Janelle Monáe Wants to Tour in Africa, and Nine Other Things You Learn Hanging Out With the Superstar
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On Tuesday, Janelle Monáe began giving select fans a chance to preview her new album, The Age of Pleasure, as she hits Chicago, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and New York for what she’s calling Pleasure Playbacks. When we sat with her this spring for Rolling Stone’s June cover, she was teasing out the idea. She let us in on much, much more over the course of our interviews. Here are some of the conversations that didn’t make the story.
On “Champagne Shit,” a song from The Age of Pleasure, she raps that she used to “pray about taking vacations.” Janelle actually took her first vacation – ever – after the success of her first album, The ArchAndroid, in 2010.
For her first personal trip, Janelle went to Las Vegas. “I was just starting,” she says. “And I probably had a little bit of cash that I could be like, ‘OK, I’m going to go somewhere.’ The only way that it happened was because of my birthday. I was like, ‘Well, I should at least take off for my birthday.’” She then went to Vegas for three birthdays in a row, before her first international getaway to Jamaica. She eventually brought her mom and sister along. “I had cousins [whose] dads had worked at really good jobs growing up, and they used to always go cross country to different places. And I was like, ‘Wow. I wish that I could have done this as a kid. I want to share this with everybody in my family.’ And that’s when I started trying to plan a vacation for my mom and my sister, because we never had that together.” Since, they’ve been to Jamaica, Mexico, Japan, and Dubai.
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Janelle got some real hate in school for constantly showing up other kids at talent shows.
She says her mom was “driving me in her 1988 Dodge Plymouth, to and from talent shows, while people would throw bricks at our car because we won the talent show three, four times in a row.” (The brick thing only happened once, though.)
Rising Afro-fusionist Amaarae (who scored a viral hit with “Sad Gurlz Love Money”) ended up on Janelle’s album after she and Janelle realized they were fans of each other.
“Oh, my God. I heard ‘Fancy’ and I fell in love,” Janelle says. “She’s so unique, and she’s an incredible writer. She came in [to her studio] and she wrote her verse the same day. It was amazing to find out that she was a fan of me. I was like, ‘What?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, no. You don’t know.’ She started naming songs, telling me where she was in her life and she heard them. It meant a lot for us to connect because I love her frequency. All of us find one another. Her vibe and where she’s from, to me, is super important and necessary to move the conversation forward.”
Though few American acts tour across Africa, Janelle wants to.
She’s never been, having to put past plans on hold when the pandemic arose. “My hope is that I can tour this album on the continent,” she says. “I don’t know why other artists don’t. My hope is that I can go, we can play over there, we can have parties.”
She picked up DJ’ing with the popular Serato mixing software during the pandemic.
“I was like, ‘If I’m going to be here, let me develop a little more. That also brings me pleasure and also helps with any sort of depression for me, if I’m learning something new,” she says. “I have one to two mixes. I have to get back into it.” She says she was paid for a livestream set during the time that events moved online.
When it comes to the opinions of others, Janelle says, “there is not another person that can tell me about myself better than I can tell me about myself.”
“I think for me, I definitely have a mantra — my inner voice has to be the loudest voice that I listen to. My inner voice is king, my inner voice is queen, my inner voice is alpha, omega. I believe that, religiously. It’s like, ‘That is what I am.’ That allows so much more quality of life, where you have made a choice to truly believe that.”
Though Janelle is nonbinary, Black womanhood remains extremely important to her.
“I have a Black mama,” she says. “I’m going to always worship Black women. I see myself in Black women. I see my energy in Black women. I see my energy in Black men. I see my energy in so many things. I’m still allowing myself to discover how I want to articulate who I am. Because I think all of this is not a destination. It’s a constant journey. I just want to be really clear about that.”
Janelle started her music career in Atlanta by hawking her CDs out of the trunk of her green Mitsubishi Mirage.
“I only wanted 500 supporters. I called them supporters. I refused to call them fans,” she says. “I remember writing it down: ‘If I look at this as a church, if my church had 500 people, that means they could buy my CD that I’m selling out of my trunk. I could live in a nice little apartment in Atlanta. I can have gas in my car’ — that’s when I wasn’t using an electric car — ‘and I could pay for my outfits.’ I really was just like, ‘That’s it, because the freedom that I’m going to have, it’s going to be worth it. The people that I’m doing it with, I love them. We can do this independently. That’s really all I need to survive.’”
To support herself in those early days, she worked at an Office Depot in Atlanta for about a year before getting fired. The incident inspired one of the first songs she released.
“You know how they have those display computers? They caught me signing into my email,” she says. Janelle had already gotten a warning about using company property for personal use and she was already showing up late after open-mic nights and studio time. When she was was caught on camera using a display computer again while working on two of her first projects, they canned her.
“When I was working on The Audition [an early EP], I was working on an EP called My Favorite Nothing that a lot of people don’t know about,” she says. “A lot of people think The Audition and My Favorite Nothing are the same, but it’s like a hybrid of some of those songs. Anyway, it was during that season. [Office Depot] knew what I wanted to do. The way they spun it was like, ‘We know you don’t want to be here, and you really want to be an artist, so we’re just going to let you go.’ Then, that’s when I wrote ‘Lettin’ Go,’ my first song.”
Janelle hasn’t made it back to her hometown of Kansas City, Kansas, as often as she’d like to. A recent funeral would have made for a bit of a reunion there, but she was hesitant about going.
“My mom actually lost her best friend, who I’ve known since I was born,” she says. “So she had to go back there to the funeral this past weekend. I felt like I was there when I got all the photos. All the people that I grew up with went to the funeral. I didn’t get a chance to go. I’m not really good with funerals these days. I think I went [a lot] as a kid. We were always at somebody’s funeral. I probably went so much that it was just — I’m understanding the cycle of life a little bit more. And I’m not beating myself up if I cannot take going to someone’s transition.”
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