Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (8 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”