Janelle Monae pushes the futuristic funk button

Even music freaks who've heard and seen it all waxed ecstatic last May when Janelle Monae dropped her first full-length album, "The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III)."

We were mad as hell in February when the artist didn't take home Grammys for Best Contemporary R&B Album and Best Urban/Alternative Performance. And jeez, she wasn't even nominated for Best New Artist, an even bigger crime.

Monae did earn a spotlighted performance on the televised awards show, though. "That's something people are more likely to remember," she rationalized brightly in a recent chat. And Monae expresses delight that her friend Esperanza Spalding, "an intelligent black woman who could write symphonies," claimed the New Artist honor.

This week, Monae commenced a major concert tour with blue-eyed soul-pop sensation Bruno Mars that brings them to Camden's Susquehanna Bank Center tomorrow. It's your golden opportunity to pick up on her very special vibes, doubly magnetic in live performance.

Granted, Mars has sold way more albums as a hook-happy singer, songwriter and producer - in the multimillions, worldwide.

But this girl's got the serious buzz going, got the respect. "Our show's an absolute co-bill in all details, even on the [backstage] laminates," Monae stressed in our chat.

"It's not a 'special guest' thing like I've been doing with Prince and Stevie Wonder. And that's good for the both of us, for cross-pollinating our audiences."

For those who haven't kept up, Monae pushes the futurist funk button better than anybody since the heydays of Parliament/Funkadelic and Prince. And she comes off as a total package - a fresh, intriguing concept artist.

That's why guys like OutKast's Big Boi and music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs jumped into her corner early, then Atlantic Records let her carry on with her Atlanta-based Wondaland Arts Society production team "without interference, without pushing a direction on me. That's practically unheard of nowadays," she shared.

And how about all those comparisons she's earned to David Bowie in his spaciest Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars glory days? "When I first heard that I thought, 'Wow, he's a brilliant guy.' Then someone showed me the 'Ziggy' concert movie. It made me feel like I'm on a great path."

Monae is visually striking, with cover-girl features, oddly piled-up hair and a lanky, limber, androgynously tuxedoed frame.

She piles on the music styles in an equally exotic, skitterish, shape-shifting way, crunkin' the Atlanta-style soul and snappy raps, showing off some bittersweet jazz crooning and dropping psychedelic rock and theatrical song-and-dance flourishes. Why there's even a world of classical swirling in her head, as Monae lifts Debussy's "Clair de Lune" on the song "Say You'll Go."

Monae's storytelling is equally ambitious, intended to charm like a movie (or folio of Japanese anime) while moving a social discussion forward. "The ArchAndroid" was actually conceived as the second and third acts to Monae's previously released EP "Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)." That short set nodded in title and theme to Fritz Lang's silent movie classic, and first introduced us to a futuristic female-formed android on the run from the authorities for the crime of loving a human.

Yeah, smells a lot like racism (or genderism?) rearing its ugly head, again.

While less overtly story-bound, "The ArchAndroid" album better amplifies the character's plight, with frantic visions like "Dance or Die," the balancing act "Tightrope" and her plaints of a "Cold War" life spent "running from depravity."

"My goal is always to unify, to bring people together, to make sure we're not discriminating," Monae said on the eve of the tour's New York opening. "In concert, I want to create an 'emotion picture,' a transformative experience that everyone can be a part of - to mediate between the haves and the have-notes, the oppressed and the oppressors. Music is unique in that way, in being a common denominator to bring everyone together and change the world."

Is that why the now-25-year-old Kansas City, Kan., native abandoned her teenage Broadway dream - her theater studies at New York's American Musical and Dramatic Academy - to move to Atlanta, get the Wondaland collective going and then make her recording debut on OutKast's 2006 "Idlewild" album?

"Who knows? All our lives have been planned out. Music found me. There was something bigger that I needed to say. But I still love and appreciate musical theater. It's in my heart and in my live performance."

Creating her own musical is "absolutely something I'd still like to do," Monae said. "It's all about timing. You can't rush things. When I do it, I want everything done correctly, I don't want to do something half-assed."

Same goes for that talked-about filmed treatment of "The ArchAndroid."

"We're still working on it. My ideas are very big, bigger than I can take on at the moment," she said with a laugh. "Ultimately I'd love to do something [cinematic] with George Lucas or Tim Burton."

Truth is, Monae's record label partners are "more interested in me coming up with new music. They would love for us to release something tomorrow. So we've been working on new music for a month and a half. I've been playing piano, learning instruments. I've been in a very gathering place.

"Coming off touring with Stevie and Prince, getting a lot of great feedback from them, I've been feeling a lot of positive energy. I'm understanding melody writing better, coming up with a strong concept. I'm excited for you guys to hear it. And I can promise, it'll be another experience, another journey."

Janelle Monae and Bruno Mars with Plan B, Susquehanna Bank Center, 1 Harbour Blvd., Camden, 7 p.m. tomorrow, $35, 800-745-3000, www.livenation.com.