How do you create a style and a stature for yourself in a community when you didn’t grow up or develop in it? And how do you give back to that community once you’ve been embraced and once you’ve found your voice and your strength?
Well, if anyone in OKC can answer those questions, it’s surely funk-soul songstress Nia Moné, who has made a resounding name for herself in the scene through a relentless work ethic of headline concerts, festival slots, collaborations, and more than a little luck and goodwill, all spawned from her celestial aesthetic and soulful voice, but also her willingness to infuse some left-field creativity into her soul and R&B sound.
Nia Moné: R&B is totally a very heavy contender genre in the city, and it's something that doesn't have to be just old school. It can be a little contemporary. It can be kind of, like, that in-between, alternative R&B too, which is a lot of what I do.
And I actually find myself in alternative scenes more than R&B scenes here in the city, just because that's just where I'm at.
Brett Fieldcamp: But a big part of Mone’s embrace of those outside-the-box alternative scenes comes from growing up all over the world, regularly moving across the globe as part of a military family throughout her childhood and formative years, an experience that she says gave her a deeper understanding of diverse cultures, styles, and sounds far removed from the constraints of traditional R&B.
Nia Moné: I've lived in Japan for a while. I've lived in Guam for a bit. I lived in England right before I came to Oklahoma.
It makes you very adaptable, because you have no choice. Every three to four years, you're packing up and moving not just states, but countries.
And I think England, personally, has the most weight musically for me, because my father showed me Amy Winehouse right before we got there, and so I really fell in love with her and just the rawness of her sound.
I feel like, yeah, me being a military kid and just having to hop around all the time, it makes you a little restless. So it's weird to be in the same genre position for a long time. You start getting a little antsy.
Brett Fieldcamp: Those experiences gave Moné the drive to stretch out stylistically, incorporating elements of pop, electro, and harder funk into her sound, and while that may have laid a rockier road for her into the traditionalist soul and R&B scenes, it eventually drew her into the alternative venues and art spaces where she began to build her name opening for alt-rock acts or guesting with rappers.
After she and her band, The Moonrays, found themselves as the first act to ever grace the stage of OKC’s Beer City Music Hall, Moné saw her star rise from outsider to scene player, but rather than rest on the opportunities coming her way, she began to organize and book her own lineups and showcases alongside acts and sounds from across the full spectrum of her own influences, showcases like MOOD CTRL, which sees its next installment at OKC’s Blue Note Lounge this Saturday, February 28th.
Nia Moné: I feel like organizing and booking has just been a way for me to also give back to the community that organized and booked for me, you know what I mean? Like, nobody had to book me when I first came out. Nobody even knew who I was.
For me, that's my way of being able to give that oddball out an opportunity to just show what they can do.
But I just love music, and I love having people discover music so much that I decided to create MOOD CTRL and like, have a space to do this concept. And I had done Nights of Neo-Soul before, which was specifically R&B, but I was like “but I do love alternative music as well.” And I was like “well, what can I do?”
As far as the lineup goes, I try to do an alt-R&B artist, a very obviously R&B artist, and then just a straight-up alternative artist, whatever that means, because alternative is so broad, which is why it probably feels like there's a lot going on. Like, it could be anything, but that's what makes it fun
Brett Fieldcamp: All she says she looks for in the artists that she books are the same things she looks for in herself: passion, emotion, presence, and mood. Regardless of the sound or the genre, she just wants to give audiences the music that will move them, and give herself the opportunity to put all the different sides of herself and her story under the spotlight.
Nia Moné: Performing feels very sacrificial for me. A lot of the time, it's just letting it happen, because sometimes it's a mood, it's not a sound, it's a feeling. I'm just gonna do what I feel like doing and hope that someone connects with it.
It makes it fun for you. It keeps it fresh for you, because you're not gonna be comfortable doing it until you just do it. It's not gonna be perfect the first time. And it's just, it's mind blowing how much, if you really go at it and you don't stop, like, how much you can grow.
But that excitement that you get for being seen, everybody wants to feel seen. Everybody wants to feel seen.
Brett Fieldcamp: You can catch Nia Moné performing at Art Fusion this Friday, February 27th at the Yale Theatre in OKC’s Capitol Hill and the next installment of MOOD CTRL, hosted and curated by Nia Moné, is this Saturday, February 28th at the Blue Note.
For more, follow @niaxmone on Instagram.
For On the Scene, I’m Brett Fieldcamp. Now here’s Nia Moné with “What You Want.”
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