Jazz ingenue and Afrofuturism’s founding pillar, eccentric jazz artist Sun Ra, sent an artist-in-residence request to NASA shortly after the dawn of the space age and was rejected. Sun Ra, an Alabama-born musician who claimed Saturn as his mythical home, believed that music and technology could heal and transform the world. He was spellbound by the possibilities of space travel and electric technology. But ideas never die. A half-century later, a pop artist with tech love and Afrofuturistic sensibilities would create a song that Martians could hear.
Hip-hop producer and Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am has countless musical honors, but none can trump when he debuted “Reach for the Stars” on Mars. “Why do they say the sky is the limit when I’ve seen the footprints on the moon?” will.i.am sings.
It was the first-ever-planet-to-planet music broadcast in the solar system. In commemoration of the historic landing of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, on August 28, 2012, the song was beamed from Earth to Mars and back—a round trip of some 330 million miles—to an audience of students and scientists at a laboratory in Pasadena, California. Then it was beamed back and played on the Red Planet itself.
The song transmission was will.i.am’s idea. NASA administrator Charles Bolden called will.i.am to brainstorm ways to promote NASA to teens. When the artist suggested creating a song aired from the planet, officials asked who would write it.
“I was like, ‘Are you guys for real? I’ll write the song!’ ” will.i.am recalled.1
Blending traditional musical instruments with the best in beat-making technology, the four-minute song features a forty-piece orchestra matched with techno beats. “This is about inspiring young people to lead a life without limits placed on their potential and to pursue collaboration between humanity and technology,” will.i.am said. He hoped that the song would transcend time and culture.
A longtime science lover, will.i.am advocates for STEM Centers, interdisciplinary schools focused on science, technology, engineering, and math, and he’s on a mission to inspire children to recognize the technologies around them and use creativity, science, and art to change their environment. “Science and technology [are] already a part of popular culture,” will.i.am told a reporter shortly after the broadcast. “The world of STEM hasn’t found a way to remind people that iPod and iPad and all the code that makes Twitter and Facebook work all comes from people who have an education around STEM,” he said.
“I don’t want my neighborhood to continue to be the way it was twenty years from now,” he said. “All it takes is one kid, one kid from Boyle Heights, to be Mark Zuckerberg, and my neighborhood’s changed forever.”2
But will.i.am isn’t the only musician working with NASA. CopperWire, an Ethiopian hip-hop group tapped the nation’s scientists to collect sonified light curves, or sounds from stars, that they’re mixing in their new app. In April 2012 the group debuted their album Earthbound. Raising funds on Kickstarter, a popular crowd-sourcing site, the group’s accompanying app will also include an augmented reality space-flight game, an interactive art widget and comic book, unreleased songs, artwork, and playable instruments.
“The idea of making music from a galactic perspective gives you the opportunity to make up an entire world for sound to exist in,” says Burntface, the CopperWire member who’s also the 3-D modeler and graphic designer behind the group’s Phone Home remix Android app.3 The app’s algorithms can generate two million variations of the song based on any ten-digit phone number.
Afrofuturists value universal love, reinterpret sound and technology, and echo beauties of a lost past as the essence of a harmonious future. While the music is full of mind-benders, with the new era of technology, sounds can literally go beyond the stratosphere. Always ahead of the curve, Afrofuturist music embodies the times while literally sounding out of this world. Listen to Sun Ra’s “Astro Black,” Lee Scratch Perry’s “Disco Devil,” Brides of Funkenstein’s “Mother May I?,” an X-ecutioners live DJ show, “Drexciya’s 2 Hour Mix—Return to Bubble Metropolis” by VLR, and “Dance of the Pseudo Nymph” by Flying Lotus and you too might feel like you’ve been sailing on a black ark from a distant star.
But the music is about more than good vibes. Physicist and musician Stephon Alexander revealed in a TED talk that jazz legend John Coltrane’s song “Giant Steps” was an aural and physical diagram of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Alexander stumbled upon a diagram by Coltrane and realized it plotted out geometrical theories of quantum gravity and matched the notes and chord changes in the song. The discovery sparked other research on the parallels between music and quantum physics, and Alexander and his team learned that the Western scale of music also resembles the double helix of DNA.
“It’s outrageous,” says James Haile, philosopher and organizer of the 2013 Black Existentialism Conference held at Duquesne University. Haile watched Alexander’s talk and was floored by the links between music and quantum theory. “It might be the most fascinating thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “I had an idea that’s what was going on, but to have a trained physicist prove that shows it’s more than a notion.” What do such discoveries mean for Afrofuturists? “It shows how we can incorporate particle physics into Afrofuturism and coordinate ideas three dimensionally,” says Haile. As for the world at large, the discovery gives new depth to the power of music.
“Afrofuturistic music is music that pushes beyond the norms and standards of our current culture,” says Leon Q. Allen, composer and trumpet player. Leon Q. fuses Latin jazz and house music to create futuristic expressions of both. He contributed to the Rayla 2212 soundtrack and is also a member of the legendary AACM, a world-renowned avant-garde collective inspired by Sun Ra that emphasizes sonic healing. “It’s the ‘what next’ factor,” Leon says of Afrofuturist music. “It’s music that’s moving forward to a new place of cultural significance.”
Afrofuturism is the only future-oriented aesthetic that has such a rich history in music. George Clinton, Sun Ra, Bootsy Collins, Jimi Hendrix, Lee Scratch Perry, Grace Jones, LaBelle, Outkast, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, X-ecutioners, funk, dub, turntablism, soundclash, Detroit techno, Chicago house, even Coltrane and Miles Davis, have all been framed in an Afrofuturistic context—music that shifted the edge. Whether through lyrics of inspiration, new technologies in music, or shock-and-awe performances, the idea of music and in some cases black identity and gender identity evolved. “The approach is not limited to a certain style of music, the approach is based on the desire,” says Leon Q. “People have to study what’s going on in the society and the culture and look at the trends and patterns for what’s going on at the time.”
The desire to be more, to be free of the constrictions of a society with marked color distinctions and separation is like pixie dust sprinkled throughout the tracks. The music echoes with a universalism rhythmically that emanates from the roots of African music but is jet-fueled into the future. There are no barriers in Afrofuturist music, no entity that can’t emit a rhythmic sound, no arrangements to adhere to, no locked-in structures about chorus and verse. Wordplay is keen.
The standards are high. “When you line up everything that has come before you—if you line up Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, all the way up to now and imagine yourself standing in front of them—are you contributing something that is equal in weight?” asks Morgan Craft, an electric guitarist who has played with Meshell Ndegeocello, among others. “You have to push something that is equal to what the masters have pushed before you. If you don’t hold yourself up to their standard, it’s a waste of time.”
However, if there’s a cosmic ground floor for the existence of Afrofuturism in music, Sun Ra and George Clinton would be that foundation. The idea of a song mythology from the cosmos, highflying African-inspired space costumes, wordplay that challenged logic, and the use of traditional and electronic instruments to redefine sounds and push for universal love were established by Sun Ra and George Clinton. Both are referenced more than any other artist as the inspiration for today’s Afrofuturists. Clinton, whose funk sounds came to the forefront in the 1970s, later spoke of being inspired by Sun Ra, who began creating sonar sounds for the space age in the ’50s.
While many Afrofuturist artists have donned the space gear and metallic pants of the musical space cadet, in the case of those artists dubbed as Afrofuturist innovators, the space theme was more than just a kooky gimmick to play off the space age, more than an eyebrow-raising marketing ploy. The colorful, albeit shiny, costumes served as a visual tool to stimulate higher thinking and to prepare audiences for something new.
In other cases, the costuming wasn’t a focal point at all. Creative uses of technological innovations to create reigned queen. The wordplay, the heights of irony and dissonance, compelled listeners to question their take on reality. “What I appreciated about Parliament, Funkadelic, and Sun Ra is that they were almost speaking in code. Almost like the old Negro spirituals, we’re going to talk about three things in this one line, and you almost have to be in the club to understand,” says Shawn Wallace, composer and arranger, noting that the best in hip-hop lyricism uses the same layered language.
Afrofuturists enjoy challenging their listeners on their path to enlightenment. They enjoy pulling the rug out from under the smugness of reality. Whether it’s through chord arrangements, oddity, or sheer boldness, they get a kick out of tossing their listeners into the far reaches of outer space.
When Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount, left Birmingham, Alabama, for Chicago in the late 1940s, he was already a well-respected jazz musician with extraordinary talents. But his affection for electronic music and predictions that man would one day land on the moon made him stand apart. “He was very well read,” said Arthur Hoyle, renowned jazz artist who played with Sun Ra in the late ’50s. In a time when Chicago’s South Side was littered with jazz bands and clubs, Sun Ra was a fixture on the scene. Before he adopted the flashlights, solar helmets, and sci-fi African garb that would come to be his trademark, he was known as one of the most scholarly musicians around and would frequently hand out literature about his theories in Washington Park. His canon of must-reads included books on theosophy, numerology, metaphysics, science fiction, biblical studies, and a glut of underground alternative history books and African history books. He was propelled to answer what others hadn’t questioned and gravitated to books with theories on the origins of the world that differed from the Eurocentric lessons propagated in media and schools.
Sun Ra wanted to use music to heal. He had a preacher-like conversion moment. Part spiritual revelation, part self-described alien encounter, Sun Ra believed he came to the world to heal. This quest to fill the knowledge gaps, to find the erased contributions of people of color, and to ultimately shatter the color/class divides resulted in an information trek that would last for much of his life. And this searching for more, this desire to know the answers that weren’t readily available in the classics and media of the time, was the impetus for his stretch in music. Although he was adept at playing the big band and bebop that defined jazz in the 1950s and early ’60s, he did not want to be limited by its form. He named himself Sun Ra after the Egyptian sun deity and claimed he was from Saturn.
Sun Ra was a total original. He was a founding father of Afrofuturism, a pioneer of electronic music, playing multiple electronic keyboards long before anyone in jazz or otherwise adopted the instrument. Moreover, he was a forerunner of today’s space-music genre, new-age or ambient electronica designed for contemplation.
“He had a very original concept that was way beyond his time,” says Nicole Mitchell, avant-garde jazz flutist and composer who met Sun Ra when she was twenty. “He was one of the first African Americans to start his own record companies and was one of the first jazz artists to incorporate African percussion as well as improvising electronics into his music. He wanted to find the real power of music,” she says, noting that he also believed music could develop telepathy.
With so many ideas to explore, space analogies were the ideal way for Sun Ra to escape the parameters of music and humanity, and they freed him creatively to ponder the life questions he seemed so dedicated to answering and addressing through music. Hyperlinking his music to space travel created a prism of creativity for Sun Ra. He explored with healing tones, new sounds, and pushed jazz beyond its bebop dimensions. Songs like “Astro Black,” “Nubia,” and “Dance of the Cosmo Alien” explored cosmic origins and sonically both abided and broke the rules of modern jazz simultaneously.
Arthur Hoyle played with Sun Ra in Chicago before leaving to travel with Lionel Hampton. He shared a story about how the two reconnected in New York shortly after Sun Ra moved there in 1961. Sun Ra and his Arkestra came up the steps in their space-aged garb and elaborate wired headgear. The combination of shield-like metal ornaments caused the motley crew to clank with every step. A neighbor peered into the hall and shut her door immediately. “She probably thought they were from outer space,” Hoyle said. While Sun Ra claimed he was from Saturn, he created a cosmology for himself and his music that rooted its eccentricities in a land beyond the stratosphere.
Sun Ra was also a showman, and the theatrical costumes combined with the music was a one-two punch that would come to define the assault on the senses that many musical artists in Afrofuturism would use as a model. Sometimes he drew his own album covers. He was also a fervent poet. By the time he moved to New York in 1961, he sported his onstage garb daily, walking the streets of Harlem with his Arkestra of Saturn-born ingenues. The band lived, ate, and created music together while immersing themselves in Sun Ra’s philosophy and synergizing their unique approach. Anyone in conversation with him, during rehearsal breaks and elsewhere, was either held hostage or caught spellbound by his verbal debates and attempts to solve the mysteries of the world.
In 1974 Sun Ra starred in the cult classic Space Is the Place, an independent feature film directed by John Coney. An incredibly magical film that underscores the quagmires of self-determination, backed by Sun Ra’s effervescent piano solos and rhythmic big band space music, Space Is the Place is named after one of Ra’s most popular songs. The story follows Sun Ra’s earthly return and attempt to convince African Americans to leave Earth and embark on a new life on a distant planet with different vibrations and “under different stars.”
The film opens on this lush planet world. Sun Ra sits in a multihued garden in his new colony wearing Egyptian sphinx head garb and states that time is officially over. He “works on the other side of time,” he adds. He then concludes that he would bring the black populace to this world “through isotope, teleportation, transmoleculization or, better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.” Sun Ra then travels back in time to his early musical haunts and must contest with proverbial freedom gatekeepers, including a pimp named the Overseer, while embarking on his quest to transport the race to the far-off space colony with music. The film defies categorization, but Sun Ra’s celebration of the unity of life is clear. “Yes, you’re music too,” he states. “We’re all instruments. Everyone is supposed to be playing their part in this vast arkestra of the cosmos.” Space Is the Place creates a rich world to understand Sun Ra’s sensory-altering sounds while conveying his purpose as a musician.
Although Sun Ra received critical success and attracted a loyal fan base around the world, he was never a chart topper. Yet hundreds of musicians came under his tutelage. One of Sun Ra’s prized musicians, Kelan Phil Cohran, was inventor of the Frankiephone, an electronic kalimba also known as the Space Harp and featured on several Sun Ra albums. Cohran was Maurice White’s music teacher. White would later found the R&B band Earth, Wind & Fire, known for their songs of peace and love as well as their space-inspired, Egyptian-themed costumes.
Shortly after Sun Ra’s death in 1993, Afrofuturism was born.
George Clinton also reframed the soul music of the time, challenging James Brown’s band’s tight funk with fluid chords and repetitive bass lines by former Brown bandmates Bootsy and Catfish Collins. They created funk, a syrupy, bass-heavy music form designed to create states of ecstasy akin to the trance consciousness that morphs from tribal drumming, but using a mid-tempo bass guitar as the match. The sound would shape the 1970s and influence music into the twenty-first century. “JB brought you to an elevated state of consciousness. Parliament/Funkadelic brought you to an altered state of consciousness,” says Leon Q.
Clinton said that at the time he created funk, blackness itself had become commercial. “I had to find another place where they hadn’t perceived black people to be and that was on a spaceship,” he said in the 1996 documentary The Last Angel of History.4 Parliament’s fourth album, Mothership Connection, shows a sunglasses-wearing, metallic-silver-clad Clinton coming out of or entering a flying saucer. The mothership came from the star Sirius, harking back to the Dogon’s theory of origin. Clinton was a Newark-raised barber from North Carolina whose early doowop group the Parliaments tapped into the late 1960s’ societal transformation. Looking to Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix and their fusion of R&B and psychedelic rock, the mothership became a bridge between a missing African past and a glorious space-age future.
Funk, as Clinton envisioned it, aspired to free minds, using dancing, a heartbeat-like bass line, irony and metaphors, theatrics, and liberation-tinged space metaphors. In a sense, Clinton and his bands created astral-liberation party music.
“What that really stood for in black culture was the exuberance of craziness,” says Leon Q. “It was the embracing of the chaos. It had as much chaos as it did uniformity.”
But like Sun Ra, funk also celebrated universalism and oneness in humanity. Clinton took Sun Ra’s concepts and made them a part of pop culture. “Everyone wanted to be on this level that was higher than the Earth. It’s like his music was going to take you to space,” says Leon Q. Like Sun Ra, Clinton was a forerunner in electronic instruments. “George Clinton’s approach was, ‘How can we make this music sound beyond our time, taking the music to the next level on a sonic and psychoanalytic level?’ ” The concept caught like wildfire.
Parliament and Funkadelic and their funkateer offshoots had chart-topping hits like “One Nation Under a Groove,” “Flash Light,” and “Mothership Connection.” Today these bands are touted as two of the greatest of all time and were co-inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as Parliament/Funkadelic in 1997. “This whole thing about the funk being cosmic, it made people desire to be cosmic. It made people want to educate themselves on these concepts. Everybody was listening to George Clinton. Everyone wanted to be on the mothership. People wanted to push forward and move beyond their time,” said Leon Q. Some, including the creators, used drugs to induce this state, but the music was high enough.
Parliament and Funkadelic were two different bands, with shared members, each reflecting the visions of Clinton. Parliament focused on more polished commercial releases and Funkadelic delved into a complicated story and loosely formatted groove structure with psychedelic rock appeal. Dr. Funkenstein, a Clinton alter ego in Parliament, came from outer space to teach earthlings the funk. Parliament’s concerts began opening with a giant spaceship landing on stage and a dance party of space-themed musicians and dancers devoted to bringing the funk.
Parliament/Funkadelic’s wordplay was equally fascinating. Even the word funk had a duel meaning. “P-Funk seemed to believe that music wasn’t so much something that you made with your instruments as it was something that you caught with them, as if funk was out there in the form of an ambient residual energy left over from the big bang,” says Scot Hacker, author of “Can You Get to That? The Cosmology of P-Funk.”5
Playing on a list of double entendres and ironic metaphors, nearly everything they said meant the opposite of what it implied. Although this multisymbolic wordplay made for clever quips and new slang, it was a verbal assault on the senses, inferring that all is never quite what it seems. What’s up is down, what’s hot is cold … all newfound slang that subtly made listeners who paid attention question the reality of things. Up until the time of George Clinton, a lot of the slang words came out of the jazz world, says Leon Q.
As for the mothership, the metaphor is used in songs spanning R&B and hip-hop, with Erykah Badu reminding people that “the mothership can’t save you” in her song “On and On.” Outkast’s ATLiens album drew from P-Funk album-cover imagery. The samples of funk in West Coast G-funk by the likes of Dr. Dre and beyond redefined hip-hop music and generated millions from samples alone.
Lee Scratch Perry is one of the leading reggae producers and mixers, defining the sound for reggae and later dub. His single “People Funny Boy,” recorded in 1968, included an early act of sampling—of a crying baby—and defined the reggae sound. In the documentary on his life, The Upsetter, he said he created the reggae sound to reinterpret the swinging motion of workers with pickaxes hitting rocks along the Jamaican countryside.
Perry created the dub sound in the mid-1970s by layering the same sounds on top of one another, initially playing the same sound on two tape players and recording it. The dub classic “Disco Devil” uses a range of layering and ambient sounds never before used. Perry’s unique production techniques are the basis for modern reggae and its derivatives today. In 1973 he built the Black Ark, his own production studio, where he produced Bob Marley and the Wailers, Max Romeo, and the Congos among others. The songs spread the virtues of peace and love and revolution. Perry was later recruited to work with British punk, rock, and ska bands in the 1990s and 2000s.
Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Lee Scratch Perry have inspired not just musical genres, but critical music writing that explores their technological approach to sound.
“Funk music is the perfect way to explain Afrofuturism,” says Guillaume Dupit. Dupit, a French-born musician, wrote his doctoral music thesis on funk and Clinton. Immersed in the French jazz scene, he was intrigued by funk’s creation. He compares the repetition in funk to the laced sampling in hip-hop as a machine-meets-man duality. “It’s like if you take a sample, the same way you can in hip-hop, you play it and play it, and repeat it,” he says. “In the composition of the funk, you take a sample and you play it thirty minutes or four hours with instruments. A lot of their songs have the same construction. The same drumbeat, just small variations. And yet, the idea of repetition in funk is machine-like.”
He continues, “You can’t reproduce the notion of the groove with a machine. If you take the same sample and repeat it, it’s not the same result if you play it with instruments. It’s like science fiction, this balance between the machine and human. I think the point of replaying a sample with an instrument, something that can be relayed by a machine is really specific and hard to replicate. When you see Bootsy Collins playing his bass, it’s not playing soul or jazz or rock. It’s like a machine playing a sample, with micro variations and a totally different feel.
“They create something that the machine can’t reproduce. Machines are supposed to do that. Machines are supposed to take a sample and replay it, but the results aren’t the same,” says Dupit.
Unlike Sun Ra, whose global trek never crossed pop-chart thresholds, Clinton’s funk creation launched both a new musical genre and commercial success. “I’m amazed that he could talk about these concepts and be so successful,” says Nicole Mitchell.
Many musicians hailing from the funk era of the 1970s and the jazz and blues scenes that preceded it—despite their own experimentation with synthesizers and other electronic instruments—were not fans of disco, nor were they in love with the shift to electronic-based music that prompted writer Nelson George to declare the late 1980s and beyond the “post-soul” era.
The hail of scratchology, sampling, and break beats that defined early New York hip-hop along with the Euro-inspired beat-machine-riddled rhythms in house and techno surfacing from black neighborhoods in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore was ushered in with as much criticism as praise in the ’80s. The very construction of the music—the use of record players as an instrument and the notion of using a speaking voice over an isolated beat—was fresh and highly criticized by music impresarios.
But rather than seeing electronic music as the death of soul and funk, Afrofuturist and music writer Kodwo Eshun believes this machine-era transition is a foray into the depths of how humans can experience music. “Where critics of CyberCult still gather, 99.9% of them will lament the disembodiment of the human by technology,” writes Eshun. “But machines don’t distance you from your emotions, in fact, quite the opposite. Sound machines make you feel more intensely, along a broader band of emotional spectra than ever before in the 20th Century.”6
Eshun introduced the idea that the emergence of electronic music, beginning with the use of the synthesizer in jazz and R&B and eventually the pulse effects of house to Detroit techno and hip-hop turntablism, launched a new space for sound and music. This music is not a continuation of a lineage but rather the beginning of music into the future. Although Eshun argues that music by black artists tends to be written in a historical and biographical context, this digitized uprising in music encompassed a host of fresh sounds and ideas in music that had never been created before, a concept that he dubs “Alien Music.”
Eshun describes Alien Music in his book More Brilliant Than the Sun as “the distance between Tricky and what you took to be the limits of black music, the gap between Underground Resistance and what you took Black Music to be.”7 These sounds don’t have a language, and the layman’s terms used to describe both music-making machines and the spaces they inhabit are inadequate. The drum machine, he argues, does not mimic a drum but is rather a rhythm synthesizer that resequences patterns.
Eshun compares the break beat, the skeleton of hip-hop, to motion capture. He writes, “They grabbed a beat which was always there, by severing it from the funk engine, by materializing it as an actual piece of the vinyl that could be repeated.” Eventually, variations of this music would dominate the mainstream, and the history of the music would be placed in the musical lineage of soul like James Brown and the oral traditions before it.
Flying Lotus is one such artist. Born Steven Ellison, he is the grandnephew of jazz artists Alice and John Coltrane and grandson of songwriter Marilyn McLeod, who penned Diana Ross’s disco classic “Love Hangover.” With some musical shoes to fill, Flying Lotus continues to build on electronic music, creating both ambient and emotional music. He uses turntables, samplers, drum machines, and keyboards. His ethereal rhythms have some jazz inflections, are rarely accompanied by vocals, and are distinct in their creation of a completely digital music space. While some completely electronic music creations try to mimic other sounds and instruments, Flying Lotus albums from 1983 to Until the Quiet Comes rely purely on the dynamics of the digital realm to create a new form of intimate listening.
Although many Afrofuturists use space metaphors, space itself often literally means creating a new place to anchor unique sounds.
Drexciya, a Detroit-reared duo consisting of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, developed a mythology to orient their subterranean techno sounds. Borrowing Sun Ra and George Clinton’s concept of creating a musical cosmology, the duo created a new myth of a Drexciyan race. The Drexciyans are an underwater nation, the descendants of the African women thrown overboard in the transatlantic slave trade. With songs like “Hydro Theory” and “Andreaen Sand Dunes,” the duo, who only appeared masked in public, created a fluid sound and became techno pioneers.
DJ Spooky has long been fascinated with the process of creating music, often incorporating his skills into multimedia presentations. His famous Rebirth of a Nation showcase saw him sync his turntable with the footage from the film The Birth of a Nation and remix the film—known for its modern technology and racist imagery—live, with aural sounds and mixology. Recently, DJ Spooky has created and experimented with using apps to deejay music live and create songs. His latest project, Sinfonia Antarctica, led the New York DJ to travel to Antarctica with a portable studio, where he captured the acoustic qualities of the ice forms and created a seventy-minute suite speaking to the region’s environmental stress.
Inspired by British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 1952 composition titled Sinfonia Antartica (a difference of just one C), DJ Spooky takes Williams’s ode to the continent, which he never visited, and adds some icy reality. “Think of it as sampling the environment with sound—something that Vaughan could only do with metaphor [when he was writing] in 1949,” writes DJ Spooky.
Musical technology isn’t limited to computers. There’s a technology in the practice that live musicians embrace too.
Nicole Mitchell, critically acclaimed Afrofuturist flutist and composer, was equally influenced by sci-fi writer Octavia Butler and jazz pioneer Sun Ra. The daughter of a sci-fi writer and painter—“I grew up with images of a sunrise on another planet on my wall,” she says—she learned jazz improvisation while in college. “When I learned [improvisation] I wanted to go on the street and play a soundtrack for everyone who walked by,” she once said.
She later helmed the Black Earth Ensemble and became the first woman president of the AACM, where she learned how to use music for sonic healing and the use of indigenous instruments in jazz. Her release Xenogenesis Suite: A Tribute to Octavia Butler, was commissioned by Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works program in 2010. Mitchell says, “I had a chance to interview [Butler] at the 2006 Black Writers Conference. I said, Wouldn’t it be amazing to create music around her work? I wanted to collaborate.” However, the day Mitchell mailed off the proposal, Butler passed away.
“I decided that no matter what, I wanted to do this project,” Mitchell says. The experience pushed Mitchell to alter her music-writing style. She employed singers to sing without using words and envisioned sounds that took her beyond the scale.
“I can write pretty traditional scores, but in this piece I wrote a graphic score as a way to get the real expression out for the musicians. I just didn’t want it written out note for note. Not only did it use traditional musical notation, but also using drawings, and poetry to get what I needed.” Although she had worked with most of the musicians for a while, the approach often went “against their intuition to get what I wanted,” she says.
She continues, “I might want the saxophonist to make bird sounds. Writing out bird sounds would not be as fluid, if they were trying to read some crazy high notes, so I gave them a picture and a graphic of what I was looking for. It’s just about finding the most effective way to communicate with the musicians and sometimes you have to get off the page.”
Guitarist Morgan Craft was born in Minnesota. He grew up on heavy metal and hard rock and gravitated to early 1990s black rock bands like Living Colour. “Vernon Reid was the sun I revolved around,” he jokes. But Greg Tate’s writing “Star Black Rise” introduced him to the idea of Afrofuturism and gave Craft a voice for the innovation he craved.
Pointing to the AACM as well as the technology in music today, Craft feels that some artists are holding themselves back to maintain a framework that no longer fits. “When I look out there at what is being pushed on us as black music and the box that it’s in right now, I can’t help but think that we’re way beyond that now. It seems natural for futuristic black music to embrace all of our potentialities,” he says. “If we don’t have anything that is taking us into the future, where are we going to go? We can’t go back to blues anymore. We have cameras and megapixels today. When blues was created, you had a guitar and one string. We have to be concerned with futurism.”
Currently, Craft is living in Italy with his wife, who is a turntablist. His latest music exploration is “breaking the sound barrier,” he says. “When you think of music in the West like pop and rock, the frame of that music is based on twelve notes, the chromatic scale. Those twelve notes are cool; it gave us a lot of cool music, but is that all there is? If I drop a spoon, it might not be one of those twelve notes. But what if I make the sound of that spoon? You can use any sound and build music from it.” Noting that Mahalia Jackson and the famous blues musicians played “blue notes,” or notes between the scale, Craft says there are a host of sounds we’re just not exploring.
“When you think about all the great music that came from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, all the music we dig today comes from twelve notes. I’m not saying get rid of those twelve notes. I love what music has done and what it will be. But as a musician who is concerned about music, I say, what’s beyond those twelve notes?”
Jimi Hendrix’s use of reverb on the guitar is viewed in Afrofuturistic terms as the use of new sound. “If you have an electric guitar and it’s loud, you will hear some crazy sounds,” says Craft. “Jimi Hendrix did it with feedback. It’s not the idea of notes, but beyond those notes we have sound. If you go to school, they teach you theory about an A major chord, C major, based on the chromatic scale, which are technically numbers. They’re telling us that music is really math. It seemed to me that when you listen to music, you’re not thinking about trigonometry or anything, you’re just feeling it. It dawned on me, music is not about math, and it’s about sound.” Is there an undiscovered world of music with sounds we’ve yet to utilize?
“It’s an art form you can’t see. It’s aural. It’s sonic. If it’s sonic and emotional, can’t you take any sound and get it to speak? Instead of playing the guitar like Jimi, you take a bread knife and take it up and down a string, put it on a floor and step on it. You can make all these crazy sounds, but can you get them to communicate? The challenge for futuristic invention is to get new sounds to communicate.”
Janelle Monáe is a modern-day musical paradox. Sporting a coiffed 1950s pompadour and snug tuxedo, the Kansas-born singer’s futuristic sound is rich with romance-craving droids and time travel. She was discovered by Outkast’s Big Boi, another Afrofuturistic point person, who introduced her to Bad Boy Records’ Sean Combs, arguably hip-hop’s greatest marketer. Monáe’s music, look, and frenetic dance channel James Brown, Stankonia, big-band-era Duke Ellington, and the best in uplifting sonic sound. Her shock-and-awe demeanor and masculine façade are a visual shout-out to Grace Jones. Her powerful vocals evoke memories of jazz greats.
Her music has a story.
Monáe’s alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, is a silver metallic-dipped android sent to “free the citizens of Metropolis from the Great Divide,” a secret society using time travel to suppress freedom and love throughout the ages. When the ArchAndroid returns, the android community will be free. The space saga includes love, revolution, and heroism, complete with an android uprising, freedom fights, and ultimate peace.
Metropolis combines such a wide array of time periods, sounds, layers, and intrigue that it feels like audio time travel. Even the music’s mythology has a mythology. Monáe likes to say that her tunes are created at the “Palace of Dogs,” a place that cannot be spoken of.
Monáe, too, uses traditional orchestra instruments courtesy of the Wondaland ArchOrchestra as well as kinetic computergenerated beats.
Just in case the purpose of these hyperlayered metaphors and musical arrangements goes over your head, Monáe distributes the Ten Droid Commandments at her concert. Written like P-Funk hyperbole, the commandments instruct attendees on how to experience the music.
Commandment 4: “Please be aware that the songs you will hear are electric: be careful as you experience them and interact with electrical devices, drink water or touch others. The Wondaland Arts Society will not be held responsible for melted telecommunications devices or injuries resulting from lockback, sweat-tech, leaveweave, poparm, shockjaw, electrobutt, or any other maladies or malfunctions caused by the jam.”
Commandment 6: “Abandon your expectations about art, race, gender, culture and gravity.”
Commandment 7: “Before the show, feel free to walk about the premises impersonating one of the many inspirations of the ArchanDroid Emotion Picture: (Choose One) Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, Outkast, Stevie Wonder, Octavia Butler, David Bowie, Andy Warhol or John Williams.”
Commandment 9: “By shows end you must transform. This includes, but is not limited to, eye colour, perspective, mood or height.”8
Like her Afrofuturistic brethren before her, including Sun Ra who donned a flashlight or cosmic crown, and George Clinton’s multicolored hair and space suit, Monáe is rarely, if ever, seen without her starched shirt, pompadour, and classic shrunken tux. At the 2012 Black Girls Rock! Awards, she said her costume was an ode to her working-class parents, who wore uniforms too.
The song “Q.U.E.E.N” from the Electric Lady album includes fellow Afrofuturist Erykah Badu. In the video, the two are suspended in animation in a future’s past museum exhibit on rebels who used music as a freedom movement. The song, a funk throwback, is an ode to the eccentric, independent ladies of the world who are labeled as freaks for being themselves.
Monáe has an ArchOrchestra; Sun Ra had an Arkestra. Sun Ra came from Saturn to teach earthlings how to love; Cindi May-weather must return to free her robotic counterparts. Sun Ra juggernauts to space using African themes, Monáe hyperlinks back to the ’50s big-band jazz era in which Sun Ra cultivated his cosmos theories. Monáe was mentored in part by unconventional hip-hop duo Outkast, which featured Andre 3000—as in the year 3000. Outkast borrowed their stylistics from P-Funk themes, most notably their Stankonia music in honor of the funk.
The mothership is in flight.