspective should be platformed, but the least we can do is take them seriously, even if it is for a brief time. This, to me, is why Russell says to lead with love. Love is the ethic that breaks the barrier of seeing the humanity in others as a worthwhile valuable to protect just as much as your own life. Russell also places greater emphasis on love rather than knowledge because, I think, while knowledge can be an asset to love others properly, too much knowledge can be paralyzing.
As a self-proclaimed thought daughter, I have a tendency to be overly pessimistic. The information overload of the internet can be draining. It prevents us from having any long-term optimism towards progress because the change and advancement of society has historically been much slower than the rapid rate of technological innovation and the connectivity it has fostered. It is hard to swallow the fact that many of the ideals we strive for—equality, diversity, sustainability—may not be realized in the ways we imagine in our lifetimes. This holds true for any truly progressive thinker or hopeful throughout time: you imagine worlds far beyond your own lifespan. This is why Victoria’s words stuck out to me. It can be defeating to overthink yourself into an analysis paralysis of inactivity because changes may appear delayed and minimal in the modern day. It can feel pointless to work towards bettering the world when the world is often unforgiving and unrewarding—at least in the immediate future. Pair the world’s temporal cruelty with the pessimism of climate change, and you have a combination that inspires an extreme desire to throw in the towel.
But, during this time, I was also reminded of words from the late, great Toni Morrison where she begs the questions, “What can I do where I am?” In this context, Morrison is referring to how she used her position as an editor at Penguin Random House to platform Black authors during the eras of the Civil Rights struggles. She emphasizes that while she may not have taken to the streets as publicly and actively as someone like Angela Davis, she did help get Angela Davis’ autobiography published, which is archival of, and just as important as, Davis’ activism. In this example, both women contributed their strongest skills and assets to the common cause from the positions they were in at the time. But, this context only provides a spatial reading of Morrison’s words. We live in a spatiotemporal reality where time is the fourth, invisible dimension; now imagine that same quote through a temporal lens: “What can I do when I am?” If I am only here for eighty or so years—or more—I know that I want to do as much as I can to make the world(s) that will come after me better. We are all tied in this lengthy historicity that did not begin yesterday and will surely not end tomorrow. We don’t know what the future holds. If it holds nothing promising, that’s unfortunate. But it is guaranteed to hold nothing promising if we remain pessimistic and don’t act in the present. Victoria, Bertrand, Toni, and I urge you to continue fighting the good fight, and the starting point to ensure that you’re actually contributing to the good side of this fight is a life led by authentic love <3.