Janelle Monáe

• 1. Introduction

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  Janelle Monáe sold her first album out of the trunk of a Mitsubishi Galant. The demo was called The Audition, it appeared in 2003, and she released it herself. Monáe is an American singer, songwriter, rapper and actress, and she has since collected ten Grammy Award nominations.

  On the 9th of February 2020, she opened the 92nd Academy Awards alongside Billy Porter. Their performance saluted the nominated films and also some the Academy overlooked, including Dolemite Is My Name and Midsommar.

  That stage is a long way from a car trunk, and the route between them was anything but conventional. It runs through church pews in Kansas, a record executive browsing MySpace, and a robot who commits the crime of falling in love. Who was she before the label deals? Why does she keep returning to the android as a symbol? And what does an artist in a signature tuxedo want her audience to feel?

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• 2. Kansas City Beginnings

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  Quindaro, a working-class community in Kansas City, Kansas, is where Janelle Monáe Robinson grew up after she was born on the 1st of December 1985. Her mother, Janet, worked as a janitor and a hotel maid. Her father, Michael Robinson Summers, drove a truck. The two separated when she was a toddler, and her mother later married a postal worker. That marriage brought a younger sister named Kimmy.

  Years later, a song called "Ghetto Woman" would speak directly to her mother and to the way working-class Black women are portrayed in American culture. Its line urges her to carry on even when the news portrays her as less than she could be.

  Church gave Monáe her first stage. She was raised Baptist and learned to sing at a local church. Relatives performed at an African Methodist Episcopal church, a Baptist church and a Church of God in Christ. She dreamed of performing from a very young age and has named Dorothy Gale, the heroine of The Wizard of Oz, as a musical influence.

  With her first paycheck she bought two copies of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She then sang songs from it at Juneteenth talent shows, and she won three years in a row.

  The Coterie Theater's Young Playwrights' Round Table drew her in as a teenager, and the group began writing musicals. One, finished when she was around 12, took its inspiration from Stevie Wonder's 1979 album Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants".

  After F. L. Schlagle High School, she moved to New York City to study musical theater at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. She was the only Black woman in her class. She enjoyed it, but she worried she might lose her edge and end up sounding, looking or feeling like everybody else. In a 2010 interview she said she wanted to write her own musicals, and that she did not want to "live vicariously through a character that had been played thousands of times".

  She left after a year and a half and moved to Atlanta, where she enrolled at Georgia Perimeter College. She started writing her own songs and performing around campus. To pay the bills she worked at an Office Depot, until she was fired for answering a fan's e-mail on a company computer. That firing inspired the song "Lettin' Go", and the song caught the ear of Big Boi.

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• 3. Bad Boy Breakthrough

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  Big Boi of OutKast had a name to pass along to his friend Sean Combs. Monáe had already appeared on the Purple Ribbon All-Stars album Got Purp? Vol. 2. She was also featured on "Call the Law" and "In Your Dreams" from OutKast's 2006 album Idlewild. Combs, however, had not yet heard of her.

  Combs went to her MySpace page. Daniel "Skid" Mitchell, an A&R person at Bad Boy Records, later told HitQuarters that Combs was won over right away. Mitchell recalled that Combs "loved the way she was dancing, and just loved the vibe."

  Monáe signed with Bad Boy, and Mitchell described the label's main job as widening her exposure rather than developing her music. In his telling, she already had "a self-contained movement." Combs and Big Boi chose patience. They did not want "a hot single which everyone jumps on" only to watch her fade as a passing moment.

  The first result was the EP Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), released in mid-2007. Monáe had planned a four-part concept album sold through her own website and mp3 stores, and signing with Bad Boy altered that plan. In August 2008 the label gave the suite a physical release with two new tracks, under the title Metropolis: The Chase Suite (Special Edition).

  Critics embraced it. The single "Many Moons" earned a Grammy nomination for Best Urban/Alternative Performance at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards. The EP also brought festival appearances and opening slots for the indie pop band of Montreal. In the summer of 2009 she toured as the opener for No Doubt, and her song "Open Happiness" played in that year's American Idol season finale.

  At the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards, in 2011, she performed with Bruno Mars and B.o.B. They played the synth section of B.o.B's "Nothin' on You". Then Monáe sang "Cold War" with B.o.B on guitar and Mars on drums, and the crowd gave the performance a standing ovation.

  In September 2011 she sang as a guest on fun.'s single "We Are Young". It topped the charts of more than ten countries, sold over ten million units worldwide, and earned her three nominations at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year. The Recording Industry Association of America certified it diamond, and it reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

  On the 11th of December 2011, she carried that momentum to Oslo, Norway. At the Nobel Peace Prize concert she sang "Cold War" and "Tightrope", plus a cover of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back".

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• 4. Cindi Mayweather

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  The year 2719 is where Monáe says her alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, comes from. On Monáe's first EP, Cindi has a back story. She is on the run for breaking the law in her home town of Metropolis by falling in love with a human named Anthony Greendown.

  In an MTV conversation, Monáe explained why androids fascinate her. She said they are "the new 'other'", and she believes people will one day live alongside androids because technology keeps advancing. In September 2010 she told NPR that she is a believer in time travel.

  The ArchAndroid arrived on the 18th of May 2010 and peaked at number 17 on the Billboard 200. It folds the second and third suites of the Metropolis series into one full-length album. In it, Cindi becomes a messianic figure to the android community. Monáe announced plans for a video for every song, plus a film, a graphic novel and a touring Broadway musical.

  Her sources range from Alfred Hitchcock to Debussy to Philip K. Dick. Above them stands Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis, which she calls "the godfather of science-fiction movies." The album cover echoes that film's famous poster, and both works use futuristic settings to examine prejudice and class.

  The two works part ways on their android heroines. In Lang's film, the android Maria is the evil double of the city's messianic figure and sows havoc. Monáe's Cindi instead stands for the segregated minority itself, which Monáe calls "the Other." She added that everyone, in the majority or the minority, has felt like the Other at some point.

  Monáe has described Cindi as a mediator between the mind and the hand, and between the oppressor and the oppressed. She compares her to the Archangel in the Bible and to Neo in The Matrix. In one telling, Cindi returns to Earth to free the people of Metropolis from the Great Divide, an oppressive oligarchy that used time travel to suppress freedom and love.

  The fantasy was never far from real geography. On The ArchAndroid, songs such as "Cold War" and "BabopbyeYa" link the dystopian cityscapes of Metropolis to the boarded-up projects of poverty-stricken Kansas.

  The Electric Lady followed on the 10th of September 2013 and debuted at number five on the Billboard 200. Its first single, "Q.U.E.E.N." with Erykah Badu, went on sale on the 23rd of April 2013 and sold 31,000 digital copies. The video drew four million YouTube views in its first week. Monáe said the song grew from conversations with Badu about how marginalized people, especially Black women, are treated. The title is an acronym covering the queer community, the "untouchables", "emigrants", the "excommunicated" and "negroid".

  The album stretches beyond funk and soul into jazz on "Dorothy Dandridge Eyes", pop-punk on "Dance Apocalyptic" and gospel on "Victory". Guests include Prince, Solange Knowles, Miguel and Esperanza Spalding. In mid-2014, Monáe teased what would come next, calling it a big concept that would simply land.

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• 5. Wondaland and Protest

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  In February 2015, Epic Records and its chairman L.A. Reid announced what they called a landmark joint venture with Monáe's independent label, Wondaland Arts Society. Jem Aswad of Billboard called Monáe a "mini-mogul" because of the deal. The label's first product was The Eephus, a five-song compilation EP with tracks from the rapper Jidenna, Roman, St. Beauty, Deep Cotton and Monáe herself.

  The single "Yoga" came out in late March 2015. The Eephus debuted at number 22 on the Billboard 200 and at number five on the top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, with equivalent sales of 47,000 units.

  On the 14th of August 2015, Monáe and her Atlanta-based collective performed "Hell You Talmbout". The protest song names Black people who died in police violence, among them Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland. After the performance she spoke about police brutality on NBC's Today Show. "We will not be silenced," she said.

  Politics had reached her stage earlier. In September 2012 she performed at CarolinaFest, in support of President Obama, just before the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. By the 15th of March 2016, Michelle Obama had announced a track, "This Is for My Girls", with vocals from Monáe, Kelly Clarkson, Zendaya and Missy Elliott. Diane Warren and Elliott shared production credit. The song supported the First Lady's Let Girls Learn education initiative and coincided with her speech at SXSW in Texas.

  In September 2020, Monáe released the music video "Turntables" as part of an Amazon Studios voter-registration campaign. Her song plays over the end credits of All In: The Fight for Democracy, a film backed by Stacey Abrams.

  On the 4th of July 2021, Netflix premiered We The People, a ten-part series of animated music videos created by Chris Nee. Kenya Barris was showrunner, and Barack and Michelle Obama produced. Monáe performed several of its songs, including a reggae-influenced number called "Stronger" about the fight for justice and unity. She won an Emmy as one of the writers.

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• 6. Screen Career

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  Her voice reached screens before her face did. Monáe played the veterinarian Dr. Monáe in Rio 2, released in the United States on the 11th of April 2014. She also appeared on Sesame Street in the episode "The Power of Yet".

  In October 2016 she made her big-screen acting debut in Moonlight, alongside Naomie Harris, André Holland and Mahershala Ali. Hidden Figures followed in December 2016, with Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer. As the engineer Mary Jackson, she earned a Critics' Choice Movie Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

  In 2017, she appeared in "Autofac", an episode of the anthology series Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, which premiered on Channel 4 in the UK and on Amazon Video in the US. The author whose work shaped her music now supplied a role.

  Director Robert Zemeckis cast her in the 2018 fantasy drama Welcome to Marwen, with Steve Carell and Leslie Mann. The same year, her production company, Wondaland Pictures, signed a first-look deal with Universal.

  In 2019, Monáe replaced Julia Roberts in the second season of Amazon Prime Video's Homecoming. Her character was described as a tenacious woman floating in a canoe with no memory of how she got there. That year she also co-starred in Harriet, about the abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

  September 2020 brought Antebellum, her first lead role, and she also appeared in the biopic The Glorias. In 2022 she played the twin sisters Helen and Cassandra "Andi" Brand in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and received critical acclaim.

  Monáe has said she wants her acting career to resemble Johnny Depp's, praising a range that runs from Willy Wonka to Sweeney Todd. Her own version, she said, might be "something even better." In May 2022, Deadline reported that she would play Josephine Baker in a series called De La Resistance.

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• 7. Dirty Computer and Joy

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  A teaser video on YouTube, shown on the 16th of February 2018, revealed her third album, Dirty Computer. It also aired nationwide in select theaters before screenings of Black Panther. She had set the album aside when scripts for her first two acting roles arrived, as she told People. For listening sessions in Los Angeles and New York, she kept things strictly "top-secret".

  Six days after the reveal, on the 22nd of February 2018, she released "Make Me Feel" and "Django Jane" as the first two singles, each with a music video. The album and a companion "emotion picture" arrived on the 27th of April 2018. Its short film earned a Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.

  The album debuted at number six on the Billboard 200 with 54,000 equivalent units. The Associated Press, the New York Times and NPR each named it the best album of the year, and it was nominated for Album of the Year at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards.

  Prince had a hand in it. Speaking to BBC Radio 1, Monáe said he was working on the album with her before he passed on "to another frequency" and helped her find some of its sounds. She admitted it was hard to talk about him.

  She also contributed to the soundtrack of the dark comedy Sorry to Bother You, working with The Coup. On the 6th of December 2018, Billboard Women in Music gave her its Trailblazer of the Year award. The following year, Coachella announced her as co-headliner with Childish Gambino, and Glastonbury confirmed her for the West Holts stage.

  The story kept growing on paper. In April 2022, Harper Voyager published her first book, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer. The publisher describes it as exploring how queerness, race, gender plurality and love tangle with memory and time in a totalitarian future.

  On the 16th of February 2023, she released "Float", featuring horns by Seun Kuti and his band, Egypt 80. She announced her fourth album, The Age of Pleasure, on the 11th of May, for release on the 9th of June. Speaking to The Current, she called it "a movement" and "a soundtrack to a lifestyle", built on the unapologetic pursuit of radical joy.

  Its summery tracks "Water Slide" and "Lipstick Lover" keep depicting queer love and acceptance, as her earlier work did. The 66th Annual Grammy Awards nominated the album for Album of the Year and Best Progressive R&B Album.

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• 8. Tuxedo and Identity

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  "I bathe in it, I swim in it, and I could be buried in it," Monáe has said of the tuxedo. She calls it a standard uniform that keeps her balanced, and she describes herself as a canvas. Her look echoes dandyism and the black-and-white pattern of the 18th century, and she cites Grace Jones and Josephine Baker as role models.

  The uniform has another root. In her acceptance speech for the Young, Gifted, and Black award at the 2012 Black Girls Rock! ceremony, she linked it to her early days working as a maid. She has also handed fans the Ten Droid Commandments, which encourage them to be individuals.

  A journalist at The Telegraph described her as a slight, stiff young woman in a starched shirt and tuxedo, her face an opaque mask of perfection. In August 2012, CoverGirl chose her as a spokesperson. InStyle put her on its Style 100 list, and the Council of Fashion Designers of America gave her the Board of Directors' Tribute and the American Ingenuity Award.

  A 2011 interview with the London Evening Standard offered an early clue to her private life. She said she "only dates androids", a nod to her alter ego. She compared the android's outsider status to being a lesbian, a gay man or a Black woman, and said she would discuss her sexual orientation "in due time". By 2018, reports had her identifying as both bisexual and pansexual.

  Actor Tessa Thompson told Net-A-Porter that year that she and Monáe loved each other "deeply" and "vibrate on the same frequency." She added that people were welcome to speculate about what they were.

  On the 10th of January 2020, Monáe tweeted the hashtag #IAmNonbinary in support of Nonbinary Day. The Cut later asked about it, and she said she had long pushed the boundaries of gender, feeling feminine energy, masculine energy and energy she could not explain.

  In April 2022 she came out publicly as nonbinary on Red Table Talk. She said she did not see herself solely as a woman, because God is bigger than "he" or "she". A representative then said she continued to use she and her pronouns. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Monáe said her pronouns include they and them as well as her and she.

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