It’s not enough to make list after list. The Turning the Tables project seeks to suggest alternatives to the traditional popular music canon, and to do more than that, too: to stimulate conversation about how hierarchies emerge and endure. This year, Turning the Tables considers how women and non-binary artists are shaping music in our moment, from the pop mainstream to the sinecures of jazz and contemporary classical music. Our list of the 200 Greatest Songs By Women+ offers a soundtrack to a new century. This series of essays takes on another task.

The 25 arguments writers make in these pieces challenge the usual definitions of influence. Some rethink the building legacies of popular artists; others celebrate those who create within subcultures, their innovations rippling outward over time. As always, women forge new pathways in sound; today, they also make waves under the surface of culture by confronting, in their music, the increased fluidity of “woman” itself. What is a woman? It’s a timeless question on the surface, but one deeply engaged with whatever historical moment in which it is asked. Our 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century illuminate its complexities. —Ann Powers

Janelle Monáe is many people in alternate timelines at once. She’s an archivist of right now, interpreter of back then, dreamer of one day. She imagines black people into the future in the midst of past and present threats of erasure. And after two studio EPs and three albums, the full scope of her work illuminates how the past, present and future might exist simultaneously. Who we were, who we are and who we’d like to be swirl and layer until timelines merge.

She’s Cindi Mayweather, an android on the run from an oppressive government dressed in black and white. She’s Jane, a human who holds onto her memories even as powers-that-be aim to systematically erase them. She’s a singer and actress; a queer, black woman who grew up in Kansas, City, Kan. to working class parents; an Atlanta transplant who sold her CDs and sang on Atlanta University Center library steps before signing with Bad Boy in 2008.

Monáe’s first self-released demo album The Audition (2003) was situated in both the present and the future. “Lettin’ Go,” a song about getting fired from Office Depot, appears on the same project as “Metropolis,” a four minute primer for the Afrofuturist world that Cindi Mayweather would love and live in. The universe she accelerated herself into was centuries away from the right now.

Monáe received the first of several Grammy nominations for “Many Moons,” a song from her 2007 release Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase). In Metropolis, androids are “the Other” in a dystopian reality set in 2719. The story of Metropolis revolves around Cindy Mayweather – just one of the characters Monáe would perform as, onstage and off, for much of her career.

These characters allow Monáe to sometimes speak in symbol and shadow. Timelines blur then sharpen, and visions of the future collide with present realities. “Left the city, my mama she said ‘Don’t come back home / These kids round’ killin’ each other, they lost they minds, they gone,'” she sings in Metropolis‘ “Sincerely, Jane.” Even when Monáe sings in character, the sense of something immediately true to her own life bobs into and outside of these voices.

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