If Voodoo represents a high water-mark for the neo-soul movement, the track Millionaire (2003) by Kelis and Andre3000 can be understood as a melancholy moment of transition away from these aesthetics by two performers who were active participants in them. I would like to follow the suggestion of reading a discrete cultural object as a revolutionary conspiracy by considering the sonic and lyrical composition of the track, with a particular emphasis on unpacking the complexities of the Slick Rick sample that works as the track’s coda, alongside Neil Roberts’ suggestion of a Vèvè architectonics outlined in the attached passages from his work Freedom as Marronage (2015)

“I’m feeling sad (…) like a million bucks”

While the precise arrangements of words appearing in Millionaire, with their computational stutter, don’t exist in La-Di-Da-Di, Slick Rick imbues each individual word with such affective polyvalence that they can be sampled, rearranged, even broken, seventeen years later, the complexities of each uttered syllable brought to the fore. The sample quietly links Millionaire to a far older revolutionary conspiracy, shifting, learning, and gathering force to seize the next opening even as the last one recedes slowly, achingly from view. These lines are a collective undertaking: uttered by Slick Rick, rearranged by Andre3000, and given vibrant urgency by Kelis’ revolutionary-melancholic dream of collective wealth. They synthesise the conflicts of the song and its participants, human and machinic, without thereby resolving them. Millionaire is a revolutionary conspiracy; an encounter of embodied, intolerable tensions fighting to transcend themselves and each other through a fraught surrender to collective subjectivities, however spectral.