Janelle Monae’s
music, acting, style and personas embody her unfettered imagination, in her latest album, “Dirty Computer.”
In addition to making one of the year’s best albums, a sprawling, Princelike rumination on sex and politics called “Dirty Computer,” and continuing her acting career in movies like “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures,” Janelle Monae is apparently tinkering with a new career as a comedian. Some of her responses to questions by phone:
Where are you right now?
“I’m in a remote island in the future.”
Brian Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Pharrell and others appear on the album. Anybody else you would have liked to collaborate with?
“The only other thing I would have wanted to do was to go with SpaceX, and go into space, and get the opportunity to have kind of like a big bang and spread the album in different parts of the universe. And that didn’t really happen, because I didn’t have the right passport. So that was a regret. That was on me.”
You told The New York Times you like to moonwalk on hardwood floors. What is the most unusual place you’ve ever done this?
“At Home Depot at 5 a.m. By myself. Naked.”
What are you working on now?
“Well, right now, I’m working on what I’m going to eat for lunch.”
Monae, 33, is one of those musical characters who can barely contain her imagination on a single work. She had moments over her 13-year career where she seemed poised to take off, particularly on 2010’s “Tightrope,” effervescent step-dancing funk with the feel of a classic Jackson 5 single and a killer rap by Outkast’s Big Boi. But perhaps because Monae has an off-center marketing vision involving immaculate tuxedos, an enormous pompadour, bow ties and two-toned saddle shoes, she never quite achieved mainstream success until recently, when she took film roles.
“Dirty Computer” is Monae’s third album, and in recent stories for The New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone, she explained that it is the first album she has made that lacks the device of her futuristic sci-fi alter ego Cindi Mayweather. She has said the death of her friend Prince, in April 2016, made her feel more vulnerable and willing to express herself from her own point of view. So “Django Jane” contains the line: “Momma was a G, she was cleanin’ hotels/ Poppa was a driver, I was workin’ retail.”
But in a 20-minute phone interview, Monae disowns this theory. “Well, I am Cindi Mayweather, and Cindi Mayweather did make ‘Dirty Computer,’” she says. “When you deal with someone in the future, they can get your album done much more quickly.” And the interviews about a new approach? “Yeah, that was all a lie,” she adds. “Anything you’ve read prior to this interview, 72 percent of it was really not accurate.”
Born Janelle Monae Robinson in Kansas City, Kan., Monae had a complicated childhood in which her father struggled with a crack addiction and she grew up with her mother and stepfather. They belonged to a Baptist church but permitted Monae to listen to R&B and hip-hop.
After high school, Monae moved to New York to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, then relocated to Atlanta, where she found like-minded artists. By the time of “Tightrope,” she had already established her pop-star persona, in the gender-bending style of Prince or David Bowie.