Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Victoria Monét is a multi-dimensional, versatile singer, songwriter, and dancer whose forthcoming solo project, Jaguar, is an unapologetic declaration of female empowerment and sexual freedom. As a queer woman of color working in a landscape that still actively pigeonholes artists with marginalized identities, Monét makes music and art that play with gender roles, and themes of femininity.

Monét leveraged her considerable songwriting skills writing some of the biggest hits in contemporary pop, hip-hop, and R&B for top 40 and critical darlings like Nas, T.I., Chloe x Halle, and Brandy. She earned four nominations at last year's Grammys for her work on Ariana Grande’s thank u, next. Monét’s unique ability to juxtapose the fresh and familiar, the sexual and substantial, and the feeling of nostalgia with modern and youthful aesthetics, sets her apart.

Photo credit: Micaiah Carter

Jason King is a professor and the founding faculty member at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, an innovative leadership training program for aspiring music entrepreneurs.

A journalist, musician, DJ, songwriter, curator and producer, Jason was the host and co-producer of NPR's Noteworthy, a series on the creative process of music superstars like Dua Lipa and Miguel, as well as the curator of NPR's 24/7 R&B radio channel.

He is currently working on a biography of Freddie Mercury, and producing and directing documentaries.

The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley. The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.

Maureen Mahon is the author of Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Duke University Press, 2020), an exploration of the pivotal part African American women have played in the development of rock and roll. Her first book, Right To Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race (Duke University Press, 2004), discusses the ways African American rock musicians used music and activism to challenge the limitations placed on black expressive culture and black identity in the 1980s and 1990s. Mahon’s articles on African-American music have appeared in academic journals and on the websites of National Public Radio and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was the Chief Academic Advisor for “Soundtrack of America,” the five-night concert series commission by filmmaker Steve McQueen that opened the inaugural season of The Shed in 2019. She teaches in the Department of Music at New York University.

Ann Powers is a critic and correspondent for NPR Music. She is the author of several books, most recently Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey Street, 2017). She lives in Nashville and is currently working on a critical biography of Joni Mitchell.

Go behind the headlines: From the economy and health care to politics and the environment – and so much more – On Point hosts Meghna Chakrabarti and David Folkenflik speak with newsmakers and real people about the issues that matter most. On Point is produced by WBUR for NPR.