Out of this world
Part rock star, part space-age chanteuse, Janelle Monae makes her own rules
AUSTIN, Texas - As her funk band kicks into overdrive, a mash of clanging cymbals and squealing guitar riffs, Janelle Monáe drops her microphone and locks eyes with the sea of strangers in front of her. She stands up straight in a white tuxedo shirt, her pompadour towering a good six inches high on her head. With arms outstretched, she nods and falls chest first onto their hands, sailing way out into the crowd before looping back around to the stage. She crosses over a reporter’s hands, her petite body stiff but featherweight, her eyes wide open and manic.
It’s one of the seven times in just a few days that Monáe will galvanize audiences at South by Southwest here in March, eventually emerging as one of the music festival’s most buzzed-about breakthrough stars. Judging from gaping mouths, it’s clear no one quite understands what they’ve just witnessed when Monáe exits after 45 minutes of futuristic R&B and hip-hop that’s very much the singular product of her imagination.
Coming on strong as a space-age hybrid of James Brown, David Bowie, and Frank Sinatra - with a dash of Grace Jones’s slavish devotion to image - Monáe is as fascinating to the eyes as the ears. She says upfront that she wants to challenge our perceptions of what an African-American woman can write and sing about - and how she can wear her hair, for that matter.
As riveting as her music is, a big question looms: Is Janelle Monáe too weird for mass consumption?
“I don’t worry about those things,’’ she says the next day, still suited up and regal after a string of interviews. “As artists, we have to focus on creating art. There’s a saying that Claude Monet had and I totally agree with him. He said, ‘People discuss my art and pretend that they understand it, as if it was always meant for them to understand.’ All they simply have to do is just love it - or hate it.’’
Monáe, who opens for No Doubt at the
“I think she’s extremely commercial - but with a twist,’’ says Matthew Morgan, producer and creator of New York’s Afro-punk music festival, which features Monáe as one of this year’s headliners. “And I think she knows she’s extremely commercial. But it’s OutKast commercial; it’s not Kanye [West] commercial.’’
Monáe can’t exactly sidestep the OutKast comparison; she’s almost indebted to it. André 3000 and Big Boi featured her on the soundtrack to their 2006 movie musical, “Idlewild.’’ In fact, if Monáe had a “Hey Ya!’’ in her arsenal, she’d no doubt be a bigger star. So far she has released just one album, 2007’s overlooked “Metropolis: The Chase Suite.’’
In the meantime, she’s keeping company with kindred spirits. Her friend and fellow neo-soul singer Erykah Badu gave her some good advice once: Get out of your head, a mantra Monáe has wholeheartedly adopted. Sean “Diddy’’ Combs personally signed Monáe to his Bad Boy Records, which co-released a special edition of “Metropolis’’ last year. It’s a high-art concept album that . . . well, best not to think too hard about it, Monáe says.
“I won’t diminish it by trying to sum it all up. But it does deal with an android, Cindi Mayweather, who’s built by the robotics industry and has a working soul and heart,’’ Monáe says. “There are a lot of people who want to see her rise, there are a lot of people who want to see her fall. What you heard from ‘The Chase’ is her running because she’s fallen in love with a human, and they want to disassemble her for that.’’
Got all that? Because there’s more to come, including the second and third suites of “Metropolis,’’ which should be released in . . .
“See, I can’t tell you too much more because that would diminish it,’’ she insists again. “But we have liner notes, lots of illustrations, and a graphic novel we’ve already printed up.’’
As you’d expect with someone who claims, quite seriously, to be a time traveler, details are fuzzy when it comes to Monáe’s biography. There are cursory mentions of growing up in Kansas City, caught up in her own little world where she heard sound in colors. “I took my cues from my own mind,’’ she says. “Literally, sometimes my mother thought that I needed to be admitted somewhere because every day my life was about music.’’
She followed those aspirations to New York, where she studied musical theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She didn’t stick around, though, because she didn’t find a lot of people like her and didn’t want to be influenced too much by the standardized teaching methods.
“And then I moved to Atlanta and lived on a horse farm,’’ she says.
Interesting. How old were you?
“Uh, I can’t tell you that, sweetie,’’ she says with a wave of her hand. “Because then you’ll understand my mission and you’ll have too much information.’’
That’s the last thing Monáe wants anyone to have. For her, half the appeal of her art is how others interpret it.
“My job is not to make someone understand anything. Sometimes I don’t even understand what it is that I’m doing,’’ she says. “I will be very honest: There are some things that I don’t understand about myself, and there are certain things that I won’t ever understand. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a purpose and that people won’t be moved by it.’’
James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com. 
