Lyric discussion by killstar 

Cover art for Cold War lyrics by Janelle Monáe

as ShoshiRosie said- it is definitely about being a minority. monae says in an interview: "Heavily inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis, which used an urban dystopia to berate capitalism, she too has invented a not-too-distant future in order to comment on the confines within she is expected to perform and present herself as a black female artist. “As an African-American woman, as an immigrant, wherever I am, I’m always the minority,” she explains. “So I came up with the concept of the android as the ‘other’ in society. I’ve been studying the theory of technological singularity, which predicts that as advances in technology become faster, there will come a point when robots will be able to map out the brainpower of humans and recreate our emotions. I’m posing the question — how are we going to live with the ‘other’? Are we going to treat them inhumanely, teach our children to fear them?”"