Brow Beat

Worst Since Fallon Interviewed Trump? Watch Janelle Monáe Normalize Conan O’Brien’s Hair.

Shameful. That’s the only sane response to singer and actress Janelle Monáe’s decision to help normalize Conan O’Brien’s bizarre and un-American hairstyle. Despite the clear correlation between mysterious red hair and fascism, Monáe—whose own pompadour is stacked like a glorious wedding cake made from democratic civic virtue—wasted no time running her fingers through the authoritarian waves of Conan’s hair. “It’s not a lace front,” she told the audience, as though Conan’s hair were worthy of a good-faith debate. Some ideas simply do not belong on the national stage, and Conan’s hair represents about 100,000 of them. Nevertheless, hapless TBS viewers may have been led to believe that Conan’s hair was the kind of thing people could joke about, get a beer with, maybe even vote for.

It’s the most blatant act of cowardice in the face of evil we’ve seen since Jimmy Fallon’s infamous decision to muss Donald Trump’s hair. Monáe has now participated in the corrosive process of normalizing Conan O’Brien’s hairstyle, which towers over American television like a crimson Volkshalle. Like Fallon and all the other red-hair-mussers that have somehow entered political life, her soul is now at peril. Her reckless actions will surely place TBS in the hall of shame right next to NBC when the hairstyles of the Trump era are finally litigated.

This is not normal.