This mental linking of sound and vision doesn’t only apply to film, though. I ask about the brief, seemingly incongruous guitar lick that ends Metropolis and her answer—“It just fit. It was the color I needed.”—suggests some form of synesthesia, the rare neurological condition where different senses fuse together in the mind causing, for example, sounds to be interpreted as colors. (Perhaps apocryphally, Frank Zappa once told his band to “play it more orange” to the bemused looks of his fellow musicians.)
Describing her songwriting process later on, the singer bolsters the idea. “I had seen all these colors in my mind whenever I’m writing. Some red here. Some blue there. Tone down the black. That’s what I was seeing.”
Let’s be real. The chances that someone of influence will discover your song online are, to understate this dramatically for effect, not good. Last year, Monáe posted “Violet Stars Happy Hunting!” on her MySpace page and, incredulously, amidst all the spam and notes from young admirers, the singer received a message from Diddy himself. The mogul, on the advice of Big Boi, caught her performance a few years earlier at the Got Purp? release party and liked what he saw. She consequently did what anyone would probably do after getting messaged by Puff.
“I didn’t respond. I thought it was a crank,” she says, laughing. “Puff’s a busy man. There’s no way he’s taking the time to be on MySpace.” After Big Boi convinced her it was legit, the singer talked with Combs and, after rejecting numerous other offers, signed with Bad Boy late last year.
With the Bad Boy deal in place, the original concept of four separate EPs was scrapped, with Parts I and II combined for the upcoming album and III and IV coming together for the follow-up. Still, as one who owes a part of her success to social networking, Monáe is conscious of the musical state of the world.
“I wanted to take into consideration that we are living in an iPod generation and attention spans are very, very short,” she states. “Because I have a conceptual album, I didn’t want to put out a project with so much info that people don’t understand because they’re so overwhelmed with the story that they lose the jam. I thought it’d be better to put them on a musical diet, so when they hear the next part they appreciate it. I’m excited with knowing that there’s so much more music to be created and ideas that haven’t been discovered yet. I respect the past, but it’s all about the future for me.”
Prepare for blast off.
- Jason Newman
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