LEANING OVER THE POOL TABLE, JANELLE MONÁE PERCHES ON THE TOES OF her right foot and extends her stick toward the far corner pocket, but the cue ball remains just out of reach. Without a word, she hops onto the side of the table, her knee-high black boots dangling beneath her diminutive frame, and calmly sinks the six ball. Around just about any pool table, this is clearly a foul—one foot must always remain on the floor—but nobody in this swanky Atlanta bowling alley on a warm, wet January night says a thing. Janelle Monáe is used to doing things her way.

“They’ll tell you,” she says, motioning toward her two tuxedo-clad collaborators,
producer Nate Wonder and writing partner Chuck Lightning. “I’m very controlling.”

For an androgynously coiffed five-foot-nothing black woman about to release a futuristic Afro-punk/funk concept album inspired by (and named after) the 1927 Fritz Lang silent film Metropolis, it helps to be a bit headstrong. “I’ve been blessed to have people very afraid to talk to me about how I can fit into the mainstream,” she says.

Monáe, 24, grew up Janelle Robinson in Kansas City, Kansas. After a brief stop in New York City to study dance and musical theater, and an even briefer stay in Germany to pursue her goal of becoming, in her words, “the first pompadour-wearing female jockey,” she landed in Atlanta, where she soon hooked up with Wonder and Lightning. A chance meeting with OutKast’s Big Boi at a horse farm led to Monáe being featured on his label’s Got Purp? Vol. 2 compilation and, later, the Idlewild soundtrack. The MC then introduced her to Sean “Diddy” Combs, with whose Bad Boy label Monáe partnered to release her debut EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite, last year.

The EP built a strong word-of-mouth following thanks in part to a pair of slick, high-concept videos and an audacious sound that owed a debt to OutKast, Gnarls Barkley, and the orchestral gusto of Shirley Bassey’s classic James Bond themes. In December, “Many Moons,” a bobbing, hyperkinetic synth-funk blast from the EP, nabbed a surprise Grammy nomination for best urban/alternative performance.

“I really don’t give a damn about an accolade telling me that I’m doing good,” Monáe says. Nonetheless, she’s encouraged by the example it sets. “If I could make a wish come true, it would be to redefine the stereotype of young African American females, the type of music we write, how we wear our hair and dress.”

On this particular evening, Monáe is dressed as if she just arrived from an equestrian
competition—she’s semiserious about her jockey aspirations—accompanied by Wonder
and Lightning, who don’t feel at all overdressed in their formalwear. (Says Wonder, “We
actually dress like this every day.”) Monáe is toting a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, a
critical analysis of successful people. “That book has really inspired me,” she says. “I always
knew I had a special gift; I just didn’t know how to cultivate it.” To record her full-length,
which will package together the second and third “suites” of the Metropolis tale, Monáe,
Wonder, and Lightning shut themselves off from the world for the better part of six weeks.

“We’re digging into a world that’s very unique, so we’re very careful about the music we’re listening to, what we’re reading, the type of people we talk to,” she says. “But we challenge ourselves to constantly take in new ideas.” Recent sources of inspiration include Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler, Richard Wright, Prince, Björk, Kate Bush, Grace Jones, Radiohead, Of Montreal, The Matrix, and, for good measure, an Irish exchange student named Dylan from nearby Emory University. (“We’d go fishing, biking, ride horses; he’d tell me about Ireland, and my mind would be in such a different space, it would kind of freak me out.”) It’s a heady, eclectic mix of influences, but one that offers some reasonable insight into Monáe’s otherworldly ambition.

“We’re making music for the future,” she says, after she’s hung up her pool cue for the night. “This is just the beginning.” DAVID PEISNER

64 MARCH 2009 SPIN.COM: THE MUSIC WEBSITE