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The plot thickened when she met local musicians Nate Wonder and Chuck Lightning at a Def Poetry Jam. "I'd go to their place, and we would work," she says. On breaks, they watched films like Blade Runner and Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis. "That's what really got me into sci-fi. Those stories of struggle between the haves and have-nots reminded me of my parents, working day and night and feeling like we were not getting anywhere. Looking at something from 1927 but set in the future really connected with me. I wanted to do the same through music."
Local heroes Outkast were doing just that, fusing multiple styles and stances in their 2000 masterpiece Stankonia. Outkast's Big Boi heard about Monáe and asked for a track for a mix CD. She chose "Lettin' Go," a breezy tell-all about the Office Depot dismissal.
"That song really opened a lot of doors," she says. Emboldened by the support, with Wonder and Lightning she co-founded the label cum collective Wondaland Arts Society and released an EP, 2007's Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase). The EP introduces Android No. 57821, a.k.a. Cindi Mayweather, Monáe's alter ego, who falls into forbidden love with a human, Anthony Greendown, and flees under threat of disassembly. Its five songs include two atmospheric set pieces; the gloriously bombastic "Sincerely, Jane"; the '60s-soul throwback "Many Moons," which transforms a hook out of Monáe's impersonating sirens into an earworm; and the frantic, plot-summarizing "Violet Stars Happy Hunting!"
That last song was the one eagle-eyed talent scout Sean Combs found on MySpace. "He called me and Big Boi," Monáe remembers, "and said, 'I don't want to be involved creatively. I don't want to mess it up. I just want people to know what you got going on.' And I said, 'Well, if you're serious, two days from now I'm having my own release party in Atlanta, and you should come down so you can understand it. Because what we're about to do is gonna be illegal, and I don't have time for people who don't believe in the vision.'"
Diddy came, he saw, he licensed. His entertainment company, Bad Boy, reissued Metropolis with bonus tracks, including a cover of Charlie Chaplin's classic "Smile" that Monáe began closing her shows with. A Grammy nomination for "Many Moons" arrived in 2009 ... as did new messages from Cindi.
The BFF From the Future
"I'm going to tell you a secret," says Erykah Badu. "Janelle and I go by these human names, but we're actually sent from the ancient future to do good." She cackles. "Don't tell anyone."
Monáe explains things a bit differently. She says the songs that made up Suites II and III, compiled on 2010's The ArchAndroid, came to her in dreams sent by Cindi in fragments that Monáe would record, still half asleep, as voice memos on her phone. These transmissions became songs, like the double-time rock of "Cold War" and the psychedelic softness of "Say You'll Go," that tell of Cindi's notoriety and her ascent to queen of the androids--a story that, as it happens, could also be seen as a clever analogy for Monáe's conquest of pop music as an African-American, sexually ambiguous, clearly ambitious young woman.