Nelly Furtado says the future is genderless

Larry King: You said recently, I quote, “I really think the future is gender-less. I feel the future is even more body positive and limitless. The boxes are going to become increasingly irrelevant, and it’s wonderful.” Gender-less? Explain that.

Nelly Furtado: Yeah. [Laughs] Well I’ve been-

Larry King: We have two genders.

Nelly Furtado: I know, but I’ve been really lucky because I’ve been exposed to kind of the future, through all the young people I meet, and kind of the next generation, and even beyond millennial, like younger than that, you know what I mean? And I’m not just talking my daughter or her friends, I’m talking about art and creativity and kind of the exploration of a world in which we can stop focusing on our differences and more about how we’re all the same. I did a really cool art installation, kind of like a performance art piece, with another artist named Ryan McNamara and it was at the MoMA, the MoMA PS1 in Queens.

I turned a room into a songwriting experiment, where I wrote songs with 80 strangers in 3 hours. And some of them never had written a song in their life. Some of them had never written a poem. They would walk into a room, and I would ask them, “What did you dream last night? What was your favorite vacation?” And I had a guitar, and I would start to write. And at the end of the day, there were tears, there was laughter, but what that proves, is what a lot of brain science still has not proven. That there is empathy between you and I. If we can write a song together, that proves there’s empathy between us, connectivity. That proves that no matter what political stripe or belief you’re part of, it’s all irrelevant when it comes to matters of the heart and compassion.

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