AUGUST 2019 InSTYLE 119All eyes are on Janelle Monáe as she walks into a swanky
restaurant in uptown Manhattan. Punctuating her black-
and-white ensemble is a pair of tiny, very on-trend sun-
glasses; these, however, have a lens for the third eye attached
at the top (not unlike the ones her idol Prince wore once upon
a time). The glasses match her black Kenzo sweater, which
features an all-over eye print. Who’s watching whom?
For lunch she orders avocado toast, fresh-squeezed
orange juice, and a dozen oysters to share. She asks a few
questions to figure out my background, her mind calibrating
itself in real time, calculating how the interview will go
before it has even begun. When she is satisfied, she says,
“OK, what do you want to talk about?”
In a way Janelle Monáe, 33, was born with a heightened
sense of awareness. The Kansas City, Kan., native comes
from a large religious family (“I have 50 cousins. Five-
zero!”) and was primarily raised by her mom—a janitor—
and her grandmother, who ran a de facto community center
out of her home that was filled with kids, ex-convicts, and
recovering addicts. During this time Monáe was perform-
ing in plays and talent shows, and after she graduated from
high school, she decided to attend the American Musical
and Dramatic Academy in N.Y.C. to study acting and music.
After almost two years she packed up again and moved to
Atlanta, where she offset playing college campuses by
working at Office Depot. Eventually, her act caught the eye
of OutKast’s Big Boi and then one Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Her début EP, Metropolis, released on the latter’s Bad Boy
label, was the first of three concept records based on the
tale of her alter ego, Cindi May weather, an android run-
ning from the law after falling in love with a human.
With a knack for storytelling, Monáe broke into the
scene as a fully formed artist. In the beginning she always
was outfitted in a black-and-white tuxedo, a nod to the uni-
forms worn by her working-class parents. It was also her
way of rebuking gender politics.
“I’ve always wanted to redefine what a cool young black
woman looks like in the music industry,” says Monáe with
a sigh. “I was never interested in fitting into a system that
wasn’t built for me or with me in mind. I’m interested in
burning that shit down and building something new.”
A decade of critically acclaimed albums gave way to crit-
ically acclaimed performances in critically acclaimed
movies like 2016’s Moonlight and Hidden Figures. In
November Monáe will appear in the Harriet Tubman
biopic Harriet, as Marie Buchanon, a free black woman and
business owner who teaches Tubman to embrace her free-
dom. Then she’ll portray Dorothy Pitman Hughes—who
co-founded Ms. magazine along with Gloria Steinem,
played by Julianne Moore—in The Glorias: A Life on the
Road, based on the feminist icon’s autobiography. It’s obvi-
ous that Monáe’s choice of movies has been very deliber-
ate—most of them tell the stories of underdogs, of people
who have been written out of history, whether they took
part in big cultural triumphs or small personal ones.
“I don’t look at myself as just an actor or a musician,” she
says. “I am an artist, and I have a responsibility to tell the
truth. I use different mediums, but it’s all storytelling to me.”
Her overall aim, she says, was never to be famous but
rather “to add value to the culture.” With the release of last
y e a r ’s Dirty Computer, her typical new-album nerves were
heightened by personal revelations that opened her up to a
whole other world of cultural sensitivities. Her music video
for “Make Me Feel” found Monáe in a chain-mail bikini top
and matching trousers, doing a sort of push-and-pull chore-
ography with both a man and the actress Tessa Thompson. It
was immediately crowned a “bisexual anthem” and fueled
speculation about her and Thompson, whom Monáe was
rumored to have been dating as far back as 2015. The release
of another music video, for the song “Pynk,” found Monáe
once again in the company of Thompson, but this time the
singer was wearing giant pink pants in the shape of a vagina.
“One of the things that bothered me before I did Dirty
Computer was this concept of respectability politics,
men and women who don’t respect agency and think that
if we dress a certain way, if we show skin, we’re seeking
attention,” says Monáe. “I don’t want your attention. I’m
exercising my freedom.”
When it came to wearing the proverbial pants, she was
all about having fun. Even bringing up the topic makes her
break out into a huge smile. “I knew I wanted women,
especially black women, to be shown experiencing joy and
celebrating each other,” she says. “People get really giggly
when we come onstage. It’s important that we laugh.”
Monáe had always made allusions to queer love in her
music, but with Dirty Computer there was no longer ambigu-
ity. Following its release, she came out as pansexual in an