This story is taken from the spring 2024 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.
Jaguars stalk in silence. Their spotted coats, once highly desirable in the fur industry, mimic the dappled shadows cast by broadleaves in dense rainforests, and their preference for hunting in low light allows them to move through the underbrush, and along the riverbanks, virtually undetected. Despite being the biggest cats in the Americas, their prey rarely notice them before their invisibility turns fatal: they’re content to sit motionlessly until the opportune moment to strike. In this way, their patience can be seen as a weapon. It’s in waiting that the jaguar becomes lethal.
Victoria Monét has been waiting for a long, long time. She did not foresee her lion’s share of false starts. She did not predict when she signed her first record deal in 2009, and moved to Los Angeles on the brittle cusp of adulthood, that it would all fall apart and leave her broke before her girl group, spearheaded by the legendary R&B producer Rodney ‘Darkchild’ Jerkins, had a chance to break out. She’s been dancing professionally since she was touring California in high school, but didn’t headline her own world tour until last autumn, years into her tenure as the electrifying opener for more prominent household names. Her first songwriting credit dates back to a Diddy Dirty Money concept album from 2010, but she didn’t emerge into “the public consciousness” (that is, by the standards of the music industry) until just a few years ago, when the twinkling “thank u, next” – one of many luminous tracks she’s written for Ariana Grande since they started collaborating in 2013 – was certified five-times platinum by the RIAA, and became her first song to reach number one on the charts. She has six EPs, one studio album, and some 15 singles attached to her name, but it wasn’t until February, on stage at the 2024 Grammys, that she was honoured with the paradoxical distinction of Best New Artist.
“My roots have been growing underneath the ground, unseen, for so long,” she told the star-studded room, fighting back tears. “And I feel like today I’m finally sprouting above ground.”
At 34 years old, Monét is still young by the metric of most reasonable, thinking people, but in a cultural landscape that overvalues fast, algorithmic ascents and the most youthful of the youth, she reads as having outgrown her precocity a long time ago. She’s the flower that bloomed in a dark room despite its neglected circumstances. And to those who were already in the loop, the three Grammys she took home in February were a testament to the virtues of staying the course, of having faith in yourself when the powers that be seem intent on diminishing you, and of relaxing into the rarefied knowledge that the end of your twenties does not mark the end of your potential, despite what the funhouse mirrors of social media seem to imply all too often. Precocity is, in the end, deeply and catastrophically overrated. “It’s so surreal – everyone keeps calling me ‘Grammy award-winning Victoria’ now,” Monét tells me, a few days after the ceremony. “It’s like my title has changed. It’s going to take some time to sink in, after all these years.”
When she released Jaguar, which she’d initially conceived as the first instalment of a trilogy, back in 2020, Monét may as well have crashed onto the record with a gruff, “Allow me to reintroduce myself!” It was the first project that was born from her desire to focus on her own music in the aftermath of “thank u, next”, and a far cry from the more stripped-back R&B sound that defined those early, nocturnal EPs. The palette here was warmer and brassier, lush with funky, disco-shaded instrumentation reminiscent of the horn-kissed Motown ballads of the 1970s; Monét is also a producer and engineer, a fact some critics gloss over when describing the sound of her music. The lyrics, on the other hand, were playful and breezy, revelling in the pleasures of autonomy. There was this newfound mood of poise and self-assurance that simmered across all nine songs, a blend of personal and professional liberation that saw Monét emerging from a chrysalis, totally self-possessed.
Sophomores are said to slump as they approach their second years with confusion, but Jaguar II instead arrived as a surefooted elaboration of the blueprint, so dripping in ambition and confidence that it no longer conjured an image of Monét, Issa Dee-style, reciting affirmations in the mirror. It was like Jaguar’s older, sexier, weed-smoking sibling (“It’s a bisexual blunt, it can go both ways,” she sings on Smoke), replete with hooks that lingered like smoke in a hot-boxed bedroom. The swaggering, dubby “Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem)” sounds made for a jewel-toned Coupé de Ville tipping in three-wheel motion; when Monét purrs those first lines – “We keep it smooth like a Cadillac / with the diamond spinners in the back” – it’s like she’s encased in mink fur, counting money and sucking on a lollipop in the front seat. “Stop (Askin’ Me 4Shyt)” scans as a Badu-esque defence against pocket watchers and undeserving lovers, with a pre-chorus that functions as an out-of-office message for your own personal Tyrone: “Don’t call my phone... bitch.” And the Kaytranada-produced “Alright” announces itself with one of the best opening lines in recent pop memory: “He gave me some dick in bed / Now he thinks his dick is embedded.”
Plenty of beloved artists cut their teeth writing for other people before they achieve solo fame: Sia wrote “Diamonds” for Rihanna, Lady Gaga gave “Elevator” to the Pussycat Dolls, and Frank Ocean had Bieber and Beyoncé in his Rolodex before Channel Orange was even a thought. But it seems almost absurd, looking at her today, that Victoria Monét could ever fit behind the scenes like that, especially for as long as she did. In September, when she revealed that MTV told her team it was “too early in [her] story” to have her perform at the Video Music Awards, her fans were indignant. For over a decade she’d written bangers for the likes of Chloe × Halle (“Do It”), Chris Brown (“Drunk Texting”) and Grande (“34+35”, “7 Rings”, “needy”). Every stop of the Jaguar tour sent up flares on social media. It seemed wild to tell a bona fide star who’s been honing her craft for a decade that she needed more time to mature. Even the Grammys nominated her in seven categories but did not invite her to perform at the ceremony, despite her arguably proving herself to be one of the best performers of her generation.
“I don’t want to vilify anyone,” Monét told me ahead of the Grammys, “because it’s almost like ignorance rather than an act of malice – whoever was in charge just wasn’t aware, and now, hopefully, they are. Everything comes in due time.” She has a diplomatic charm about her, a feathery speaking voice, and a reserve of patience that seems inexhaustible. “It’s another one of those milestones that I’m going to appreciate so much more when it happens,” she added. “I’m at peace with it.” But it was difficult not to consider these decisions as part of a continuum of industry oversights, and the inability for star-makers to actually identify star quality. Sometimes, though, it takes an eternity for the rest of the world to catch up to Black genius. Other times, they don’t catch up at all. “If I had got to LA back when I was 19,” says Monét, “and someone was like, ‘Just so you know, you’re not walking through this gate and achieving instant success – it’s gonna take you a solid 14, 15 years. Are you still down?’ I really wonder what I would have said.” Victoria Monét knows what it means to be the girl on the edge of the frame. She knows how it feels to be told it’s not yet her time.
She did not set out, in the beginning, to be a singer. “I always knew that I wanted to be on stages,” she says, flashing a smile, “but I was a little bit too shy to really sing like that.” As a child she vividly remembers her uncle sending her a VHS tape in the mail with a recording of a Michael Jackson tour, where people were so overwhelmed that they were crying and passing out; she felt so captivated by what he could do in the space of a performance that she sprouted ambitions to acquire the same brand of stage presence. “I used to think, one day I’m gonna dance with Beyoncé, I’m gonna dance for Janet Jackson,” she says. (She has not yet done the former, but Beyoncé did send a bouquet of flowers to Monét’s house after she attended a screening of the Renaissance concert film.)
Her commitment to the form was almost immediately precocious. In primary school, she joined a programme through her church called Sistas (Sophisticated Individuals Striving to Achieve Success), where a dancer came in and taught everyone how to step. She loved it so much that she petitioned her school principal to start a dance club, and even wrote a letter to Coca-Cola that secured them a sponsorship. “I remember the news came to my school to interview me, and they talked about me as this unsung hero,” she laughs. She was 12. As a teenager, she fudged her home address to get into a performing arts high school, and got swept up in an after-school programme where guest choreographers would come in to prepare everyone for the annual mid-year production. The show was a big deal: you had to audition for it, and the choreographers would select you based on talent level. “It gave me a good sense of the LA lifestyle – going to label meetings, filling out audition forms, that sort of stuff,” she says. One of the choreographers who came in was a former garage dancer called Phil Tayag, the founder of one dance group called Boogie Monstarz and another called the Jabbawockeez. “I made it into his piece, but then he was also like, ‘You’re really talented beyond this. I want you to come to my rehearsals,’” says Monét. She was recruited to join the Boogie Monstarz, who rehearsed three times a week, and would spend hours after school training with the much older members, until her mother grew tired of her getting home at 2am. “She was like, ‘Either you abide by my rules or you can get out,’” says Monét, doing an impression so familiar that I wince at the sound of my own mother. “I was just like, ‘Oh, I gotta get out.’”
She moved in with her grandmother and travelled all over California with the Boogie Monstarz, revelling in her first real taste of show business. It wasn’t until Monét turned 17 that she began writing songs, and recorded demos with a friend of her mother’s who used to be Janet’s bass player; he played three beats for her at his studio and let her write over one of them. Eventually, she took the songs she’d recorded and started posting them to Myspace, where she caught the attention of Darkchild, the famous hitmaker for artists like Mary J Blige, Michael Jackson and, of course, Destiny’s Child. He invited Monét to audition for a girl group called Purple Reign; two weeks later she was on her way to Los Angeles, wide-eyed and full of promise.
When she got to LA, though, Monét says she felt more like Cinderella than Alice in any Wonderland. “I was broke as fuck, and just, like, struggling down,” she admits. For a while she was sleeping on someone’s couch, until another girl in the group invited her and the third member to stay with D’Mile, a protege of Darkchild who later produced much of Jaguar and Jaguar II. They couldn’t afford gym memberships, so they would take zumba classes at the YMCA to keep in shape. They would sing on the pier at Venice Beach or Santa Monica or in front of In-N-Out Burger with a little paper cup, in the hopes of generating some income while also recording, for free, in the studio. “There was no advance offer for signing with Rodney, and no promise of money on the table,” she says. “It was just like, ‘If you want to be here, figure it out.’”
Still, Monét was determined to grind it out. She was proud about the fact that she had been signed to Motown Records specifically, because that was the music she grew up listening to. When her grandmother died the same year of her move, it felt like a cosmic slap. “It was really hard, because I just knew she would have been so proud,” says Monét. She maintained the drive of her youth, rehearsing all day with Purple Reign and then staying late at the studio to practise her songwriting. “Rodney really liked the first song I wrote, and we just kept going,” she says. “There was a point where he was like, ‘Rihanna really likes that song,’ and I got a placement on a Dirty Money album. So I started trying to place records that way, too.” Writing for other people was like a survival tactic, and when a switchover of the label boss led to Purple Reign being dropped before they could even release an album, it came in especially handy. She had to put her own solo work on the backburner, and began thinking of it as a side project.
“[Starting out] it was like, ‘Don’t be bisexual, don’t be too Black, don’t use slang and cuss too much because you won’t get on the radio.’ It wasn’t until I let go of all those things that I realised it was a lie” – Victoria Monét
But that particular heartbreak seemed to her a natural part of the game, the cuts and bruises you expect from combat. “It was almost like, ‘OK, bitch, you’ve made it to the big leagues, and this is what the big dogs do,’” she says. It wasn’t until much later that she started unpacking some of the trauma she incurred subconsciously. “There was a while where I was just trying to appease what I thought the cookie-cutter artists sounded and looked like. When I first moved to LA, there were these rules in my head that I was told I had to follow – like, don’t put your relationship status online because people want to keep the fantasy that they can have you; don’t eat at parties, because there may be something in your teeth when you talk to an executive; when you go to a red carpet, make sure you stick your chin out just so to keep your chin from looking weird.” It was conveyed to her that there was a certain kind of artist who was bankable, and that you needed to make yourself over to become that way. “It was kind of like, ‘Definitely don’t be bisexual, don’t be too Black, don’t use slang and don’t cuss too much, because you won’t get on the radio,’” she says. “It wasn’t until I let go of all those things that I realised it was a lie.”
She felt totally suppressed. But she knew that even being in these rooms was a privilege, and that she could take advantage of being a fly on the wall. She was quietly observant. She knew it was more likely that a great song she’d written would go to a superstar like Rihanna or Chris Brown before they poured studio time into some random girl from Sacramento, so she tried to write hooks so good that the artists who received them wouldn’t want to take her off the songs. It was hard for her to treat herself as a side project, but she knew she was slowly expanding her Rolodex, building her profile in silence. She was introduced to Ariana Grande while the young Nickelodeon actress was working on her debut album, Yours Truly, and the pair began a friendship that blossomed into a longstanding creative partnership. Monét worked on every album that came after, and when “thank u, next” debuted at No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and broke numerous streaming records upon its release, it occurred to her that nobody could really deny her star power anymore. She took a month off writing for other people and made the foundation of a new project with D’Mile. She resolved to call it Jaguar. She was finally ready to strike, and nobody would see her coming.
It’s just after soundcheck at the Roundhouse, the aptly named performance venue in north London where Jimi and Otis and Bowie used to play their smouldering rock and soul shows back at the turn of the 70s, and Victoria Monét is standing on the main stage of the circular auditorium, taking stock of her surroundings and herself. The lights are still up. The theatre is still empty. Monét, who is 5ft 5in but seems taller on stage, is mentally preparing for the first of two sold-out shows closing out her first world tour as a headliner, and surveying the room to see where the high-profile guests of the night, still a mystery to her, might be sitting. She wants to ensure they’re comfortable (i.e. don’t get harassed by fans) and have a clear view of her molecular transformation from this mellow, soft-spoken girl from Sacramento to the jaguar she embodies when the spotlight hits her.
The last few months had been intense. She released her studio album in August to universal critical acclaim, and embarked on a tour that sold out in minutes. She was nominated for seven Grammy awards, officially removing her from the category of overlooked/undersung and confirming her as an R&B heavyweight. And on this particular evening in November, standing on that stage at the Roundhouse, with whatever ghosts of legends that haunt the old building, the security guard is gesturing vaguely towards the balcony and casually telling Monét something that sounds like, but can’t be, “And I think Janet is gonna sit right there.”
A beat.
“What?!” blurts out Monét, because it feels like the only appropriate response. “Sorry – who? Which Janet?”
The security guard, probably with some amusement, replies in a tone that still feels too casual for the occasion, that does not convey the weight of the surname in his mouth: “Jackson.”
Another beat.
Monét, for her part, relays this story to me with palpable excitement. She acts out both parts, affects supreme confusion, whips her head around, lifts herself from the foot of her bed and angles her face closer to the webcam. “I’m just like, no fucking way,” she says. “Like, Janet – the Janet – is coming to my show?” Her heart all but stopped. She scurried backstage to find her team, who asked how she found out and admitted to withholding the information. “I totally understood where they were coming from, because that’s my absolute idol and they didn’t want to throw me off my game,” says Monét. She’d never been so nervous to perform. “I was thinking of her most of the time during the show, just trying to escape from my head.”
“I just want to show people it’s actually possible to have your wildest dreams come true. You just have to be patient, and work towards it slowly. The universe will draw it to you. It won’t have a choice. If you just focus on it, it will come”
But Janet loved the performance, and went backstage to tell her how much fun she’d had watching the show. “I was probably stuttering and fumbling my words,” Monét says with a gentle laugh. It was like a full circle moment for her: there’s no Victoria Monét as an artist, she says, without Janet Jackson. She was raised on Janet’s high-concept, choreography-in-tensive music videos, and certain aspects of her musicality – that affinity for funk, disco and dance-pop; the playful, humid displays of sexuality; the soft vocal phrasing and sweet vulnerability – were clearly formed by the legacy of albums like Control and The Velvet Rope. To have Jackson come to her show, after years spent learning from her music, felt like the biggest honour that could be bestowed on anyone.
In the wake of all this madness – the Jaguar tour, the Grammys, the surreality of witnessing her heroes encounter her life’s work – Monét is trying to catch a moment of respite. She’s eager to get back into the studio, so she can work on a deluxe version of Jaguar II. She’s keen to work with new collaborators. But for now, she’s trying to catch her breath. The world tour was the first time she’d been away from her daughter Hazel for that long, and finding the right moments to have her come and visit was its own logistical challenge. She wanted to strike the proper balance between allowing Hazel to see her on stage, doing what she loves to do and being loved for it, and also not totally annihilating her sense of normalcy by surrounding her with music-world adults all the time. “One morning recently, she was like, ‘I want to sing like mommy!’” says Monét, laughing. Hazel tends to shy away from flashing cameras and roaring audiences, even at birthday parties, but at home, says Monét, she’s often singing and dancing, reciting monologues to herself in the mirror. “It’s almost like she’s acting, playing characters sometimes – talking about tea parties, or whatever.”
As far as songwriting goes, she feels like right now is the time to be pouring into herself, and to continue the momentum that has led her to this moment. Other artists, she says, will always be there when she’s ready to express herself in that mode, but what feels natural to her now is expanding the Victoria Monét universe, and watering the seeds that she planted over a decade ago. “I feel like an example for the fact that slow and steady really does win the race,” she says. “Someone who runs two miles every day is going to get there faster than the person who does three miles every other day, you know? It’s just about focusing, and trying not to stop. I feel like that’s been my career. Like, OK, I’m just going to inch towards it slowly. But I’m not going to stop. And I want to be an example for people, because I know there’s so much bullshit going on. We all have our passions and goals and things we want to accomplish, and it’s tough sometimes, but I just want to show people it’s actually possible to have your wildest dreams come true. You just have to be patient, and work towards it slowly. The universe will draw it to you. It won’t have a choice. If you just focus on it, it will come.”
Hair DAVONTAE WASHINGTON using AS I AM, make-up ALEXANDER ECHEVERRI, nails JOHANA CASTILLO, set design KELLY INFIELD at WALTER SCHUPFER, photographic assistants BENJI CALLOT, KURT MANGUM, styling assistant JEMMA FONG, digital operator BRIAN KENDALL, production CONNECT THE DOTS and WE FOLK, production assistants KHARI COUSINS, MARK CHECHE, MATEO CALVO, post-production FRISIAN