I create best like that. I wonder what each one thought when he first met her, because the 24-year-old singer is possibly the most focused, self-contained person I have ever encountered. "But there were children worse off than me," she maintains.
Only a singularly self-possessed individual could have pulled off the artistic high-wire act of her hugely acclaimed album, The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III).
"The lesbian community has tried to claim me," she told Rolling Stone. It's as though I was just being spoken through. "The android represents a new form of the Other," she explains. I try every trick in the book: playing the fool, cajoling and, in the end, pleading with her to drop her armour, but she won't budge.Quiz her about her famous friends, for instance, and she is infuriatingly discreet. So a holiday? "I feel like I do have a responsibility to the community," she says. Over the course of an hour, my efforts to break through the polished façade are met with expressions of kindly tolerance. Lettin' Go, a song about being fired from Office Depot for going online to answer emails from fans, attracted the attention of OutKast, who invited her to sing on their 2006 album, Idlewild.Apart from sci-fi, Monáe's main reading seems to be business manuals; she enthusiastically endorses Seth Godin's Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable. Monáe's parents separated when Monáe was a toddler and her mother later married a postal worker. she replies, aghast. I want rabbis, priests, nuns, atheists. When I ask about her musical ambitions, her reply emerges as a socio-political manifesto: "I want to be a leader in a new movement and redefine what it is to be a performer in music today. At her live shows, you'll see countless copycat Monáes, all in buttoned-up blouses and sporting giant quiffs.Her outfits, she says, are a homage to the "uniforms" imposed on her parents when she was growing up. "You have your moments of doubt, of course," she says.
Her words move with the well-oiled oratory of a practised campaigner. There are film references, too, most notably in the LP's cover art that alludes to the 1927 film Metropolis, via an Art Deco cityscape that she wears, Cleopatra-style, as a headpiece.I meet Monáe in the lobby of her hotel in London. Channelling the spirits of Fred Astaire, Katharine Hepburn and Elvis, she favours a monochrome aesthetic that takes in blazers and blouses, tailcoats and trilbies, pinstripes, pussy bows, bow ties and spats. A precocious 24-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia, Monáe is a woman with a singular vision who is very much in the driving seat of her career; asked what she does for a living, she replies, "artist and businesswoman".She takes as her inspiration James Brown, Salvador Dali, Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Wizard of Oz.
She is a conceptual artist and performer complete with a musical alter ego, a messianic heroine named Cindy Mayweather who, on her album, sets out to liberate enslaved androids.
Clearly, she takes her political mission seriously – tracks such as Locked Inside and 2007's Sincerely Jane are basically protest songs, and she recorded an articulate public service announcement about healthcare and education during the 2008 presidential election. I believe in the greater cause. Later she met Sean "Diddy" Combs whose label Bad Boy records signed a distribution deal with Wondaland.
She is also disarmingly serious and self-contained. Sitting opposite her, I feel as if I've just crawled out of a skip.
"The music that we create is to help free their minds and, whenever they feel oppressed, to keep them uplifted. The label's chief role was in facilitating her exposure on a much broader scale rather than developing the artist and their music, because in the words of Mitchell, "She was already moving, she already had her records – she had a self-contained movement." "So she dropped out and moved to Atlanta, where she lived in a boarding house with five other women and worked at Office Depot. Her mother, Janet, worked as a janitor and a hotel maid. Her first EP, "The Audition", was self-financed – she recorded it at a friend's studio and sold copies from her boarding house. I can understand when someone's saying we need a softer blue or a lime green."
"Cindi is an android and I love speaking about the android because they are the new "other". I see the freedom in what I'm doing and how great and life-changing it can be. Her physical flawlessness has an unreal quality that makes even her luxurious surroundings seem unforgivably slapdash. [...] I began to see how music could change lives, and I began to dream about a world where every day was like anime and Broadway, where music fell from the sky and anything could happen.I feel like I have a responsibility to my community and other young girls to help redefine what it looks like to be a woman. "Yeah, that hasn't happened yet. She's quite a dancer, too: during her performances, she showcases a wholly unchoreographed and hyperactive set of moves that frequently culminate in an electrifying sideways moonwalk.Then, of course, there's the music, a bewitching blend of soul, funk, old-style R'n'B with operatic flourishes.