If you're going to a Janelle Monae performance, be prepared to get up and dance. Even if the music doesn't move you — and it most likely will — her agents will plot to get you on your feet.
At a recent concert to preview her first full-length album, the critically acclaimed "The ArchAndroid," her backup dancers literally pulled people out of their seats, while other members of the Monae nation ordered people to move.
"You don't come to a Janelle Monae show to sit!" one woman barked.
The experience is almost like participating in a spiritual conversion, and in some ways, that's what Monae is hoping to achieve with her music — a revolution of the mind, one frenetic beat at a time.
"Sometimes you have to show how to dance to a song — like, they don't know until they see an example," the 24-year-old singer-songwriter explains during a recent interview.
She adds: "I want them to allow the music to transform them as much as it's transformed me ... (the music) deals with self-realization, and I think if they listen to it from the beginning to the end, they will have an emotion picture experience for the mind — and that's very transformative in itself."
Inspired by Lauryn Hill
Monae hopes to have the same impact on her followers that Lauryn Hill had on her. Back then, when Monae was growing up in Kansas City, Kan., Hill's Grammy-winning "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" was one of the albums that expanded her musical horizons.
"You just got a sense that she knew as an artist that she was a leader, and she led me to a place that no other artist had been able to do, female artist," she says. "She was an inspiration for me because she showed me that I didn't have to take the same safe, sexy route. I could bring all of me with me, when I'm performing. I could be all of me on my album."
"The ArchAndroid" seems to contain all of Monae's artistic self. It's a melange of musical styles, from James Brown-funk to Prince-like rock to a tune that could blend in with 1960s folk-pop.
Monae's artistry draws from a large well. Her inspirations include Fritz Lang's futuristic "Metropolis" (she named her debut EP after the film) and Walt Disney; her uniform is usually that of a tuxedo, complete with button-down shirt and tie; and her signature pompadour hairstyle (she calls it the "Monae").
Her creative muse is a female android who finds out she is the chosen one and is trying to figure out how to handle her newfound mission. And Monae describes her own talents as superpowers.
"My goal is to really help preserve art and focus on ideas that are life-changing that will stay around for years and years, that will help the next generation that comes after me," she declares.
Staying true to herself
It's a bold attitude, but that mindset is what helped Monae during her years toiling underground before she started to chip at the mainstream. She moved to Atlanta to experience that city's bubbling music scene, living in boarding houses while staging shows at college campuses. Monae would soon find kindred musical spirits in OutKast's Big Boi and Andre 3000; she appeared on Big Boi's 2005 mixtape and the soundtrack to OutKast's 2006 movie, "Idlewild."
"She had a quirkiness about her that was kind of different. She was cute as a button and she could sing," Big Boi, who appears on her single "Tightrope," says in a phone interview. "She's always been real experimental since I first met her. She wanted to stretch boundaries and go outside the box, and I always encouraged that."
Monae also linked up with other like-minded musicians and created the Wondaland Arts Society, as well as her own label, which is being distributed by Diddy's Bad Boy. She put out the EP "Metropolis: The Chase Suite" in 2008, which was also highly regarded — but it didn't get any love from radio, and it would take another two years before her debut album finally materialized.
Throughout it all, she stayed true to her vision.
"Often, people will try to project their idea of what she should be onto her, but she has a very strong compass," says her collaborator, Nate Wonder. "She knows what she wants, she is very distinct, and she has always been that way."
"If I ever thought about conforming to something a little more safe, it always made me feel like it was such a boring idea," Monae says in her cool, even tone. "I have to have excitement in my life. I need to be shocked."
And she thinks pop listeners are looking to be shaken up as well.
"Ears are shifting and they want to be taken somewhere by the artist. They don't want to stay in the same place. I think that it's up to us to take them there," she says. "We have the privilege of seeing things that other people don't see. ... Artists are understanding that the reward is art and being artists, and you have to stay true to that."