Janelle Monáe
Janelle Monáe Robinson (/dʒəˈnɛl moʊˈneɪ/ jə-NEL moh-NAY;[11] born December 1, 1985) is an American singer, songwriter, rapper and actress. She[a] has received ten Grammy Award nominations,[12] and is the recipient of a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Children's and Family Emmy Award. Monáe has also been honored with the ASCAP Vanguard Award, as well as the Rising Star Award (2015) and the Trailblazer of the Year Award (2018) from Billboard Women in Music.[13]
Janelle Monáe
Janelle Monáe Robinson
December 1, 1985
Kansas City, Kansas, U.S.
- Singer
- rapper
- songwriter
- actress
2003–present
Monáe began her musical career in 2003 with the release of her demo album, The Audition. She signed with Puff Daddy's Bad Boy Records to release her debut extended play (EP), Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) (2007).[14] It received critical acclaim and narrowly entered the Billboard 200; she followed up with her debut studio album and the EP's sequel, The ArchAndroid (2010), a concept album and her first release through Atlantic Records.[15][16] The following year, she guest performed on fun.'s 2011 single "We Are Young," which received diamond certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and peaked the Billboard Hot 100 as well as ten other countries. Monáe's second studio album, The Electric Lady (2013) debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 and served as the fourth and fifth installments of her seven-part Metropolis concept series.[17]
Monáe's third studio album, Dirty Computer (2018)—also a concept album—was released to widespread critical acclaim; it was chosen as the best album of the year by several publications. The album peaked within the top ten of the Billboard 200, and was further promoted by Monae's Dirty Computer Tour. It was accompanied by the science fiction film of the same name.[18] In 2022, she wrote the cyberpunk story collection, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, based on the album.[19][20] Her fourth studio album, The Age of Pleasure (2023) was nominated for Album of the Year at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, becoming her second nomination in the category as a lead artist.
Monáe has also ventured into acting, first gaining attention for starring in the 2016 films Moonlight and Hidden Figures. For portraying engineer Mary Jackson in the latter, she was nominated for the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has since starred in the films Harriet (2019) and Glass Onion (2022), and the television series Homecoming (2020). In 2022, she won her first Children's and Family Emmy Awards for Outstanding Short Form Program for her role in the TV series We the People. She launched her record label, Wondaland Arts Society in a joint venture with Epic Records in 2015, and has signed artists including Jidenna, Roman GianArthur and St. Beauty.[21]
Career[edit]
Career beginnings (2005)[edit]
Monáe appeared on the Purple Ribbon All-Stars album Got Purp? Vol. 2 as well as on OutKast's 2006 album Idlewild, where she was featured on the songs "Call the Law" and "In Your Dreams".[31] Big Boi told his friend Sean Combs about Monáe, of whom at the time Combs had not yet heard. Combs soon visited Monáe's MySpace page and according to a HitQuarters interview with Bad Boy Records A&R person Daniel 'Skid' Mitchell, Combs loved it right away: "[He] loved her look, loved that you couldn't see her body, loved the way she was dancing, and just loved the vibe. He felt like she has something that was different – something new and fresh."[32]
Monáe signed to the label, Bad Boy, in 2006. The label's chief role was to facilitate her exposure on a much broader scale rather than developing the artist and music, because in the words of Mitchell, "She was already moving, she already had her records – she had a self-contained movement." Combs and Big Boi wanted to take their time and build her profile organically and allow the music to grow rather than put out "a hot single which everyone jumps on, and then they fade because it's just something of the moment."[32]
Artistry[edit]
Musical styles and influences[edit]
Monáe has a mezzo-soprano voice.[131] The Telegraph published an interview with Monáe, talking about her first studio album, in which the journalist Bernadette McNulty said, "I begin to worry for a moment that Monáe may not just be a humourless science-fiction nerd, but actually an android herself, created in a laboratory as a super-musical cross between James Brown, Judy Garland, André 3000 and Steve Jobs, invented to test the desperate incredulity of music journalists." She also compared Monáe to artists such as Annie Lennox, Lauryn Hill, and Corinne Bailey Rae.[132] Monáe's musical styles have been described as "a soaring orchestral trip enlivened with blockbuster vocals, mysterious imagery and notes of Sixties pop and jazz".[133] The Guardian has noted some of Monáe's influences as Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince, Outkast, Erykah Badu, James Brown, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Bernard Herrmann, Funkadelic and the Incredible String Band.[29] Matthew Valnes likens Monáe's dancing style in the music video for "Tightrope" to that of James Brown.[134] In an opinion piece for The Quietus,[135] John Calvert places Janelle Monáe within the Afrofuturism movement, pointing out her similarities to Sun Ra and George Clinton. He asserts that Janelle Monáe is innovating the genre. Monáe has said she has an alter ego from the year 2719, named Cindi Mayweather.[136]
In her first EP, Monáe gave this alter ego a back story: she was on the run after breaking the law in her home town of Metropolis by falling in love with a human, Anthony Greendown. Monáe has expanded on Cindi's mythos, saying, "The Archandroid, Cindi, is the mediator, between the mind and the hand. She's the mediator between the haves and the have-nots, the oppressed and the oppressor. She's like the Archangel in the Bible, and what Neo represents to The Matrix."[137] In her second album, Cindi Mayweather returned to Earth to liberate Metropolitans from the Great Divide, an oppressive oligarchy that used time travel to "suppress freedom and love".[138] Chris Champion of The Observer described Metropolis and The ArchAndroid as "psychedelic soul with a sci-fi twist".[139] Matthew Valnes describes Monáe as innovating a more contemporary Neo-Afrofuturism, where the android role is used as a tool to critique the representation of Black female musicians in the funk genre. Funk music of 1960s through 1980s is a prevalent music style influencing Monáe. The website for Monáe's Wondaland Arts Society Collective asserts, "We believe there are only three forms of music; good music, bad music, and funk."[134] Monáe has also referred to herself as a "funkstress".[140]
Monáe's roots in Kansas City, Kansas, where she was born and raised, are evident in her lyrics and style. According to Carrie Battan's Pitchfork feature on Monáe, the song "Ghetto Woman" directly addresses Monáe's working-class K.C., Kansas mother – as well as the portrayal of working-class black women in U.S. culture – with the line "Carry on, ghetto woman, even when the news portrays you less than you could be."[1] Monáe also told the London Evening Standard she has internalized her KCK (K.C., KS) roots by wearing the working-class uniform of her parents and expressing concern that she cannot let "her community down".[141] On the album The ArchAndroid, especially in songs like "Cold War" or "BabopbyeYa", Monáe relates "the dystopian cityscapes depicted in Metropolis to the boarded-up projects of poverty-wracked Kansas".[142] Kansas City, therefore, not only represents Monáe's physical roots within her hometown, but also serves as an important influence on the lyrics and science-fictional setting.
Personal life[edit]
During a 2011 interview with London Evening Standard, Monáe said she "only dates androids", a reference to her musical alter ego found in many of her songs. She also said, "I speak about androids because I think the android represents the new 'other'. You can compare it to being a lesbian or being a gay man or being a Black woman ... what I want is for people who feel oppressed or feel like the 'other' to connect with the music and to feel like, 'She represents who I am.'" She added that she would talk about her sexual orientation "in due time".[141] In 2013, Monáe said she wants both men and women to "still be attracted to [her]" and expressed support for the LGBTQ community.[151]
Monáe has said she identifies with both bisexuality and pansexuality.[23] On January 10, 2020, she tweeted the hashtag #IAmNonbinary, along with a quoted tweet, which trended on Twitter that day.[152][153] Monáe said in an interview with The Cut a month after the tweet that "I tweeted the #IAmNonbinary hashtag in support of Nonbinary Day and to bring more awareness to the community. I retweeted the Steven Universe meme 'Are you a boy or a girl? I'm an experience' because it resonated with me, especially as someone who has pushed boundaries of gender since the beginning of my career. I feel my feminine energy, my masculine energy, and energy I can't even explain."[154]
In April 2022, she came out publicly as non-binary on the Red Table Talk saying, "I'm nonbinary, so I just don't see myself as a woman, solely ... I feel like god is so much bigger than the 'he' or the 'she.' And if I am from God, I am everything."[155] In the interview, she also acknowledged having been in both monogamous and polyamorous relationships.[155] Following the interview, a representative of Monáe said that she "continues to use she/her pronouns."[156] In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, however, Monáe identified herself as non-binary and added that her "pronouns are free-ass motherfucker—and they/them, her/she."[157][158]
