Janelle Monae, Dirty Computer, & Scrum

by JJ Sutherland | May 21, 2018 | Blog

Janelle Monae is a hard artist to put into a box. Hip Hop? R&B? An Afrofuturist like Sun Ra? Is she like Prince or Annie Lennox or Lauryn Hill? Maybe an apt comparison would be David Bowie, a genre and gender rethinking of the future. Maybe she is the future. I probably have nothing original to say, except she is a remarkable talent making sui generis musical commentary on the current moment and mode.

Which made my discovery of this Radical Reads piece list of her favorite books reinforce for me that Scrum is a universal human accelerant, whether you are working on software, rocket ships, AI, or really interesting music.

“One of the last books that we read as a company was Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. We have some incredible people working with Wondaland Records, and we knew that if we were going to be releasing five artists, including myself, we’d need to figure out a way to make sure we were on schedule. We wanted to find the quickest ways to get quality results we were all happy with. It solves problem on how we write music and how we run the company. It’s the way people use it in the tech industry, inspired by the tech world. It justifies the way we run Wondaland Records.” -JM

It's not many people that have Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler, Ray Kurzweil, and Malcolm X on their list of favorite authors. I do myself, and to be honest thought I was the only person with that particular brand of eclecticism. It is an honor to be included on the Electric Lady's bookshelf.