David Bowie, and I was like, ‘This is an artist who was able to create their own character.’ They didn’t have to look to Broadway or everybody else’s storytelling. I think I was using him as a model. And then Chuck Lightning, who is a creative partner with me, showed me a lot of science fiction films, because he asked me what genre I was into. And so he showed me this film, and it was like, you know, this is kind of like ‘The Godfather’ of sci-fi. It’s a silent film, black and white, and I had never seen a silent film. And what spoke to me was how it paralleled my life growing up in Kansas, this constant struggle between the haves and the have nots. Where you have working-class people like my grandmother, who was a sharecropper, and then my mom, her last occupation was a janitor, like working-class against the upper echelon - just that constant struggle between the hands and the mind. I was like, ‘This reminds me so much of my life’ and what I’ve been able to see and the injustices and that power dynamic. But it was centred around this Android. And one of the quotes that inspired me was Fritz Lang’s quote, ‘The mediator between the mind and the hands is the heart.’ And I was like, ‘I want to be the heart.’ Like I want to be that with music through storytelling. I want to bridge that gap.
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So what film or films made you fall in love with cinema? Oh, wow. So I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. I was obsessed, still am, with Judy Garland. Where I grew up was not at all like that. I grew up in Wyandotte County. Wyandotte is the name of a Native American princess, so a lot of indigenous roots there. I grew up in one of the poorest counties, I had working-class parents. And, for me, the arts always made things better. You know what I mean? Like when you grow up with working-class parents, you see them working, sun up to sun down, living pay check to pay check. I had parents who let me watch a lot of things like, I remember seeing ‘Boyz n the Hood’. I remember seeing all of the Tim Burton movies. ‘Beetlejuice’ was one of my favourite movies. And I was like, ‘I want to do that level of acting’ I don’t know, I was just always like, you know, Willy Wonka, ‘Charlie and Chocolate Factory’, like all of those characters all the way down to Freddy Krueger and ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’. I’m a huge horror lover and I remember watching that with my cousins. I’m one of 49, I have 49 first cousins so I grew up in a big family. We always watched movies and that was a time for me to dream. Once I got into being able to combine singing because I loved Prince, I loved Grace Jones, I was scared of them, I really was, I would have dreams that they would chase me - in my dreams. So when I finally got an opportunity to, like - can’t believe I’m saying this - meet them, I was really scared. But it was so warming to the soul. But I think it’s just storytelling in general and I think cinematically too. Even down to putting on an outfit, I create these sort of characters and I think I’ve kind of been like this for a while. I mean, how else can we make sense of life if we don’t add some storytelling in it.
Let’s talk about the film ‘Metropolis’, which you’ve said has been a really big influence on your career. What is it about that film that you love and that’s influenced you so much? I saw it right when I was deciding to become an independent artist. I was just like, ‘I’m gonna go the independent route, sells CDs out of my trunk and I’m going to write my own sort of like stage show.’ I had listened to ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’,
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You mentioned before that the way that you approach music is cinematically. When you start a project do you know the start and the finish and then the songs and the visuals come into it later? Or do you start it a different way? It varies. So with my last project, ‘Dirty Computer’, I had a dream that I was kidnapped and that all of my memory was erased and I was given a new identity. I was in a theatre and I had just gotten popcorn and Twizzlers, and I was walking down some steps and then this usher was like, ‘We need to take you to the back. They’re kidnapping people. They’re snatching people.’ And I was like, ‘Leave me alone, I just want to watch this movie, I want eat my Twizzlers in peace and drink my Sprite.’ but I was going in and somebody just snatched me. And I woke up a different person. I remember taking my iPhone voice recorder and trying to make sense of it. It was that piece around identity being erased that really created the framework for the film that we did, which is centred around Jane 57821 being kidnapped. So that spoke to me. I knew that I wanted to talk about why we were being kidnapped. What made us so unique, so special, what made us outcasts, what made us, I guess, a threat to the status quo. I knew it was that, it was like I needed to make sure that the community of people that I wanted to represent felt seen, felt heard and that I was creating a church for people who were kicked out of their own churches. So it started there. So it varies, to answer your question.
CE L EBRIT Y INTERVI EW JANE L L E MONÁE
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