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Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora Edited By: Sheree R. Thomas

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Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora Edited By: Sheree R. Thomas

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Anthology

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Description

This volume introduces black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers to the generations of readers who have not had the chance to explore the scope and diversity among African-American writers.

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Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Paperback) | 44th & 3rd Bookseller

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This volume introduces black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers to the generations of readers who have not had the chance to explore the scope and diversity among African-American writers.

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"A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction" By Nisi Shawl

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"A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction" By Nisi Shawl

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Blog

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A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction

As I write this it's February-- Black History Month in the U.S. and Canada--for a few more days. But just as black history didn't just take place in the February of any given year, it takes more than a mere month to encompass it. Even if the focus is narrowed to the black history of science fiction.

In 1909 Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot, issued a 51-volume anthology he claimed could provide its owners with a complete liberal arts education. In the same vein, I've pulled together an annotated list of 40 black science fiction works that are important to your understanding of its history. You've got the rest of 2016 to read them. That's doable, isn't it? Tackle them one per week....Sure, some of the older titles are going to be full of archaic and unfamiliar turns of phrase; some of the anthologies are thick, and a couple of the novels I recommend are fairly long. But a few of my suggestions are short stories, a few are children's books, and all of them are things I've enjoyed. And if you start now, you should have at least one week you can use to catch up if you fall behind, or to explore any titles find yourself distracted by as you make your way through this crash course. Plus, you may well have read some items on my list beforehand.

Just one caveat before you start ordering and downloading and diving into things: some of these works could be construed as fantasy rather than science fiction. The distinction between these two imaginative genres is often blurred, and it's especially hard to make out their boundaries when exploring the writing of African-descended authors. Why? Because access to the scientific knowledge from which SF often derives has been denied to people of the African diaspora for much of history. And the classification of what is and is not scientific knowledge hasn't been under our control--it's frequently a matter of dispute. Also, it's sometimes difficult to understand the history of black science fiction without reference to the history of black fantasy.

Keeping in mind how inextricably the two genres are interwoven, I include works of fantasy in this history of black science fiction crash course reading list, though I'm careful to note their presence with a parenthetical F at the end of each entry, thusly: (F).

We begin at the beginning.

1859 Martin R. Delany: Blake, or the Huts of America -- This is often cited as the first African American science fiction novel, though the author lived in England at the time it was published. It's about a slave revolt, with hints at the Utopia that may follow.

1887 Charles Chesnutt: "The Goophered Grapevine" This was the author's first short story, and the first story by a black writer to appear in the prestigious glossy magazine The Atlantic. Heavily laden with "eye dialect" (stylized and phoneticized depictions of nonstandard speech), it's one of Chesnutt's popular "Uncle Julius" tales, which were collected in 1899's The Conjure Woman. (F)

1903 Pauline Hopkins: Of One Blood -- A rousing adventure along the lines of H. Rider Haggard's She and King Solomon's Mines, Hopkins's serialized lost race narrative takes readers from a sleety Boston campus to a Libyan desert's "rosary of oases." Medical student Reuel Briggs discovers he's the descendant of divine African kings, destined to rule the faithful inhabitants of "Hidden City" with the aid of a priestly hypnotist. (F)

1920 W.E.B. Du Bois: "The Comet" -- In the post-apocalyptic New York created by the devastating toxic gases a crashing comet unleashes, a black man has a close encounter with the only other survivor, a wealthy white woman. This unabashedly science fictional scenario is deftly handled by, yes, that Du Bois, the influential black thinker best known for his philosophic analyses of U.S. race relations. It was reprinted in Dark Matter 1, which I cover later in this article.

(As you can see, I have no 1930s or 1940s titles to recommend. All I can offer is the fact noted by author and librarian Jess Nevins that the race of the many anonymous authors published in the pulps in those years is unknown. Onward.)

1954 Amos Tutuola: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts -- Like his first novel, The Palm Wine Drinkard, this collection of related stories deals with the mythic realm of Yoruba-based cosmologies. Unlike that book its young protagonist enters this realm unwillingly. The stories appear non-sequentially, emphasizing the disjointed outlook resulting from his strange experiences. (F)

1962 Samuel R. Delany: The Jewels of Aptor -- Completed when Delany was a teenager and published when he was 20, this first novel tells in poetic language of a quest through post-atomic lands filled with mutants and surprising cultural survivals.

1969 Sam Greenlee: The Spook Who Sat by the Door -- A wishful tale of overthrowing the status quo, this book, sometimes classified as a thriller or spy novel, pits black ex-CIA agent Dan Freeman against a corrupt white political system. By arming and educating Chicago gangs Freeman brings about a violent revolution.

(How are you doing? If you're reading these titles in order you've absorbed over 100 years of black science fiction at this point. Only a few more decades to go. But I won't lie to you; you're not even halfway through all the wonderfulness. Much more lies ahead.)

1970 Lorraine Hansberry: Les Blancs -- A delirious air of surrealism pervades this play examining Europe's colonialist control of Africa and Africans. Though she's best known for her 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry considered Les Blancs her most important work.

1972 Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo -- The notoriously chauvinistic literary critic Harold Bloom considers this one of the world's 500 most important books. It was certainly an important influence on me and a myriad of other imaginative blacks when it appeared. A quasi-historical, illustrated spree through clashes of the heroic proponents of jazz and voodoo with the oppressive fictional Wallflower Order, Mumbo Jumbo was Reed's third novel. It was preceded by "the first American Hoo-Doo Western," Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and the bitingly satiric The Freelance Pallbearers. (F)

1975 Samuel R. Delany: Dhalgren -- When you read Dhalgren you're automatically enrolled in a secret club made up of a special kind of intellectual. A widespread cult has grown up around it--fittingly, since it's a strange story strangely told: the last line, for instance, famously ends with the words that begin the first. Set against the backdrop of the enigmatic ruins of a post-apocalyptic city, the exploits of the Kid illuminate both more and less than we want to see of them.

1979 Octavia E. Butler: Kindred -- Not her first novel, Kindred is Butler's best known. It was itself inspired by Black History Month; she wrote it in response to disparaging remarks about their enslaved ancestors made by black students ignorant of the extent of those ancestors' oppression. A modern black woman is drawn involuntarily back to the antebellum South, ensuring that a white supremacist lives to sire her grandmother. (F)

1986 Virginia Hamilton: The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl -- This children's fantasy of West African divinities becoming involved in blacks' struggle for freedom conveys the sorrow and pain of enslavement without omitting humor and hope. A great introduction to black history's depth and breadth. (F)

1988 Gloria Naylor: Mama Day -- I love this book. It's an ambitiously structured narrative that combines romance with folklore and delves deep into the apparent dichotomy between magic and common sense. Generations of women fall into and out of conflict with one another and their definitions of emancipation on the gloriously real-feeling Georgia sea island of Willow Springs. (F)

1990 Charles R. Johnson: Middle Passage -- Though it's usually considered a non-fantastical and purely historical novel, much of the action of Middle Passage centers on a captured West African god and the healing visions he bestows on the novel's hero, freedman Rutherford Calhoun, when he stows away on the slave ship Republic. (F)

1992 Derrick Bell: "The Space Traders" -- Plausibly though controversially, this short story depicts the advent of aliens willing to trade their endless bounty for the imprisonment and delivery to them of all blacks in the U.S.

1998 Nalo Hopkinson: Brown Girl in the Ring -- Winner of publisher Warner Aspect's First Novel Contest, this near-future tale of an unwilling medium surviving in an abandoned urban core established Hopkinson as a major force in the genre. Organ harvesting, teen motherhood, murder, and other topics vie for attention as the fast-paced plot hurls readers through Canada's vividly described Afro-Caribbean subculture.

1998 Sandra Jackson-Opoku: The River Where Blood Is Born -- This book was lauded by Mama Day's author Gloria Naylor as a "stunning feat." Spanning continents and centuries, it's an intergenerational saga of inherited dreams and the legacy of defiance bequeathed on modern blacks by those who fought oppression before us. (F)

2000 Nalo Hopkinson: Midnight Robber -- This may be my favorite of Hopkinson's many amazing novels. Taking us first to the near-Utopian planet of Toussaint, a world settled by a diverse Caribbean population, then to its transdimensional prison colony of New Half-Way Tree, Hopkinson tells the moving tale of innocent bystander Tan-Tan's adaptation to strange new living conditions. Dialogue and narration highlight Island speech patterns--not the first time an author has done this, but an extremely fine example of using nonstandard English to introduce readers to black culture.

2003 Tananarive Due: The Good House -- This tale of a haunted house deliciously and simultaneously showcases Due's power to invoke blinding terror, her respect for religious traditions outside the mainstream, and her intimate knowledge of the violence directed toward young black men. It's as timely now, unfortunately, as it was at its publication. (F)

2005 Octavia E. Butler: Fledgling -- This was Octavia's last book. Heroine Shori is a 53-year-old top predator-type of vampire with the appearance of a twelve-year-old black girl. Octavia actually thought of this biologically rigorous novel, starkly realistic in its portrayal of the mechanics of death and feeding on humans, as a fun, lighthearted romp. Shori's battle against the attacks of her white relatives cries out for the sequels Butler died before she could write.

2006 Andrea Hairston: Mindscape -- Winner of the Carl Brandon Society's Parallax Award, Hairston's first foray into fiction (she's a seated professor of theater and Afro-American studies at Smith College and has written plays and academic papers for decades) was also a finalist for the Philip K. Dick and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. She won the latter for her second novel, 2011's Redwood and Wildfire, but this is the work that marked her as an SF author to watch.

2008 Nisi Shawl: Filter House -- At first I thought I shouldn't include a collection of my own short stories on this list. But Filter House actually is of historical significance: it's the first book by an African American to win the James Tiptree, Jr. award. And I believe you'll like it.

2010 Karen Lord: Redemption in Indigo -- Telling a Senegalese folktale as science fiction, Lord's debut novel stretched the familiar parameters of these related genres to the breaking point and beyond. This story of a runaway housewife who's given the power to manipulate time and space won the prestigious Frank Collymore Award before it was even published; after publication it garnered the Parallax, the William L. Crawford, the Mythopoeic, and the Kitschies' Golden Tentacle awards.

2010 N.K. Jemisin: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms -- The publication of best-selling author Jemisin's debut novel almost instantly created an army of adoring fans. First in an epic fantasy series with a distinctly "romance" feel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms successfully proclaimed the right of characters of color to inhabit the imaginary worlds authors love to create. (F)

2011 Mat Johnson: Pym -- Piercingly witty in its depiction of African-descended people's foibles ("You know, I got Indian in me."), Pym is a metafictional account of an out-of-work academic's mission to the South Pole, guided by what he believes to be the diary of a black follower of Arthur Gordon Pym--the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's sole novel. (F)

2011 Nnedi Okorafor: Akata Witch -- A fantasy for children along the lines of Rowling's Harry Potter series, Akata Witch supposes that magically endowed children spring from the so-called "Dark" continent of Africa as frequently as they do from the British Isles. Twelve-year-old Sunny, an albino American black living in Nigeria, attends a wizard's academy with similarly powerful children who soon must defeat a grown sorcerer threatening the very existence of life. (F)

2011 Milton Davis: Changa's Safari -- In the tradition of Saunders's and Imaro (recommended above), Davis spins a sword-and-soul novel out of related short stories. They center on a crew of adventurers which includes a veiled Tuareg who has taken a vow of silence, a headstrong sorceress, and the hero himself, a disinherited prince of the Kongo, bent on avenging his slain family. Changa's Safari is the first of a series, and a good example of the emergence of self- and small press publishing as a black SF force to be reckoned with.

2012 Balogun Ojetade: Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman -- What better inspiration for an action hero than the Underground Railroad conductor who led so many to freedom? In this book and its sequels, Ojetade re-imagines the woman called "Moses" as a psychic soldier as well as the spy we now know Tubman to be. Steampunk inventions and hell-spawned horrors provide an intriguing setting for her larger-than-life struggles. (F)

2013 Alaya Dawn Johnson: The Summer Prince -- Johnson's debut young adult novel, this account of an atypical love triangle set in a far-future Brazil brings to life a multi-tiered society ruled by a matriarchy armed with nanotech. It won the Andre Norton Award, which, like Johnson's two 2015 Nebulas (for Love Is the Drug and "A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i"), is a fitting tribute to the author's involving characters and the intensely believable predicaments they face.

2014 Jenn Brissett: Elysium -- Though at 197 pages it's one of the shorter novels published this century, Elysium's vision is ambitious and the fulfillment of that ambition beautifully accomplished. Characters with shifting genders, literally ethereal computer architecture, and a spiraling narrative structure combine to make this an unforgettable, pleasure-filled encounter with a true myth.

2015 Kai Ashante Wilson: "The Devil in America" -- I have a standing offer I make to anyone who reads this novelette: if you need to talk about it, call me. That goes for you, too. Email me privately and I'll send you my phone number. "The Devil in America" is a brilliant, devastating retelling of the oft-repeated destruction of a black town or neighborhood by mobs of angry whites. Rosewood, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Wilmington, North Carolina--the hideousness shared by all these "race riots" instigated by white supremacists is stunningly imparted through Wilson's gorgeous and moving prose. (F)

So that's my list. It's long yet incomplete. It's missing some great books, books I've read that you'll want to read, too. Someday. But if you make it through this crash course in the history of black science fiction you'll at least have some idea of what it is, where it's coming from. Which will help you figure out where it's going.

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As I write this it's February-- Black History Month in the U.S. and Canada--for a few more days. But just as black history didn't just take place in the February of any given year, it takes more than a mere month to encompass it.

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We Are in the Future (2017) - This American Life

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Afrofuturism is a way of looking at black culture that’s fantastic, creative, and oddly hopeful.

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“Culture in the Cosmos: Afrofuturism, Hip Hop, and Black Joy” Bottom of the Map 

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“Culture in the Cosmos: Afrofuturism, Hip Hop, and Black Joy” Bottom of the Map 

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Is space really the place? In this episode, we discuss the roots of AfroFuturism in music and popular culture, and how Southern Hip-Hop became a prominent outlet for expression. Plus, what's AfroFuturism without Future?

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‎Bottom of the Map: Culture in the Cosmos: AfroFuturism, Hip-Hop, and Black Joy on Apple Podcasts

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‎Is space really the place? In this episode, we discuss the roots of AfroFuturism in music and popular culture, and how Southern Hip-Hop became a prominent outlet for expression. Plus, what's AfroFuturism without Future?

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When I Get Home (directors cut) By Solange 

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When I Get Home (directors cut) By Solange 

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"Afrofuturism: The Next " Generation" By Ruth La Fear

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"Afrofuturism: The Next " Generation" By Ruth La Fear

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"From Black Cowboys to Queer Dreamscapes: the Afrofuturist Vision of Solange’s Film ‘When I Get Home’" By Kadish Morris

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"From Black Cowboys to Queer Dreamscapes: the Afrofuturist Vision of Solange’s Film ‘When I Get Home’" By Kadish Morris

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Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture]

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Janelle Monáe talks "Pynk" Pants, Prince and Afrofuturism By Red Bull Music Academy 

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Janelle Monáe talks "Pynk" Pants, Prince and Afrofuturism By Red Bull Music Academy 

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Janelle Monáe talks "Pynk" Pants, Prince and Afrofuturism | Red Bull Music Academy

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"Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism: The Genius of Janelle Monae" By LaShawn M. Wanak

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"Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism: The Genius of Janelle Monae" By LaShawn M. Wanak

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We're excited to share an excerpt from LaShawn M. Wanak's essay "Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism: The Genius of Janelle Monáe". The essay appears in Lost Transmissions, a fascinating illustrated history of lost, overlooked, and uncompleted works of science fiction and fantasy -available now from Abrams Books.

Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism: The Genius of Janelle Monáe

A dark alley behind an apartment complex in Neon Valley Street. Two figures running hand in hand, one human, the other android. The buzz of chainsaws and the crackle of electro-daggers. This evocative image begins the tale of Cindi Mayweather, spun in lyrical form by Janelle Monáe: songstress, poet, dreamer, prophet, feminist, Afrofuturist.

To listen to Janelle Monáe is to immerse oneself into an audio-cinematic experience. From her debut EP Metropolis to her current album Dirty Computer, Monáe's songs sweep through genres with the ease of donning clothes: crooned ballads, punk rock screamfests, bubblegum pop, swelling orchestral arias, blistering rap. Through it all, science fiction wends like a pulsing heartbeat. Fritz Lang's Metropolis influences the creation of Neon Valley Street, with Monáe adopting its titular poster image for her album cover of ArchAndroid. There are references to electric sheep, time travel, and a prophecy about a cyborg messiah who will unite the whole world.

"I thought science fiction was a great way of talking about the future," Janelle Monáe told Bust Magazine in a 2013 interview. "It doesn't make people feel like you're talking about things that are happening right now, so they don't feel like you're talking down to them. It gives the listener a different perspective."

But Monáe doesn't just borrow science-fiction motifs. She rewrites them in Afrofuturistic terms that reflect her own experiences as a black, queer woman trying to survive in a world that sees little value in her. Metropolis and ArchAndroid particularly explore how androids are used as stand-ins for the marginalized and the oppressed. Monáe joins the ranks of other black music artists who have blended science fiction into their works: George Clinton/Parliament, Sun Ra, Missy Elliott. But Monáe stands out as having a single narrative span across several albums-that of Monáe's alter ego, Android 57821, otherwise known as Cindi Mayweather.

Cindi Mayweather is an android who has committed the sin of falling in love with a human. Monáe tells her story in fragments, in music lyrics, and music videos. Throughout Metropolis, Cindi runs from bounty hunters, gets captured, and languishes in cybertronic purgatory. In the video for the song "Many Moons," she is programmed to sing at an android auction, where she experiences a strange power that levitates her, then shorts her out. In ArchAndroid, she discovers that she may be the archangel who could save the world. In the video for "Tightrope," a tuxedo-clad Cindi causes an almost-successful rebellion in The Palace of the Dogs asylum. In The Electric Lady, considered a prequel to ArchAndroid, Cindi is still on the run, known as Our Favorite Fugitive.

The story is fragmented, and may in some cases contradict itself, but Monáe keeps it going by framing the narrative in suites numbered I through V (much like a science fiction series). She also fleshes out Cindi's story through music videos, liner notes, Websites, motion picture treatments (music video concepts in written form), and even short films and fan art put out by Monáe and her producers at Wondaland Records. All of this is woven into a cohesive narrative that not only works, but also gives glances into a richer world full of intrigue, drama, love, loss, and revolution.

Monáe's use of Cindi Mayweather brings to mind Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie's alter ego and subject of his fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His album features a bisexual, androgynous being who was sent as a messenger from extraterrestrials and is used by Bowie to explore sexual themes and social taboos. In Bowie's case, however, he did not want to be continually defined by Ziggy and dropped the persona. Janelle Monáe could have done this as well, but rather than fade Cindi Mayweather into obscurity, Monáe chose to continue the narrative of Android 57821 by taking a new direction-utilizing clones of herself.

Monáe's clones populate her album covers and videos: strutting at android auctions, serving as waitresses and newscasters, dancing in unison, causing small rebellions that fail. Some of these clones have names-the album cover of Electric Lady is depicted as a painting of Cindi Mayweather and her "sisters": Andromeda, Andy Pisces, Catalina, Morovia, and Polly Whynot. Monáe can then shift her narrative while remaining in keeping with the android universe she's created. This is most prevalent in Dirty Computer, where we are introduced to Jane 57821, who shares the same number as Cindi Mayweather, but is older, less naïve, and more of a revolutionary than a messiah. This reflects Monáe's own change as she becomes more open about her pansexual identity, as well as responding to the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements. Even the music style shifts from the angelic crooning of Cindi Mayweather in ArchAndroid to the throatier rasp of Jane/Janelle in Dirty Computer.

It's a brilliant strategy. In having multiples selves, Monáe can expand upon the worldbuilding of her narrative, told in multiple viewpoints but all originating from herself. She is not locked into a single narrative, but is able to explore all facets of her self-identity, from her queerness to her blackness to her religious faith. This makes Monáe not only an excellent musician, but also an amazing storyteller, one who is telling a science fiction story in real time.

In her SyFy Wire article "Octavia Butler and America as Only Black Women See It," Tari Ngangura wrote, "It is a rare writer who can use sci-fi not simply to chart an escape from reality, but as a pointed reflection of the most minute and magnified experiences that frame and determine the lives of those who live in black skin." Through her music, the story of Cindi Mayweather/Django Jane/Janelle Monáe is bringing people who have been in separate worlds-science fiction enthusiasts, the hip-hip community, queer folk-and uniting them in a shared universe just as diverse as her musical styles.

" Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism: The Genius of Janelle Monáe" © 2019 by LaShawn M. Wanak.
Excerpted from Desirina Boskovich'sLost Transmissions; Reprinted with permission from Abrams.
Janelle Monáe press photo/artwork © by Atlantic Records.

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Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism: The Genius of Janelle Monáe

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We're excited to share an excerpt from LaShawn M. Wanak's essay "Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism: The Genius of Janelle Monáe". The essay appears in Lost Transmissions , a fascinating illustrated history of lost, overlooked, and uncompleted works of science fiction and fantasy -available now from Abrams Books.

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"Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions" By Gabriel Solis 

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"Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions" By Gabriel Solis 

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We are, it seems, in an age of Afrofuturism. The release of the Black Panther feature film in February 2018 was greeted with a spate of think pieces across a range of media, explaining the term Afrofuturism for an unfamiliar audience. "T'Challa, also known as the Black Panther, the title character of the blockbuster movie, wasn't the first person to land a spaceship (or something like it) in downtown Oakland, Calif.," starts one such article. Such pieces point back to bandleaders Sun Ra and George Clinton (and sometimes to Jamaican dub artist Lee "Scratch" Perry) to provide background for the film's mix of the old and the new, technology and the spirit, space-age Africa, and, eventually, a sense of diasporic culture that travels in both directions across the Black Atlantic - in ships in the sky rather than the sea - suturing the fissures rent by the middle passage, by war, and by colonial modernity's many terrors.

At the same time, we are in an age of or even omnigenericism in music. That is, in many cases, musicians and their audiences are liable to connect multiple genres, creating new fusions, and even to view all genres of music as potentially available to them. This is notable, if only because of how strongly it represents a break from the immediate past. Over the course of a period from perhaps 1960 to 2000 (to speak in very rough terms), genre became not only the key way to interpret popular music, but one of its most powerful modes of creating a hierarchy of value. From the authenticity - and authority - of rock to the "Disco Sucks" campaign of the 1970s, and from the much-touted "realness" of country music to Wynton Marsalis's increasingly strange, transphobic comments from the early 1990s on fusion as a kind of musical "cross-dressing," Baby Boomers and Generation Xers invested heavily in a discourse of genre purity as a way of attaching value to their chosen object of attention. That discourse seems less and less relevant every year.

Jazz - beyond the singular instance of Sun Ra - seldom enters into discussions of either Afrofuturism or the contemporary omnigeneric black music so strongly connected with it. And yet, following the theme of this issue of , I wish to look at the remarkable presence of jazz (understood broadly) at the heart of precisely these two phenomena. Indeed, despite the prominence of Marsalis's voice as an arbiter of jazz in the 1990s and 2000s, it is my contention that the turn to stylistic plurality is reasonably seen as a return, a move that echoes and recaptures a crucial element of the ethos that underlaid jazz in the 1970s. My intention in locating jazz in relation to the speculative, Afrofuturist current of our contemporary moment is twofold in relation to claims about why jazz still matters: first, to ask about the music's contemporary visibility and, second, to ask what we might still learn from it today. Ultimately, in answer to both of these questions, I argue that the relevance of jazz can be seen in its value to a broad audience and to musicians who may not identify with the genre term "jazz" but who, nonetheless, make music in dialogue with it in one way or another.

If the contemporary meaning of jazz does not necessarily point to either a futurist position or an imbrication in the midst of a broader space of black popular music, its history certainly provides considerable precedent. To a remarkable extent, in fact, seeing the continuing relevance of the music requires an accounting that understands it as having always been more than a narrow style category, always more than simply a musical form. To see it today as the cultural metaphor, artistic movement, and range of sonic signifiers that it most certainly is, it is critical to recognize its broad background. Regarding this background, jazz occupied an odd place in the twentieth-century imagination: situated between worlds, it was "both/and" in many contexts. Racially, for instance, historian and journalist J. A. Rogers's famous article in The New Negro saw it as a "marvel of paradox": the music was both particularly African American, American, and, at the same time, universal. Also, aesthetically, as Ingrid Monson notes, pointing to mid-century jazz's "Afro-modernism": "at once more populist than its European [modernist] counterpart, yet committed to articulating its elite position relative to the more commercial genres of and rock and roll." And, indeed, generically, the music has been open to incorporation from the most disparate of sources - Western classical and Afro Caribbean, Nordic, African, and Indian musics have all informed it - and yet has also policed its boundaries; and of course, many of the musicians past and present who have played this music reject jazz as a genre label altogether. Here I explore an aspect of this in-betweenness, focusing on the movement across genres as producing a kind of transcendence, and on the role of technology as a symbol of this genre-crossing gesture and as a generator of the music's sound and social meaning.

To get at this body of ideas and to clarify why they matter, I'll start with a discussion of a few pieces that clearly occupy a relation to both jazz and other forms of black popular music, in order to get at the musical aesthetics at play. I am being intentionally vague with regard to genre in this formulation. My point is to see both sonic signifiers of jazz and a jazz "impulse" in an explicitly polygeneric music scene, rather than one that coheres around style or other features of a coherent genre. Some of the music I discuss here clearly comes out of a primary orientation to jazz, but much of it draws on jazz from another space. This discussion leads me to a reading of Afrofuturism as a discourse in contemporary African American and African Diasporic arts. The central notion animating the study of this music is, to paraphrase Nigerian American science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor, that black speculative arts routinely trouble ontological boundaries, whether through a kind of liminality as "in-between-ness" or as "both/and-ness." Like the music discussed here, such work disrupts distinctions, such as that between science fiction and fantasy, between demotic and avant-garde, or more broadly between human and nonhuman, sitting at the intersection of the biological, the technological, and the cosmological.

My thinking on the intersection of polygenericism, Afrofuturism, and jazz was first prompted by a desire to reinvestigate cultural critic Amiri Baraka's ideas in the seminal article "The Changing Same: and the New Black Music." In short, looking at the landscape of African American music in the mid-1960s, Baraka, then writing as LeRoi Jones, saw an emerging gulf between the jazz avant-garde (the "New Thing" or "New Black Music," as he called it) and the working-class black audiences that had sustained jazz in earlier decades. Addressing the same question that animates this issue today - why jazz matters - he argued that there should be no alienation of black audiences from avant-garde jazz. Rather, as he saw it, there was much for black communities to find in the New Thing, that in fact the two kinds of music (and New Black Music) explored the same territory, gave voice to the same longings, and did the same work, just in different registers. His argument goes into quite abstract, metaphysical directions: "To go back in any historical (or emotional) line of ascent in Black music leads us inevitably to religion, i.e., spirit worship. This phenomenon is always at root in Black art." And further, "The blues (impulse) lyric (song) is even descriptive of a plane of evolution, a direction . . . coming and going . . . through whatever worlds. Environment, as the social workers say . . . but Total Environment (including at all levels, the spiritual)." From James Brown to Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and John Coltrane, "The song is the same and the people is the same."

Following Baraka, but offering a more mundane line of argument, I am interested in the fact that there was considerable mutual interest in making music across that genre divide within a few years of the publication of Baraka's article. This includes (but is hardly limited to) popular artists who embraced elements of the New Thing - such as the soul band Earth, Wind & Fire whose 1971 debut album, The Need of Love , opens with a nearly ten-minute free jazz piece, "Energy," or Nina Simone, whose work on songs such as "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)" brought inspirations from gospel-tinged together with modal jazz to mourn the murdered African American leaders of the late-1960s - as well as avant-garde figures who incorporated signifiers of funk and such as Pharoah Sanders, whose long, timbrally noisy explorations dug into Afrocentric cosmologies with the underpinning of a funky, danceable groove, or Archie Shepp, whose album Attica Blues threaded together funk and "energy music" to protest the racialized, carceral state made increasingly visible by the policing initiatives now known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws. This has once again become relevant in the work of a group of young musicians originally from Los Angeles who have collaborated on a range of projects and who all traverse the boundaries between jazz, , and hip hop, including producer and Flying Lotus, saxophonist Kamasi Washington, bassist Thundercat, pianist Robert Glasper, and of course, rapper Kendrick Lamar.

I focus here on this group of Los Angeleno musicians, looking particularly, if fleetingly, at recent recordings including Flying Lotus's You're Dead! , Kamasi Washington's aptly titled, massive album , and Robert Glasper's work with his trio and a larger group called "The Experiment." These make for a useful set, since they represent a breadth of genres and stylistic approaches that define the scene (from work that is straightforwardly within the jazz frame to work that is in significant ways outside that frame), and because they involve three distinct approaches to making work that might reasonably be called Afrofuturist. Significantly, each of these artists, in one way or another, makes reference back to mid-1970s jazz- fusions, and each works in ways that interestingly disrupt not only genre boundaries, but also the expectations about the relationship to technology that have constituted those boundaries in the recent past. Moreover, the return and reinterpretation of these sounds should remind and reiterate for us the historical significance of genre-spanning jazz fusions to African American audiences in the 1970s.

Flying Lotus's The album's scant thirty-eight minutes is composed of nineteen short tracks, the longest coming in at just under four minutes, and most running less than two. As a result, the album dispenses with the kind of extended, improvisational forms common to modern jazz; moreover, it does not use the kinds of song forms that remain the common language of jazz, even in the more heteroglot post-1970s era. Rather, its episodic structure makes up a single, longer form. What is most interesting about the piece is the way that Stephen Ellison (Flying Lotus's given name) and his co-composers, including Stephen Bruner (Thundercat), Kamasi Washington, and Herbie Hancock, use brief snippets of a wide range of genres to represent the album's concept: a meditation on the moment of death and its aftermath, seen from the perspective of the That is, though the title suggests a sense of morbidity, it should be thought of as a piece aiming at an understanding of the process of death, a liminal state, and rebirth, a mystical perspective journalists have credited in part to Ellison's upbringing as the nephew of Alice Coltrane. This narrative of rebirth can be heard on multiple levels - personal, social, cultural, and so forth - an interpretation Ellison indicates (without quite articulating) in interviews around the project, including, for instance: "The concept is so much more than 'You're dead as a person,' to me. Even calling it You're Dead! is the least obviously "jazz" project of those I discuss here. Tibetan Book of the Dead . You're Dead! goes so deep into how I felt maybe a year ago, where I was watching the music scene shift and change."

To get a sense of this, and a feel for the ways the piece deploys a language that ties together hip hop's more experimental wing and mid-1970s electric jazz (Ellison specifically points to George Duke in interviews, but Stanley Clarke, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Miles Davis, and others are apparent as well), it is useful to consider tracks three, four, and five: "Tesla," "Cold Dead," and "Fkn Dead." In just under four minutes combined, they include a compendium of stylistic signifiers: double-time shuffle groove; additive, even-eighth patterns; a distorted electric guitar and electric piano pairing; a synth choir; and what I think of as a kind of cosmic slow jam. The thing that marks this as something other than the 1970s jazz fusion it most clearly resembles in its stylistic mix is the sonic quality Mark Fischer describes as "crackle." That earlier jazz fusion consistently used the peak of high-fidelity recording techniques to produce music that sounded profoundly clear. Performers as diverse as Weather Report, Return to Forever, and George Duke all worked within the jazz aesthetic of their time, producing albums that attempted to capture a sound as close to an unmediated purity as possible. Flying Lotus, on the other hand, uses high levels of compression, distorting the sounds of his source material to sound intentionally lo-fi. Listeners may hear this as producing a temporal distance or a haunted, ghostly quality - as Fischer suggests recordings by fellow artist Tricky have - or they may interpret the recording's crackle as indicating a kinship with music from the era of analog recording; or they may see the sound connecting this album with the circulation of hip hop mixtapes.

None of this is improvisatory in the way jazz is commonly understood. Rather, Ellison describes the process of creating the music as an inherently technologized, collaborative composition using the studio as a medium: playing licks, loops, and even just timbres with Hancock and others, and slowly cobbling things together into tracks:

When we did the "Tesla" song, I had some drums that I had already recorded - I kinda found a cool loop, and a little idea. Herbie had come by and I played some ideas, some things I was feeling. He got on my Fender Rhodes and I started humming ideas out to him, and those became progressions. Then we did another take, and then he got even more free with it. Eventually you get these really fast recordings, and you just kind of jump to moments.

It's kind of the same as writing, with loops and stuff. It's hard to explain, but it makes so much sense in my mind. Like, I try to put it together just like I would make a beat, even if I'm using [other] people - if I had records or chopping up samples from the Internet, I still do that with collaborations and working with people.

This kind of creative practice - so much a part of the digital age, and yet still so fundamentally connected with longstanding models of musical interaction - explodes the distinction between improvisation and composition in interesting ways. It aims, ultimately, at a fixed musical object, and in that sense is clearly compositional; and yet, it happens in the moment, through interaction between musicians, in the studio, and in that sense is improvisational. Its reliance on the plasticity of digitally recorded sound makes it distinctively contemporary, and its combination of the human and the technological is a hallmark of Afrofuturism.

Kamasi Washington's is something like the opposite of Its seventeen tracks run nearly three hours, regularly extending more than ten minutes each, and most have some version of head-solo-head form. There is no obvious program to the project, in the way there is in You're Dead! You're Dead! , but its title and cover art imply a certain interest in cosmic hugeness and a sense of possibility. In line with this, on the whole, the album has a fairly unified sound. Critical commentators have pointed to John Coltrane as the key intertext, noting the ways Washington moves between a modal language, "Giant Steps" - derived harmonic complexity, and outside playing; the ways the massiveness of the arrangements resembles Coltrane's larger ensemble works; and so on. And Washington generally name-checks Coltrane in interviews. But there's really not very much on the album that sounds like Coltrane; rather, the project sounds as though it has picked up in the middle of the mid-1970s, "post-Coltrane" work. In this regard, Will Layman, writing in Pop Matters , compares it with McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Gary Bartz's Nu Troop, The Crusaders, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, and Archie Shepp.

The album's commitment to a sound that is at once accessible and cutting edge can be most clearly heard in the final track, "The Message." The song's 7/4 funk groove supports a head and series of solos (Thundercat on electric bass, Washington on tenor, and Ronald Bruner Jr. - Thundercat's brother - on drums) that mine the timbres and shapes of 1970s polygeneric jazz (fusion and avant). The most interesting intersection between the human and the technological is best seen not on the album, however, so much as in Washington's live performances of this work in the year following the album's release. As captured in a live broadcast made from Los Angeles's Regent Theater for the show Jazz Night in America , "The Message" achieves a size and scope reminiscent of the 1970s shows of pioneering Afrofuturist funk-rock band Parliament-Funkadelic. A voice-over introduces the song as sci-fi - inspired lights flash like a mothership landing. "This is a journey into music and sound," the voice intones. "Watch out and get ready to move your feet. Wherever you are, you will be a part of it." There follows an extended introduction that features the hip hop producer Battlecat, crafting an improvisation out of sampled clips of Washington's own saxophone solo from the studio recording of the song. Once again, the effect of the spectral is introduced, as Battlecat's sample is marked off from Washington's live sound precisely by crackle. The intersection here of a jazz-derived form (a precomposed head used to bookend and as the source for a series of improvised solos), a massed stage presence, and explicitly technologized sound - indeed a sound that might be called "cyborgian" for the ways it extends the human through first an analog instrument (the saxophone) and then a digital one (the sampler) - offers many ways to think of this piece and its performance as polygeneric.

Finally, I would point to two of Robert Glasper's recent recordings: the trio album and the Experiment album In comparison with Washington's and Flying Lotus's Artscience . You're Dead! , fits most clearly within the mainstream of contemporary acoustic jazz. Glasper uses the trio format to play densely interactive music that is rhythmically complex and harmonically varied, and that mostly uses songs as the basis of extended improvisation. He has actually played music that is much less obviously within the jazz frame - his album Black Radio won the 2013 Grammy award for best album - but he has generally separated the two genres in his output, releasing jazz recordings under the Robert Glasper Trio and avant under the Robert Glasper Experiment. For what it's worth, the Black Radio albums draw on jazz (and hip hop and blues) within the larger and neo-soul frame in a fairly programmatic way, pushing the idea of black radio as a polygeneric space, a space where listeners have heard compatibility in music well beyond the boundaries of genre. What makes such an interesting album is that Glasper uses it to enact a further turn of the transgeneric screw, to bridge the two aspects of his own creativity, performing material mostly from the Black Radio projects but doing so in his trio format.

Im not the first to suggest a trans- or intergeneric frame for understanding black music, but it remains true that both scholarship and criticism (as well as aspects of the newly algorithmic systems of music marketing) remain aligned to a strong vision of genre as the key frame for the music. That said, I would point to a few instances of work in this vein that I take inspiration from. Musicologist Guthrie Ramsey's now classic book draws on the resources of oral history and a community-based view of African American music-making to uncover the ways similar frames of reference informed the music across a wide spectrum of genres and styles, from jazz to blues and from doo wop to hip hop in the period between the 1930s and the 2000s. His use of the term "race music" as a title is particularly telling, inasmuch as it points backward historically to a moment, in the 1920s and 1930s, when music by African American artists was marketed - and consumed, or so it would appear - not on the basis of genre (like blues, jazz, or ), but rather on the basis of a racialized community. Musicologist David Ake and colleagues likewise explore the gatekeeping function of the genre label "jazz" in their edited volume Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries . Through a range of case studies, from the 1920s to the present, they showcase the extent to which jazz musicians have reached out past those boundaries - into pop, light classical music, avant-gardism, and more - as well as the ways jazz communities have policed the borders of the music.

The music I've discussed in this essay is similar in some ways to the repertoires looked at by Ramsey or by Ake and others, inasmuch as they involve both a matter of working through current social and aesthetic issues across some genre divides, and a desire to reach across and around those divides to develop hip new sounds. And yet, given their particular place in time - at the end of a history that already includes the stories those authors are telling - they need more interpretive resources. Ramsey's "blues muse" and the dynamic of "up South" that derives from the mid-century Great Migration may tell us something about this work, but not much at all about its technological bent or speculative leanings. And though the jazz/not jazz dyad may describe how some listeners respond to much of this music, I see something more complicated going on. If nothing else, most of the musicians here (with the exception of Glasper) could as easily be described as outsiders reaching across a boundary jazz as insiders reaching out.

However, looking beyond this particular constellation of references, there is much in Afrofuturism that comes to seem highly relevant to much jazz, and certainly to the work I am discussing here. Not only the orientation to technology as a resource for liberatory, improvisational music, or the extensions of the human into new realms through technology, or the intersections between science and mysticism, but also perhaps most significantly Nettrice Gaskin's vision of Afrofuturity as "the artistic practice of navigating the past, present, and future simultaneously." Although theorists of Afrofuturism do not routinely identify polygenericism as a core component of the movement, I believe it is reasonably seen to be one. The multiplicity that marks both its spatiality and its temporality is similarly found in the genre orientation of its major figures. Sun Ra's work spanned approaches from as disparate of sources as swing jazz and electronic noise music; George Clinton's -Funk project was explicitly an attempt to mediate between funk and psychedelic rock; more contemporaneously, Janelle Monáe has made a career of "tipping on the tightrope" strung between hip hop, , bubble gum pop, and more. What's more, the figures of the cyborg, the android, and the monster - all of which have been fixtures in Afrofuturist work since at least the 1970s - are themselves hybrid.

The response to the music I'm looking at here among jazz critics has been mixed, but I find the following telling: among the interminable end-of-year listicles in 2015, 's jazz critics poll rated at #4, after work by such established figures as Rudresh Manthappa, Maria Schneider, and Jack DeJohnette. Yet when they went to publish the list, they gave Francis Davis the opportunity to pan the album:

This sprawling 3- debut by a Los-Angeles-based tenor saxophonist who's recorded with Kendrick Lamar as well as Gerald Wilson is being talked about by its more fervent admirers as if it were jazz like we've never heard it before. It's not, though. Strings, voices, cosmic graphics, Washington's dashiki and all, it's merely jazz like we haven't heard it in a while - an intentional throwback to those "spiritual," early '70s Impulse, Black Jazz and Strata-East s whose greatest appeal might be to listeners too young to remember the dead end for jazz this sort of thing led to back then. Washington's obvious sincerity, while admirable, isn't enough to save for those like me, who do remember all too well. Then, I don't hear what others say they do in Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly or Broadway's either.

The final throwaway line aside, Davis's complaint is that this work isn't original. I suggest the return to older material is not simply derivative, as Davis would have it, but rather part of an Afrofuturist "back to the future" gesture (and indeed, a return to the specifically Afrocentric, Afrofuturist past embodied in the technologically experimental, at times spiritually inclined, funky music of George Duke, Herbie Hancock, and Earth, Wind & Fire, among others) in order to take advantage of its potentiality for a futurity of the present.

The same, I suggest, is true for musicians, as well as for audiences. For instance, Ellison (Flying Lotus) identifies jazz as a source of possibility for him, I think, precisely because he is inside it as a listener, but not fully inside it as a music-maker. The recordings I've looked at here express a range of critique, but together perhaps their most crucial intervention is in the critique of genre. It's not that they reject jazz so much as that they reject a genre-based conception of it. Indeed, each of them is happy to claim jazz as a description of their work; but in doing so for such varied work (and for work that moves past both the of post-1980s acoustic jazz and its ideological attachment to genre purity and distinction from other forms of pop music) they push it to integrate into a holistic, poly- or even omnigeneric black music. Nonetheless, while it is clear that the artists I have looked at here want to speak to an audience that is interested in hip hop, , and jazz, it's less obvious that the industry either can or cares to help make that happen, or that listeners share their interest. While the first of these issues can be grasped using older methods, the latter two - listener's activity especially - are much more difficult. One way to get at it is to look at the ways this music is embedded in a recommendation matrix by the streaming services through which many audiences now consume music. A glance at the "related artists" pages for Flying Lotus, Washington, and Glasper is instructive. In a sense, they tell a story about how an artist may or may not be understood beyond conventional notions of genre. Of the three, only Washington's really describes an omnigeneric frame. Notably, while his page points to both Glasper and Flying Lotus, neither of their pages points to him or to each other. Glasper's is composed primarily of well-known artists solidly within the jazz world - Kurt Rosenwinkel, Kenny Garrett, Brad Mehldau, Roy Hargrove, Nicholas Payton - and Flying Lotus's includes almost solely other experimental, electronic, sample-oriented artists - Samiyam, Tokimonsta, Daedelus, Knxwledge, Shigeto. Washington's page points in both of these directions. Interestingly, his is also the only one of the three to point directly to other new or canonical artists associated with Afrofuturism, including Sons of Kemet, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra.

This is a good moment to stop and take some historical stock of the aesthetic critique embedded in polygenericism. This is not just the oddball feeling of a few musicians at the edge of things, but rather an emergent structure of feeling (much as I think Marsalis's rejection of fusion was in its moment), and one that can be multiplied over and over within the popular music world. It accounts for the rise of extended instrumental music with or without room for improvisation (whether in math rock or in electronic dance music) and the rise of explicitly hybrid styles (in work as diverse as that of Rhiannon Giddens, D'Angelo's Black Messiah , or Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly ). It also accounts for the move away from monogeneric listening - at least as a form of middle-class/elite distinction. While this is no doubt significantly related to the massive shift to online subscription listening, it is a site where jazz clearly matters, specifically the jazz of the 1970s. The critique of the 1970s fusion and avant-garde movements by the succeeding generation was that the music had lost its way: the experiments had led to a dead end and the way forward in jazz was to look at the moment before, to the early 1960s, and explore a new path from there.

The artists I describe here have found a relevance of a different type in 1970s jazz fusions. That music offers not a vision of jazz as a specific musical style, but as an orientation to music-making that has the capacity to diffuse into many genres, indeed, into any genre. There is more to this, however, than simply a kind of flexibility or breadth to the jazz fusions of the 1970s as a way of understanding why jazz - this jazz - still matters: it is to be found in the shared Afrofuturist leanings that connect the music these artists are making today with that of the past. Beyond the specific elements that might mark art as Afrofuturist - the connection of Egypt and outer space, the interest in cyborgs and other posthumans, the investigations of fugitive myth-science - these works share an affect that we surely need at this moment.

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Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions

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The rise of jazz-R&B-hip hop fusions in contemporary Los Angeles offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways jazz matters to black audiences today.

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You’re Dead!: The Afrofuturistic Sounds of Flying Lotus By Paul DB Watkins 

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You’re Dead!: The Afrofuturistic Sounds of Flying Lotus By Paul DB Watkins 

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Album Review

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"The future is always here in the past."
-Amiri Baraka, "Jazzmen: Diz & Sun Ra"

From Sun Ra to Janelle Monáe, Afrofuturism lets us know where we've been (from griot traditions and Egyptian pyramids and astronomy) to where we are going (mixing culture, technology, liberation, and imagination), particularly as a new generation of artists embody the movement's philosophy and push jazz and hip-hop into new realms. As Afrofuturist Ytasha Womack writes of the movement, "It's a way of bridging the future and the past and essentially helping to reimagine the experience of people of colour." Few working DJs in the "beat scene," particularly with mainstream recognition, embody the creative spirit of Afrofuturism as much as experimental electronic artist Flying Lotus, whose aunt is the legendary Alice Coltrane. He's also the cousin of saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, and the grandson of singer/songwriter Marilyn McLeod (notable for writing Diana Ross's " Love Hangover" and Freda Payne 's "I Get High (On Your Memory)."

Rather than letting his deep musical roots hold him down, Flying Lotus (aka FlyLo, born Steven Ellison) forges forward, sounding futures and making music that uses past recordings-made live through scratching and remix-as sources for improvisation. Flying Lotus first came to recognition making beats for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, eventually releasing a full-length record in 2006 entitled 1983. 1983 (of which I have a hard to find copy on vinyl), like its follow up, Los Angeles (2008), is a fairly straight ahead and accessible beats record, although it comes from the left field of jazz-based eletronica, video game music, and experimental hip-hop. His more recent releases include the albums Cosmogramma, and 2012's sparse sounding and critically acclaimed, Until the Quiet Comes. Until the Quiet Comes displays the complexity of Ellison's production, characterized by consonant and dissonant sounds, counterpoint, diverse shifts in tone and feel, and various improvisational modifications in mood, time signature, and overall structure. The psychedelic undertones, a mixture of downtempo jazz and post-rock ethos, add a dream quality to the album. Andy Beta of Spin described the record as the "dreams within dreams within dreams" concept of the 2010 film Inception while Karen Lawler of State insists that, "If the limbo between awake and sleeping, dreams and nightmares could be expressed through music, this album might well be it."

Unique to Flying Lotus is how much sound he can get using a computer and digital production tools. Often he performs with live musicians (such as Ravi Coltrane) and his complex melodies, syncopated rhythms, and textured productions are largely a product of his own diverse interests. Some of his favourite albums, as he describes in one interview, include Alice Coltrane's Lord of Lords; Radiohead's Amnesiac; Charles Mingus's Black Saint and the Lady Sinner, and J Dilla's Ruff Draft. Stylistically, Ellison's music reflects these diverse records, as Lotus's albums contain free form jazz undertones and jazz-based patterns and time signatures. In 2010, Flying Lotus worked with the Ann Arbor Film Festival in a live scoring of the 1962 avant-garde film, Heaven and Earth Magic. Flying Lotus continues to surprise his audiences with imaginative live performances and by remaining true to the cross-fertilization of ideas and technological manipulation so present in Afrofuturism, Lotus (and the larger movement of young creative artists) continues to imagine possible futures.

Flying Lotus's latest release, You're Dead! (October 2014), embodies his mind-bending Afrofuturism more than any of his earlier recordings. The album is perhaps what Sun Ra's and Miles Davis's sonic child would sound like if they birthed an album together under the auspices of hip-hop. You're Dead! is a breaking away and fresh approach to jazz-influenced hip-hop that feels a lot like Miles Davis's On the Corner or Bitches Brew. In the liner notes of Bitches Brew, Ralph Gleason argues that "electric music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging." The great thing about You're Dead! is that it recalls and echoes other fusion records, and yet its sounds are distinctive and in some ways unparalleled. You're Dead! digs deep into jazz fusion, and takes the listener on a psychedelic journey into the unknown of the infinite afterlife. The exclamatory title ( You're Dead!) signals both the intensity and enthralled irreverence with which Ellison approaches death. Ellison's own singing on the record is both goofy and haunting. Most impressive about this album is the well-orchestrated panoply of ideas, which are channeled through a tapestry of spirits and friends who converse together in the sonic afterlife.

The album's musical influences range from the spiritual jazz of the Coltranes, the prog jazz fusion of Weather Report (a major stylistic conduit for Ellison on the record), to the humour and cosmic tones of Sun Ra. Such a mix makes You're Dead! Ellison's most free sounding album to date; impressively the record never spirals out of control because it clocks in at less than 40 minutes. In those 38 minutes we encounter a wide spectrum of sounds (and silences) with more live instrumentation than any prior Lotus album. The collaborative cast on the album is diverse, and includes Herbie Hancock, Kendrick Lamar, Captain Murphy, Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, Angel Deradoorian, and others. Given his role at the helm of the fusion movement, Herbie Hancock is well deployed and his mellifluous keys on "Telsa" and "Moment of Hesitation" add to the jazz feel of the album. To really appreciate You're Dead! you need to listen to the album in one continuous sitting: preferably in a smoky moon-lit room. The smoke could just as fittingly be from incense or cannabis. The tracks seamlessly flow together and the intense opening to the ethereal closing creates a cinematic experience that juxtaposes life and death, heaven and hell. This is cosmic music that is more meditative than it is consumptive. Yes, it is anthropophagic (cannibalistic) of other musical forms, but its channeling is meditative. We are not given a concrete answer to the nature of the afterlife, but I think that's largely the point. The shamanistic journey FlyLo takes us on is Afrofuturistic because it lets us know that our past contains portals to explore the future of unknown horizons. You're Dead! might just be the most exciting and confounding musical experience released this year.

(4.5 spins out of 5)

Check out some of Ellison's music below, including the Kendrick Lamar collaboration on "Never Catch Me."

Featured image from,

I am a Professor of English at Vancouver Island University. Read more at: pauldbwatkins.com View all posts by pauldbwatkins

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You're Dead!: The Afrofuturistic Sounds of Flying Lotus

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"The future is always here in the past." -Amiri Baraka, "Jazzmen: Diz & Sun Ra" From Sun Ra to Janelle Monáe, Afrofuturism lets us know where we've been (from griot traditions and Egyptian pyramids and astronomy) to where we are going (mixing culture, technology, liberation, and imagination), particularly as a new generation of artists embody...

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"Sci-Fi Digital Series 'Afrofuturism' Missy Elliott" By Dust 

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"Sci-Fi Digital Series 'Afrofuturism' Missy Elliott" By Dust 

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AF Video Series

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Sci-Fi Digital Series “Afrofuturism” Missy Elliott Part 5 | DUST

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Music Video

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Flying Lotus - Never Catch Me ft. Kendrick Lamar

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Album

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Song

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"Modern Classic: Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma" By Owen Jones

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"Modern Classic: Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma" By Owen Jones

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If musical skill is genetic, Steven Ellison hit the hereditary jackpot. The great-nephew of spiritual jazz pioneer Alice Coltrane, and the grandson of Motown songwriter Marilyn McLeod, his career follows in the footsteps of two era-defining talents in the continuum of African-American music. With such ancestry it would be hard to deny the creative impulses so readily encouraged within the family. And so it was in his grandma's Los Angeles home, where Ellison worked tirelessly to build his own musical legacy; a chaotic and cosmic blend of soul, hiphop, and electronic sound, that would bear the unmistakable hallmark of Flying Lotus.

A nerdy and introspective child, Ellison was lucky enough to grow up surrounded by expensive musical hardware. A plethora of synthesisers and drum machines filled every space, and throughout his youth he would watch his grandma working away on new compositions. McLeod had risen to prominence in the mid '70s writing major hits, including Diana Ross's number one single 'Love Hangover' and Freda Payne's "I Get High (On Your Memory)", and later working with Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine, for his label Motorcity Records, throughout the '90s. Ellison had always been curious about his grandma's work, but shied away from singing, preferring instead to submerge himself in the technical intricacies of the recording process.

The aspiring producer had started making beats around the age of sixteen, but his style of composition was far more abstract. By 2006 he was interning at the legendary indie hiphop label, Stones Throw, meeting the likes of Madlb and the late J Dilla whilst working in their offices throughout the day. At night Ellison would retreat to his bedroom to record his debut album, 1983, which would introduce his incredibly eclectic vision by combining traditional eastern sounds, Japanese synth-pop, and jazz-inflected melodies. In the same year, he would also participate in Melbourne's Red Bull Music Academy, before signing to electronic powerhouse Warp Records.

With a name inspired by lucid dreaming, Flying Lotus swiftly became one of the defining acts of LA's burgeoning beats scene, drawing on the psychedelic heritage of the west coast via the fantasy of video-games and anime. Ellison's 2008 sophomore release, Los Angeles, was a dedication to his hometown and its musical pioneers, but written in a now trademark afrofuturist style, combining alien electronic textures with Dilla inspired syncopated rhythms. Flying Lotus was was honouring the past whilst imagining the future.

Cosmogramma would further hone this multi-directionality whilst confronting some painful life experiences. In January 2007 Alice Coltrane passed away, leaving behind an impressive musical legacy and an Ashram full of spiritual devotees. Ellison had been listening to one of her recorded speeches about death marking our release from the "cosmic drama" when he misheard the phrase as "cosmogramma" - a word that he later realised already existed as a way of describing the study of the universe, heaven, and hell.

This strange word took on greater meaning a year later when faced with the death of his mother due to complications from diabetes. Whilst she was in the hospital Ellison had used microphones and mobile recording equipment to capture several evocative sounds from her room, including medical equipment such as respirators and monitors, in an effort to preserve his own thoughts and feelings during this traumatic experience. The recordings were later moulded into samples, several of which feature prominently on the album's triumphant finale, 'Galaxy In Janaki'; a song which renders genuine beauty with the sounds of dwindling life.

The grieving process did not prevent Ellison from immediately diving into the recording process. Besides being a cathartic exercise, the project had introduced the producer to several important collaborators that would help shift his music towards more organic and improvisational influences. After founding his Brainfeeder label in 2008, Ellison had developed a strong creative relationship with the virtuoso bass player and vocalist Thundercat, who would have a major influence on Cosmogramma 's free-flowing musical style. Later going on to release his own acclaimed solo albums, the musician's agile melodies and smooth vocals appear frequently across Ellison's project, most notably taking centre stage on the cosmic r&b jam 'MmmHmm', on which Thundercat sings wistful lyrics atop a hyperactive yet measured instrumental. Thom Yorke also makes a strong vocal appearance on '...And The World Laughs With You'; a glitchy, paranoid pulse that draws from the same pool of introspection as Radiohead, and signifies Yorke's ever-growing interest in modern electronic production.

Cosmogramma manages a near perfect blend of Ellison's many influences - most notably jazz and video game music, which give structure and meaning to the album's controlled chaos. On tracks such as 'Pickled!' furious bass lines rush through the stereo field like characters on an arcade screen, as synthesisers bridge the divide between the digital and the cosmic. More live instrumentation than ever had become part of the producer's arsenal, which now included strings, bass, saxophone, trumpet, and keys. Brief flourishes of harp decorate tracks, such as "German Haircut" and "Drips//Auntie's Harp" - a touching salute to the pioneering work of his late elder, to whom the album is overwhelmingly dedicated. Like Coltrane, Ellison had created the illusion of great time and distance within a deceptively small, album-shaped space.

More than any other LP, Cosmogramma confirmed the cinematic ambition of Flying Lotus, which has only grown across his subsequent albums. Having soundtracked cartoons for the Adult Swim Network since 2006, his genre-hopping music has since become a major touchstone for experimental indie film makers and appeared in major sci-fi franchises such as Blade Runner. The producer also offered his own cinematic vision in the form of Kuso, a gross-out body horror that somehow visualises the frankenstein-esque subconscious that underpins his music. There are plenty of words you could use to describe Ellison's work, but "boring" is rarely one of them.

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Modern Classic: Flying Lotus 'Cosmogramma' | Classic Album Sundays

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If musical skill is genetic, Steven Ellison hit the hereditary jackpot. The great-nephew of spiritual jazz pioneer Alice Coltrane, and the grandson of Motown songwriter Marilyn McLeod, his career follows in the footsteps of two era-defining talents in the continuum of African-American music.

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Reflection on Creation and Space By Alice Coltrane 

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Reflection on Creation and Space By Alice Coltrane 

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Alice Coltrane - Reflection on Creation and Space (A Five Year View) LP 1973 [FULL ALBUM]

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Journey in Satchidananda By Alice Coltrane 

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Journey in Satchidananda By Alice Coltrane 

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Life - Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda

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"The Strange World of...Alice Coltrane" By Stewart Smith 

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"The Strange World of...Alice Coltrane" By Stewart Smith 

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Alice Coltrane is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, with a sublime musical vision that encompasses jazz, blues, gospel, Indian classical, North African music, and European modernism. Although her achievement is now being recognised, for many years Coltrane was misunderstood and dismissed by many of jazz's gatekeepers. Some viewed her in the way many view Yoko Ono: responsible for the break-up of her husband John Coltrane's classic quintet; a sexist and demonstrably untrue claim.

Others simply didn't get what her music was about, dismissing it as so much hippy twaddle. As the normally on-point Richard Cook writes in his Jazz Encyclopedia, "Her albums of her own music often come across as soft-headed and incoherent rambling... one wonders if she would have enjoyed any attention at all if she had remained plain Alice McCleod."

Such wrong-headed attitudes are thankfully on the wane. Coltrane was hugely respected by the heavyweight musicians she worked with, who were clearly less hung up on genre boundaries than many critics. Her music has always attracted open-minded music fans - Journey In Satchidananda is one of the cult albums - but in recent years it has enjoyed a new lease of life, with Radiohead, Four Tet and Sunn 0))) among the acts paying homage.

The Los Angeles beats & jazz community centred around her nephew Stephen Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, has played a key role in raising her profile, and there's undoubtedly a heady whiff of Alice in Kamasi Washington's symphonic jazz arrangements. She's also a major influence on contemporary jazz innovators like Joshua Abrams and Amirtha Kidambi, who clearly respond to her unorthodox approach.

Born in Detroit in 1937, the young Alice McLeod was a musical prodigy, learning piano from an early age, and playing organ in Mount Olive Baptist Church by the age of nine. Gospel remained a great love and its influence can be heard throughout her work. In her teens, she discovered bebop through her older half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, and was entranced. Before she was twenty, she had gigged with saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and Sonny Stitt. She later moved to Paris where she studied piano with the great Bud Powell. She returned to the US after her first marriage ended, where she played with vibist Terry Gibbs (she appears on his 1963 album Plays Jewish Melodies In Jazztime) who introduced her to John Coltrane in 1963.

He was her soulmate and collaborator, and together they had four children before John's untimely death from liver cancer in 1967. Her music and spirituality helped her overcome the trauma of losing her husband at 30, and in 1968 she released the first of her twenty solo albums, the beautiful A Monastic Trio.

In the 1970s, she became a disciple of Swami Satchidananda (the guru who opened Woodstock) and took on the name Turiyasangitananda. She soon became a spiritual leader herself, opening the Vedantic Centre in 1975, and the Sai Anantam Ashram eight years later. As a result, she drifted away from the music business, although she continued to record devotional music for her community. Those recordings enjoy their first commercial release with the new compilation on Luaka Bop, The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda; a real cause for celebration. Before her death in 2007, she returned to the studio for one final album proper, the wonderful Translinear Light. Read on, as we unpack her legacy.
Something About John Coltrane

Alice Coltrane joined her husband's band in 1966, recording a number of studio sessions including the final album released during his lifetime, Expression, and the posthumously released Stellar Regions. She also appeared on several live recordings, including Offering: Live At Temple University, a phenomenal set recorded in Philadelphia in 1966, but only released in 2015. Alice's piano playing on these albums is less flashily virtuosic than McCoy Tyner's, but it's highly distinctive nonetheless, with the extended harmonies, rippling modal lines and driving bass she would develop further on her own albums. She hooks up beautifully with bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Rashied Ali, riding the latter's multi-directional flow, while providing rhythmic and harmonic anchors when necessary. She more than proves herself of being willing and able to follow her husband on his ecstatic journeys to the outer reaches.

Following John's death in 1967, Alice founded the independent Coltrane Records to release the jointly credited Cosmic Music, featuring two 1966 tracks by the John Coltrane Quintet, and two new pieces she had recorded with her first quartet (with Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison and Ben Riley) at her Long Island home studio in 1968. Highlights include John's 'Reverend King', where a light, folkish melody erupts into a wild collective improvisation, and Alice's 'The Sun', a modal piano piece that opens with a spoken word invocation recorded by her husband and Sanders in 1966. By pairing her own music with her husband's, Alice announced her intention to continue on the visionary path they had mapped out together. That approach met with some controversy, not least in 1972, when Alice added string, organ and bass overdubs to two 1966 tracks to create half of the John Coltrane album Infinity. Jazz purists cried blasphemy, but as Alice repeatedly pointed out, the project was a realisation of her and John's original vision. As she told The Wire magazine in 2002, "We had a conversation about every detail; [John] was showing me how the piece could include other sounds, blends, tonalities and resonances such as strings. He talked about cosmic sounds, higher dimensions, astral levels and other worlds, and realms of music and sound that I could feel." The results are fascinating and rather gorgeous, offering a glimpse where John might have gone next had he lived.

Towards the end of his life, John Coltrane decided to buy a harp, hoping that the instrument would help him rethink his approach to harmony and texture. The harp took months to build and wasn't delivered to the family home until after his death. Alice would later recall how, if the windows were open, a strong breeze would make the harp's strings hum, as if it was being played by some invisible force. She soon mastered the instrument, developing the dreamy rippling style that can be heard on ensemble recordings and beautiful solo pieces like 'Wisdom Eye' from 1976's Eternity. This sublime live clip captures her solo harp playing in all its glory; if your eyes are still dry by the end of it, there is no hope for you.

Alice Coltrane's solo debut Monastic Trio (1968) is one of her finest, confidently establishing her compositional voice with a series of tunes that combine Easter modes with blues and gospel tonalities. As the sole lead instrumentalist, Coltrane plays the shit out of the piano, particularly on 'Ohnedaruth' and 'Gospel Trane', where she brings her rippling, harp-like phrasing to complex modal structures. The gracefulness of her right-hand playing is underpinned by a gutsy sense of swing that reflects her gospel and bebop roots. The harp makes its first outing on Side B, as Coltrane conjures shimmering clouds of tone over Garrison's exploratory bass (I'll even wager that 'Lovely Sky Boat' is an influence on Parliament's simultaneously sublime and ridiculous 'Silent Boatman', with its 'Skye Boat Song' references and luscious harp).

The highest song of bliss: Journey In Satchidananda (1971)
Infinite music: Universal Consciousness (1971), World Galaxy (1972), Lord Of Lords (1972).

The following year's Huntington Ashram Monastery is an equally fine trio outing, with Rashied Ali on drums and erstwhile Miles Davis bassist Ron Carter stepping in for Garrison. 1970's Ptah, The El Daoud offers an expanded sound, replacing Ali with Riley, and bringing in Sanders and Joe Henderson on saxophones and flute. It's a stone-cold classic. Carter and Riley are a more in-the-pocket rhythm section than Garrison and Ali, providing a solid, funky backbone for the title track's expansive Egyptian strut. Henderson's warm, hip style contrasts nicely with Sander's weirder expressions, while Coltrane dazzles with undulating piano leads and strident gospel riffs. 'Turiya And Ramakrishna' is a deeply soulful piano ballad, its blues inflected with Eastern modes, while 'Blue Nile' is a blissed-out spiritual jazz gem, with Coltrane on harp and the saxophonists doubling up on flutes.

Coltrane met her guru Swami Satchidananda in 1970, travelling to India with him, and taking on the name Turiyasangitananda. Sangit means music in Sanskrit, and Coltrane translated her adopted name as 'the transcendental lord's highest song of bliss'. Hinduism, she felt, could best accommodate the Universalist vision she and John had explored together, and that syncretic approach is reflected in the world music fusion of Journey In Satchidananda. The title track is Coltrane's best known tune, and deservedly so, with harp and tamboura wrapping themselves around Cecil McBee's mantra-like bassline. 'Isis And Osiris' reflects Coltrane's interest in Egyptian cosmology, with Vishnu Wood's oud cutting through the mystical drift. This is the album which begins Coltrane's voyage beyond jazz, and it's as innovative as it is accessible.

Coltrane's final three albums for Impulse are her most radical, weaving together European modernism, Indian classical, psychedelic rock, gospel and modal jazz to create a truly cosmic music. These albums largely eschew horns for strings and Wurlitzer organ, reflecting her fondness for flowing sounds. As she said in 1971, 'the instruments which require breathing are more in line with what's happening on an earthly level, but the instruments that can produce a sound that's continuous, to me, express the eternal, the infinite.'

Guest Spots And Collaborations

Universal Consciousness is arguably her masterpiece, an utterly mind-blowing album that is still hard to fathom 46 years on. The astounding title track hits with the force of a meteor, as slashing atonal strings - co-arranged with Ornette Coleman - lay waster to your speaker cones over Jack De Johnette and Rashied Ali's twin drum barrage. The organ-led 'Battle At Armageddon' is one of the heaviest pieces Coltrane recorded, as she teams up with Kali, El Daoud and Jesus Christ to vanquish demonic forces. Her Wurlitzer playing is wild, as she uses the tone wheel to emulate the swoops and bends of her husband's soprano saxophone, and embarks on freewheeling modal runs that touch on Indian classical music, gospel, and Terry Riley's wilder flights. The breadth of her spiritual interests is reflected in titles like 'Oh Allah' and 'Hare Krishna' and 'The Ankh Of Amen-Ra'. Truly visionary music.

Coltrane handles all the string arrangements on World Galaxy laying dense, billowing clouds of strings over stormy bass and percussion while she lets rip on organ, piano and harp. Her take on 'My Favourite Things' is nuts, with the strings modulating from breezy major to dramatic minor, while Coltrane opens vast black holes of organ. The fulcrum of the album is the 'Galaxy...' trilogy, where Coltrane elevates her music to the astral plane. 'Galaxy Around Olodumare' is free jazz via Stravinsky and Stockhausen, with Frank Lowe's raw saxophone burning a hole through gaseous string abstractions, before some sudden tape edits turn the universe inside out. 'Galaxy In Turiya' is more consonant, with Coltrane's harp drifting over luscious strings, while the symphonic re-imagining of 'Galaxy In Satchidananda' sounds like the birth of a new planet.

Lord Of Lords has Coltrane's trio going head to head with a full orchestra, with some intriguing versions of Stravinsky and Dvorak themes. The albums Coltrane subsequently recorded for Warners, most notably Eternity (1976) and the awesome live set Transfiguration (1978), push her sound in a more accessible, but no less rewarding, direction, with inventive big band arrangements and flourishes of Latin percussion alongside the strings, piano, harp and organ.

In addition to her own projects, Coltrane guested on a number of albums by jazz heavyweights, including McCoy Tyner's splendid Extensions (recorded 1970, released 1974) and Charlie Haden's very fine 1976 duets album Closeness. She also worked outside of jazz, contributing harp to Laura Nyro's 1970 album Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat. Check out the incredible 'Map To The Treasure', where Coltrane's harp ripples gorgeously behind Nyro's vocal and piano.

Her most sustained collaborative projects, however, are the 1974 albums she made with saxophonist Joe Henderson and Carlos Santana, respectively. Henderson's The Elements is a concept album exploring the classical model of the cosmos. 'Earth' is the highlight, with Coltrane laying a tamboura drone over a deliciously slow and deliberate groove, as Henderson plays superbly off Michael White's hip violin jabs. It's not unlike a benign cousin to the vicious tabla-funk of Miles Davis's 'Black Satin'. A spacey interlude sees the drums drop out, as Kenneth Nash narrates cosmic wisdom over flute, tabla and harp, and then we're back into the main theme, with White and Henderson raising the pressure over that indelible groove.

The 21st century Alice Coltrane: Translinear Light (2004)

llluminations is less well regarded ("Carlos attempts once again to reproduce his own alpha waves on guitar and Mrs Coltrane contributes background music barely worthy of 'Kung Fu'", sniffs the self-styled Dean of Rock Critics Robert Christgau) but it's worth a listen if you can get with the idea of Santana noodling over lush strings. It's not all chilled-out music to meditate to: 'Angel Of Sunlight' burns, as the group attempt a jazz-rock take on John Coltrane's late music. Much of the track is taken up with Santana shredding over Jack De Johnette's hard-driving drum barrage, but Alice shows the boys how it's done with an irradiating Wurlitzer solo.

In 1975 Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda became founder and director of the Vedantic Centre. Her final studio albums for Warners, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and Transcendence (both 1977) reflect this new stage in her life by exploring traditional Hindu songs, while maintaining a connection to jazz through their complex harmonies and extended instrumental breaks. The growth of her spiritual community led to the establishment of the Sai Anantam Ashram in Cornell, California, in 1983, where she quietly began recording devotional music. She shared these with her followers via a series of private press cassettes, which are now collectors' items. Selections from Turiya Sings (1982), Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1990), and Glorious Chants (1995) appear on the new compilation World Spiritual Classics Vol. 1: The Ecastatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda.

The music is absolutely stunning, with its heady mix of Hindu devotional music from the Indian and Nepalese traditions, gospel, spiritual jazz and New Age music. Don't let the New Age tag put you off. There's nothing hippy dippy about this music: it is heavy. The arrangements are primarily for organ and synthesiser, with Coltrane joined on vocals by her students. The lightness of the melodies, combined with the density of the drone, is totally mind-bending, with organ and synth laying out huge blocks of chordal bass under the heavenly voices. Coltrane rarely solos, but occasionally adds subtle right hand variations and weird modulations. Best of all are the vast, sweeping synth glissandi she uses to ramp up the intensity of the music, an effect that recalls her orchestral arrangements of the 1970s, while elevating the listener to even higher planes of cosmic bliss. I could listen to those whooshing synths sounds on a loop, although I might never come down.

Coltrane's alto vocals are gorgeous and deeply felt, not least on the impossibly beautiful 'Er Ra', where she sings at the top of her range over harp and strings. She's joined on the joyous call-and-response kirtans by choirs and other soloists, giving these traditional Hindu hymns a gospel fervour that is matched by the grooving organ and handclaps. In addition to the traditional material, there's a version of 'Journey In Satchidananda' that leaves me breathless, as a choir sings the theme over monumental suspended synth chords that seem to be played by Shiva herself. In the second half, male vocalist Sairam Iyer enters with an impassioned raga and I'm completely sent. Luaka Bop and the Coltrane family can't be praised enough for making this incredible music more widely available.

Alice Coltrane came out of semi-retirement in the early 2000s to work with her son, the saxophonist and producer Ravi Coltrane, on what would be her final album. As Ravi told the journalist Ashley Kahn, the aim was to make a modern day Alice Coltrane album, 'forward thinking' with 'a little bit of historical influence there'. Featuring a sympathetic cast of collaborators including her old friends Haden and De Johnette, as well as Ravi and his brother Oran on reeds, Translinear Light celebrates her musical and spiritual interests: she revisits her classics 'Blue Nile' and 'Sita Ram', engages in some stunning modal interplay with Ravi on the gorgeous title track, and channels her gospel roots on a shimmering version of the traditional 'Walk With Me'. That gospel influence is deeply felt on the Hindu devotional song 'Satya Sai Isha', where the Sai Anantam Ashram Singers summon the spirit over grooving organ, shakers and hand-claps. Halfway through, Coltrane doubles the tempo, and the whole thing takes off in a soaring expression of joy. She brings her synths down from the Ashram for blissed out 'Jagadishwar' and 'Hymn', while her Wurlitzer organ the drives the gospel tune 'This Train' down the cosmic railway. Her husband's music is represented by 'Cresent', 'Leo', and the bonus track 'Impressions' ( Interstellar Light), a fiery organ wig-out with De Johnette channelling the Rashied Ali of Interstellar Space. A beautiful and generous album.

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The Quietus | Features | Strange World Of... | The Strange World Of... Alice Coltrane

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Alice Coltrane is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, with a sublime musical vision that encompasses jazz, blues, gospel, Indian classical, North African music, and European modernism. Although her achievement is now being recognised, for many years Coltrane was misunderstood and dismissed by many of jazz's gatekeepers.

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"Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again” By Abby Aguirre 

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"Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again” By Abby Aguirre 

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Octavia Butler's tenth novel, " Parable of the Sower," which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought and rising seawater. The middle class and working poor live in gated neighborhoods, where they fend off the homeless with guns and walls. Fresh water is scarce, as valuable as money. Pharmaceutical companies have created "smart drugs," which boost mental performance, and "pyro," a pill that gives those who take it sexual pleasure from arson. Fires are common. Police services are expensive, though few people trust the police. Public schools are being privatized, as are whole towns. In this atmosphere, a Presidential candidate named Christopher Donner is elected based on his promises to dismantle government programs and bring back jobs.

"Parable of the Sower" unfolds through the journal entries of its protagonist, a fifteen-year-old black girl named Lauren Oya Olamina, who lives with her family in one of the walled neighborhoods. "People have changed the climate of the world," she observes. "Now they're waiting for the old days to come back." She places no hope in Donner, whom she views as "a symbol of the past to hold onto as we're pushed into the future." Instead, she equips herself to survive in that future. She practices her aim with BB guns. She collects maps and books on how Native Americans used plants. She develops a belief system of her own, a Darwinian religion she names Earthseed. When the day comes for her to leave her walled enclave, Lauren walks west to the 101 freeway, joining a river of the poor that is flooding north. It's a dangerous crossing, made more so by a taboo affliction that Lauren was born with, "hyperempathy," which causes her to feel the pain of others.

By writing black female protagonists into science fiction, and bringing her acute appraisal of real-world power structures to bear on the imaginary worlds she created, Butler became an early pillar of the subgenre and aesthetic known as Afrofuturism. (Kara Walker cites her as an inspiration; and, as Hilton Als has pointed out, Butler is the " dominant artistic force " in Beyoncé's visual album "Lemonade.") In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Kellyanne Conway made a strong case for George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" when she used the phrase "alternative facts" and sent the novel to the top of Amazon's best-seller list. Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" also experienced a resurgence in sales, and its TV adaptation on Hulu inspired protest costumes. But for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler's novel and its sequel may be unmatched.

Butler was born in 1947, in Pasadena, California, and raised by her grandmother and mother, who worked as a maid. Her father, a shoe shiner, died when she was seven. As a child, she often accompanied her mother to work at a wealthy Pasadena household, where the help entered through back doors. In one of Butler's first stories, "Flash-Silver Star," which she wrote at the age of eleven, a young girl is picked up by a U.F.O. from Mars and taken on a tour of the solar system.

Butler ignored the received idea that black people belonged in science fiction only if their blackness was crucial to the plot. (In 1979, a fellow-science-fiction writer advised Butler that points about race might better be made with extraterrestrials.) As she wrote in a 1980 essay for the magazine Transmission, titled "Lost Races of Science Fiction": "No writer who regards blacks as people, human beings, with the usual variety of human concerns, flaws, skills, hopes, etc., would have trouble creating interesting backgrounds and goals for black characters." She later made a habit of explaining, as here to the Times, "I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing. I can write my own stories and I can write myself in."

In "Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories," an exhibition of Butler's papers at the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California, which runs through August 7th, there is tangible evidence of her outsize resolve. Over the decades, as she was writing her most popular novel, " Kindred," and two highly regarded series-her five-part Patternist books and her Xenogenesis trilogy-Butler was filling personal journals with affirming mantras. "I am a bestselling writer," one entry, dated 1975, reads. "I write bestselling books." She closes: "So be it! See to it!" She was still talking to herself in this manner in 1988, even though by then she had won both a Hugo and a Nebula award, science fiction's highest honors. "I shall be a bestselling writer," she writes in a notebook that year. "So be it! See to it!"

By the time she began working on the Parable books, in 1989, Butler was in her forties and had written nine novels. The series, she decided, would be her "If this goes on..." story. In colorful diagrams, Butler extrapolated her vision of a near-future dystopia from what she read in the news, forecasting what kind of collapse might result if the forces of late-stage capitalism, climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and the tech industry continued unhampered. ("More Hispanics," she writes in one notebook. "More High Tech.") Butler took a cyclical view of history. She also thought social progress was reversible. As the public sphere became hollowed out, a fear of change would create an opening for retrograde politics. With collapse, racism would become more overt.

The sequel, " Parable of the Talents," published in 1998, begins in 2032. By then, various forms of indentured servitude and slavery are common, facilitated by high-tech slave collars. The oppression of women has become extreme; those who express their opinion, "nags," might have their tongues cut out. People are addicted not only to designer drugs but also to "dream masks," which generate virtual fantasies as guided dreams, allowing wearers to submerge themselves in simpler, happier lives. News comes in the form of disks or "news bullets," which "purport to tell us all we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights." The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to "make American great again."

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Octavia Butler's Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to "Make America Great Again"

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Octavia Butler's tenth novel, " Parable of the Sower," which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought and rising seawater. The middle class and working poor live in gated neighborhoods, where they fend off the homeless with guns and walls.

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"OCTAVIA BUTLER BOOKS: A GUIDE TO HER LIFE, WORK, AND LEGACY" By Alex Luppens-Dale 

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"OCTAVIA BUTLER BOOKS: A GUIDE TO HER LIFE, WORK, AND LEGACY" By Alex Luppens-Dale 

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Octavia Butler was the author of more than 15 books. If you've ever wanted to read more of her work, this is our guide to the best Octavia Butler books and a look at her life and legacy.

Who is Octavia Butler?

A native of Pasadena, California, Butler was an only child who was raised mostly by her mother and grandmother. Her father died when she was 7 years old. She spent much of her time as a child on jobs with her mother, who worked as a housekeeper, and reading books at the Pasadena Central Library.

She attended Pasadena City College and the Clarion Workshop. After graduating from college, she would continue to work temp jobs while getting up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning to write. She was eventually able to leave these jobs behind to write full time. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to win a McArthur Fellowship. In 2000, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center.

Huntington Library, which has her papers in their research collection, published an image of one of her notebooks that periodically resurfaces on Twitter. In the notebook, Butler declared that "This is my life. I write bestselling novels. My novels go onto the bestseller lists on or shortly after publication. [...] So be it! See to it!" and that "My books will be read by millions of people!"

Her vision more than came true. She also expressed a wish to help poor black students get an education and to travel whenever and wherever she wanted. Today, the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship provides Clarion Writers' Workshop scholarships for young writers of color. There is also a scholarship in her name at her alma mater, Pasadena City College.

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Butler died in 2006 at the age of 58, having written her own dreams into existence.

Butler's legacy lives on in so many ways. In addition to her immortal body of work and the scholarships that have been established in her name, there is also an asteroid named after her. In 2019, the Los Angeles Public Library opened the Octavia Lab, a maker space named in Butler's honor.

Octavia Butler Books

Butler read science fiction growing up, but was disenchanted with the genre's portrayal of women and race. Her work sought, in part, to correct these gaps. Here are more reasons why Octavia Butler is essential sci-fi reading.

This is your guide Octavia Butler books, from her first series to standalone novels.

Patternist Series

This was Butler's first series and is about a secret history taking place from the 17th century into the far future and featuring a race of selectively bred telepaths who come to dominate the Earth. There are five books in this series, which can be read in order of publication or chronologically as and Patternmaster. Butler was not fond of the novel Survivor later on, and it is not included in the most recent Patternist omnibus.

Xenogenesis (Lilith's Brood) Series

A woman, Lilith, awakes in what seems to be a prison cell with memories of this happening before. She remembers being questioned. She is asked the same questions again and eventually learns that the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war and that humans are nearly extinct. The Oankali wish to save humanity by cross-breeding with the surviving humans. Lilith's Brood is sold as an omnibus but the individual novels are, in order, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago.

Parable (Earthseed) Series

Parable of the Sower is the story of Lauren Olamina, who was born with hyperempathy, meaning that she feels others' pain in her own body. The United States has turned into warring city-states and company towns. There is an influential senator who uses the slogan, I kid you not, "Make America Great Again." His supporters are known to burn people at the stake for not being Christian, or not being the right kind of Christian. When her community is attacked, Olamina travels to Northern California to build a community called Earthseed. The story of the community continues in the Nebula Award-winning Parable of the Talents. Butler planned several more Earthseed novels, including Parable of the Trickster. The beginnings of Trickster can also be found at the Huntington Library.

Standalone Novels

In Kindred, Dana, a black woman living in modern times, is celebrating her birthday with her boyfriend when she suddenly disappears and reappears in the antebellum South to save the son of a slave owner, who would have otherwise drowned. Dana returns to her own time but continues to be drawn back to past and specifically to the boy, Rufus, for longer and longer periods of time until she is uncertain whether she will ever be able to return to her own life.

In Butler's other standalone novel, Fledgling, protagonist Shori does not remember who she is, but a closer study of her needs leads her to an unusual conclusion: she is a genetically modified adult vampire, not the little girl she seems to be. She sets herself on a path to remember who is after her and how to survive. In this book, Butler imagines a symbiotic relationship between vampires and humans.

Short Story Collections

There are two collections of Butler's short stories. Bloodchild and Other Stories ("Bloodchild" won several awards including a Hugo and a Nebula) and Unexpected Stories, which was published in 2014 and features two never-before-published stories: "A Necessary Being" and "Childfinder."

Not sure where to start with her work? There's a Reading Pathway for that.

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Octavia Butler Books: A Guide To Her Life, Work, and Legacy | Book Riot

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Octavia Butler was the author of more than 15 books. If you've ever wanted to read more of her work, this is our guide to the best Octavia Butler books and a look at her life and legacy. A native of Pasadena, California, Butler was an only child who was raised mostly by her mother and grandmother.

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"Octavia Tried to Tell Us" By Monica A. Coleman and Tanarive Due 

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"Octavia Tried to Tell Us" By Monica A. Coleman and Tanarive Due 

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Octavia Tried to Tell Us V: Parable for a Pandemic

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"Octavia Butler: Writing Herself Into The Story" By Karen Grigsby Bates

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"Octavia Butler: Writing Herself Into The Story" By Karen Grigsby Bates

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Octavia Butler used to say she remembers exactly when she decided to become a science fiction writer. She was 9 years old and saw a 1954 B-movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and two things struck her. First: "Geez, I can write a better story than that!" And second: "Somebody got paid for writing that story!" If they could, she decided, then she could, too.

Eventually she did exactly that. Octavia Estelle Butler became one of the world's premier science fiction writers, the first black female science fiction writer to reach national prominence, and the only writer in her genre to receive a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. ("You have a Genius Grant," Charlie Rose said in a 2000 interview. "They don't call it that," she corrected him firmly; "somebody probably made that up.") When she died in 2006, she was lauded as a pioneer, an icon and one of America's best writers.
Tracing a writer's evolution
"Octavia Butler: Telling My Stories" is an exhibit currently at the Huntington Library, in the Pasadena suburb of San Marino, Calif. Curator Natalie Russell went through some "8,000 manuscripts, letters and photographs, and an additional 80 boxes of ephemera" to create an exhibition that shows, in chronological order, how Butler's career was born and evolved, and what influenced her.

Large glass cases hold early notebooks and drawings, report cards from her days at Pasadena City College and notes to herself about character development. Early copies of her first editions are here. So is the one-page letter from the MacArthur Foundation notifying Butler she'd been chosen as a fellow in 1995.

The walls are hung with blowups of Butler's childhood drawings and the affirmations she repeated to herself: "I am a best-selling writer, I write best-selling books," one says. "Every day in every way I am researching and writing my award-winning books and short stories."

That encouragement was probably essential: Butler faced a lot of challenges. She grew up black and poor in Pasadena, Calif., when legal segregation was dead, but de facto segregation was very much alive. She was also shy, unusually tall for her age, and not particularly social. "I'm an only child," Butler told Sci Fi Buzz. "I had no idea how to get along with other children. And also, I was a strange kid who learned to stay by herself and make things up."

She often made them up while sitting on the porch at her grandmother's chicken farm, in the High Desert town of Victorville, Calif., where she dreamed about animals. The drawings of horses that illustrated one of her early stories are on the walls at the Huntington. After Devil Girl, though, Butler switched to science fiction, determined to make that her career.
Creating her own path
That was astonishing, because the world was not full of well-paid science fiction writers, and with very few exceptions, all of those were male and white. No one like Butler existed in the genre. And that didn't seem to hold Butler back one bit. "I don't recall every having wanted desperately to be a black woman fiction writer," she told Rose. "I wanted to be a writer."

She went to Pasadena public schools, then got an associate's degree from Pasadena City College. And she kept writing. She had short stories published here and there while she held what she called "lots of horrible little jobs" -warehouse worker, dishwasher, potato chip inspector. ("The one good thing about all those jobs was they left her mind free to think about her characters," Russell says.) Butler's first book, Patternmaster, was published in 1976 and caught people's attention. It became part of The Patternist series; the stories revolved around a group of elite beings with telepathic superpowers.

Kindred, one of the books most famously associated with Butler, was published in 1979. It's the story of Dana, a contemporary black writer hurtled backward in time to antebellum Maryland. A spirited feminist, Dana must learn to conform herself to the times so she can survive; she needs to find her slave-holding ancestor to ensure her own existence more than 150 years in the future.

Butler researched the book arduously. "She needed to go to Maryland, to see what the geography was like, find out what a working slave plantation was like," Russell says. "How far away were the towns? If you were trying to run away, where would you go?"

Those lifelike details made Kindred a classic. It's taught in high schools and colleges annually, and it's a book club favorite. Butler often said she was inspired to write it when she heard young black people minimize the severity of slavery, and strongly assert what they would or would not have tolerated if they were enslaved. She wanted them to not only know the facts of slavery, but how slavery felt. She wanted to make those militant young people see that even surviving such an institution made their ancestors heroic.
Making room for others
Butler wrote more than a dozen books in all. In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship, she was awarded science fiction's equivalent of the National Book Award - two each of the coveted Nebula and Hugo awards. She became one of science fiction's best-known female writers, considered a colleague of Ursula Le Guin and Madeleine L'Engle. And while Butler was the most prominent black female writer in the genre, she was determined that she not remain the only one.

Science fiction writer Tananarive Due recalls meeting Butler in 1997 as a new writer. "You could fit all the black science fiction and fantasy writers on one stage, and that's not the case anymore - the field has exploded so much!"

Steven Barnes, Due's husband, is a science fiction writer, too, and was a friend of Butler's for two decades. "She opened a door and walked all the way through it," he says, "and therefore created a path for others."

Butler enjoyed having the company. A photo early in the exhibit shows her at Clarion, the science fiction/fantasy writers' workshop, in 1970. It's a group picture with her mentor, Harlan Ellison, at the center surrounded by mostly young, mostly male, almost all-white faces. Almost. There at the edge is a very serious Octavia Butler, almost fading into the background. Two decades later, she is with a group of black women at a writer's conference sponsored by Essence magazine. She's smiling broadly and glowing, clearly enjoying the reverence paid her by other young writers.

Octavia Butler's death in February 2006 took everyone by surprise. She'd been living in Seattle, where she'd moved in 1999, and died after a fall that some think was possibly the result of a stroke. (She'd been having health problems for several years.) She was 58. Obituaries in important papers across the country emphasized her pioneering role in creating a space for people of color in science fiction.

In several interviews Butler said she wrote because she had two choices: write, or die. "If I hadn't written, I probably would have done something stupid that would have led to my death," she said cheerfully. We're fortunate that she chose to write.

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Octavia Butler: Writing Herself Into The Story

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An exhibit at the Huntington Library shows visitors how famed science fiction writer Octavia Butler created a career for herself in a genre that had few women and even fewer African-Americans.

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Black Women's vocality

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"Because I'm a Black woman, everyone thinks I should sing the Blues. But I have nothing to be blue about. I'm a happy person." Thus did Minnie Riperton, the singer-songwriter best known for her stratospheric soprano range and her 1974 hit song "Lovin' You," her decision to sing "happy music." On a continuum of black women's positive affects, Riperton belongs somewhere between Zora Neale Hurston's to be pegged "tragically colored" and later black feminists' of black joy. Her most proximate ally is Nikki Giovanni, whose speaker in "Nikki-Rosa" white biographers' tragic expectations by insisting of her childhood, "all the while I was quite happy." But Riperton's happiness was present-tense, not retrospective. "I am very happy," she told a reporter in 1975, the year before she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer: "I have a beautiful husband and two adorable children. I know I am lucky."* Riperton's story is sad, but her star persona is not; and that tension makes her a strange subject and a useful one for a journal devoted to music and melancholy.

Minnie: with her zippy name, Age of Aquarius spirit, bohemian aesthetic, sass, beloved white husband and kids. her on the Mike Douglas Show, baby's breath in her hair, telling how she was attacked but not hurt by the lion on the cover of her album Adventures in Paradise; she laughs and shrugs while Douglas and the other guests ask her countless questions just so she'll keep talking. Listen to the refrain of the album's title track-Step this way for another adventure in paradise-in which Riperton moves from a growling tone up through a series of higher notes into her whistle register as if making more and more room for adventure, and for belief in the wonderful. She was a superlatively gifted singer, capable of conveying a range of emotions. But what really set her apart was her expression-by turns unselfconscious and strategic-of ease, faith, and contentment. For that reason, Riperton has something to teach us about the utility of black joy in the 1970s, but also about the complexity of black optimism now. At a time when "the power of positive thinking" looks like victim-blaming pseudoscience, when Afropessimism is a governing scholarly paradigm, and when the sacred text, or at least the sacred slogan, of anti-racist efforts is James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), Riperton's music and persona ask us to grapple with the belief that things will come out alright.

She was born in 1947 in the Bronzeville district of Chicago, the youngest of eight children and the daughter of a homemaker and a Pullman Porter. She studied opera for years-and, while she knew that opportunities for black classical singers were limited, she did not, like Nina Simone, narrate her detour from concert music as a racial trauma. This might have been a matter of temperament, or a deliberate omission. Or perhaps it was that Riperton always had another place to land: she had grown up near Chess Records, the crucible of Chicago soul. While in high school, she was recruited for the Gems, a girl group that made their own records and sang backup for other Chess acts. And in the late 1960s, she joined Rotary Connection, a chamber-soul group led by Riperton's transcendent vocals and Charles Stepney's ornate arrangements that opened a new spiritual-ethereal pathway for soul music-one most famously pursued by Riperton's Chess label mate Maurice White, with his group Earth, Wind & Fire.

In 1970, shortly after Chess dropped the uncategorizable Rotary Connection from their roster, Riperton recorded her first solo album, Come to My Garden. With dramatic arrangements by Stepney and a cover shot of a gloriously Afro'ed Riperton seated amid flowers, the album presented what Farah Jasmine Griffin an image of "black bohemian femininity." In the title track, Riperton moves into and out of dense orchestral interludes, ascending to her falsetto on the chorus and singing the verses in quiet, low tones. Although she aims to seduce the listener away, the lyrics keep an eye on that which she wants to escape. Come to my garden, no more dreams filled with cries, Riperton sings-and, one verse later, I'll take your hand and lead you from these bad times.

She knew about bad times. In interviews with UK journalists, especially (with whom she might have felt freer to speak her mind than she did with her fan base at home), she revealed dimensions of her experience that complicated her own insistence on happiness and her image as soul's princess of pleasure. She British writer Penny Valentine that much of the work she recorded in the 1960s "wasn't what you'd call black music so therefore nobody knew what to do with it. I mean, in the record industry if you were black you were black and you couldn't be anything else. At that time you were Negroes, you weren't even human beings. That's the way it was then, that's the way it is now." She Chris Charlesworth of Melody Maker that industry executives who wanted to sign her on the basis of her music changed their minds once she showed up: "They freaked out because I was black. They didn't know what to do, because [my] name didn't sound black. It's not like Jones, is it?"

In the early 1970s, partly in response to such indignities, Riperton and her husband Richard Rudolph, her cowriter and accompanist, "retired," as she jokingly put it, to Gainesville, Florida (they were still in their twenties). The couple had a second child, a girl (actor and comedian Maya Rudolph). After a few years of songwriting and domestic life, Riperton signed with Epic Records, and the family moved to Los Angeles, where Riperton's friend and admirer Stevie Wonder produced her album Perfect Angel. That album's third single release, "Lovin' You," hit No. 1 on both pop and r&b charts and at last brought Riperton and her five-and-a-half-octave range to national attention.

Perfect Angel features pared-down arrangements that foreground Riperton's voice. (That paring down is funny and erotic in Perfect Angel's cover image: Riperton smiles at the camera, naked under her overalls and eating a melting ice cream cone.) The opening track, "Reasons," serves as a treatise on singing, and, as such, offers a theory of Riperton's practice as a whole. The song's first lyrics suggest a movement from outside to inside-The reasons for my life are in a million faces/Like aching promises I feel them in my bones-that the next lines reverse: Slipping through my fingers to dance along the road/The reasons for my life are more than I can hold. Moving from her chest voice to her falsetto and back again while keeping pace with Marlo Henderson's electric guitar, Riperton insists on taking up a great deal of sonic space and exceeding her own boundaries just as the reasons do, slipping through my fingers to dance upon the road. Both lyrically and sonically, she conjures an expansive interior life that overflows the boundaries of the individual psyche and body to radiate outward. The "inner light" that singing sparks might be hers, or it might be the listener's:

But oh the sweet delight to sing with all my might

To spark the inner light of wonder burning bright

You're not alone. You're not alone!

Riperton leaps to her whistle register on the last "alone." She takes time to explore the stratosphere, darting up and down and mimicking Henderson's guitar riffs with her voice. This song showcases both her nimble technique and her gift for expressing joy in performance. Yet just as "Come to My Garden" evokes both the possibility of escape and the world that needs escaping, "Reasons" shows that her self-validation is not only joyful but necessary in a world that denies her worth. As she sings, The reasons for my life are more than I was told.

A year later, at age twenty-seven, she received her terminal diagnosis, and the vision of life she the public became more straightforwardly positive: "Every time I sit down to eat, when I get up in the morning, when I see my children . . . I always thank God . . . for permitting me to be alive." If Riperton's brief life can be narrated as a series of emergences-out of the role of backup singer and into the spotlight as a solo artist; out of "retirement" in Florida and into the studio in Los Angeles-no move was as dramatic as her emergence from cancer treatment. In 1976, she had a partial mastectomy and was given a prognosis of six months to live; yet, when she made the news public, she discussed the surgery as if it had cured her. Months before her death, she touted the healing powers of green magma, discussed an upcoming European tour, and hinted at a new fashion line. Not that there was any rush-she told Ebony's Bob Lucas, "I know that I'm going to be around for a long time."

She fretted privately to her sister that she did not want to leave her children. But in public, she continued to perform the optimism that had shaped her career. As she had sung, before her diagnosis, in "Adventures in Paradise," I believe any dream that I want to. "There was no way she could live as fully and freely if everyone knew her real condition," to Rudolph; she didn't want people to buy her records out of pity. Her positive attitude was not only self-serving; it was meant to empower others. In 1978, Riperton was appointed the education chairwoman for the American Cancer Society. She was the youngest woman and the first African American to hold the position-no small feat in the years before Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals (1980) helped to break the silence around breast cancer. "I had to be vocal and let these people know they were not alone, that this is not something you have to hide from," Riperton . In her work as an advocate, she translated the spectacular reassurance of "Reasons" to other women: You're not alone!

When I first wrote about her response to her diagnosis, I lamented Riperton's positive thinking. I it revealed the limited options available for black women in the public eye, "where one could choose between, but not combine, the roles of strong, sassy diva; professional mourner; or perfect angel." I thought Riperton's optimism betrayed naivete or denial, and that the same was true of Stevie Wonder, who wrote a song for her, titled "Minnie, Get Well Soon," which she listened to on her deathbed: Like a bird singing earthly songs of love / We need your love around / Minnie, get better.

I think of it differently now. Having experienced my own acute anxiety about leaving my two young children, I appreciate Riperton's positive comments; I see them as signs of fortitude and faith. In this moment of global pandemic, when US cities are burning, I draw comfort from the few people who believe things will be OK-not because they are oblivious but because they have an actual gift, which is freedom from anxiety in an age defined by it. "I think it'll be fine," one woman drawled to me as we picked up our kids from a school that was closing, due to the pandemic, for an unknown period of time: "People just need to have a little faith!" Minnie Riperton's music is for people who need to hear that. And it's for those who hear, in her utterly extravagant, extraordinary falsetto, the sound of a soul unbound by the body. Rudolph of his wife, "She always said she had been here a lot before," in previously incarnated form. And she might be here still. The reasons for her life are more than she can hold not only because they defy comprehension, but because they exceed her lifetime. She would not live to behold all the ways her spirit would circulate and generate hope. But I think she can see them.

*Riperton, qtd. in Vicki Wilson, "Minnie Riperton, On and Off Stage," Philadelphia Tribune, May 20, 1975, 14.

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Minnie Riperton's Reasons | Hyped on Melancholy

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"Because I'm a Black woman, everyone thinks I should sing the Blues. But I have nothing to be blue about. I'm a happy person." Thus did Minnie Riperton, the singer-songwriter best known for her stratospheric soprano range and her 1974 hit song "Lovin' You," her decision to sing "happy music."

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2017 Blog by Ayana Bascom

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"Woman Wednesday: The Evolution of Kelis" 

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"Woman Wednesday: The Evolution of Kelis" 

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Kelis Rogers is a singer, songwriter, chef, and muse from Harlem, NY. The "first girl to scream on a track" stepped onto the music scene when her raspy vocals touched the hook of Ol' Dirty Bastard's Got Your Money. As a singer, she explores R&B, Hip Hop, Soul, and EDM. As a chef who graduated from the Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, she published "My Life on a Plate: Recipes From Around the World" and debuted her sauce line 'Bounty & Full'. As a muse, she sets trends, , and steps out the box. Kelis is severely and unfairly underrated; the cons of being ahead of her time. She is a trendsetter who develops style and music before it becomes trendy. She is not afraid to be different or authentic. With each album and endeavor, she reinvents herself and her musical approach. She continues to be Kelis while setting trends that will surface in the mainstream several years later.

Kaleidoscope (1999)

Wanderland (2001)

Tasty (2003)

Kelis Was Here (2006)

Flesh Tone (2010)

Food (2014)

Check out her mini style series below:

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Kelis Rogers is a singer, songwriter, chef, and muse from Harlem, NY. The "first girl to scream on a track" stepped onto the music scene when her raspy vocals touched the hook of Ol' Dirty Bastard's Got Your Money. As a singer, she explores R&B, Hip Hop, Soul, and EDM.

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"I'm very aggressive on stage, and men usually don't like aggressive woman. They usually like submissive women, or woman that pretend to be submissive."

Betty Davis is a 60s-late 70s funk, R&B, and soul singer who was known for her free expression. Davis is the first NastyGal, known for her progressive, carefree image that was too advanced for the misogynistic media. Before becoming a singer and lyricist, Davis was one of the few international models of color at the Wilhelmina Agency. As an artist, she stood bravely in her female sexuality. She was fearless, unique and daring. Betty is responsible for Miles Davis' experimental phase; she introduced him to new fashion and music trends. She is the force behind Miles'record, Filles de Kilimanjaro (featured Betty's face as the cover) and Bitches Brew (M. Davis's first gold record). Betty was ahead of her time with her sex-positive lyrics and raunchy stage presence. She stepped out of the boundaries of the submissive woman.

Betty Davis deserves a great amount of acknowledgment. She created her own genre, influenced Miles Davis' reimaging , fueled M. Davis' creation of Jazz Fusion, introduced him to Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly Stone,wrote songs for the Chambers Brothers and the Commodores, inspired the NastyGal brand and most importantly cracked the barrier for women in music to assert their sexuality freely.

Without her, we wouldn't have artists like Lenny Kravitz, Peaches, JDavey, Outkast, Madonna, Erykah Badu, Prince (RIP), or Beyonce. Davis paved the way for many artists and was unsung. Thankfully, she has returned to the spotlight to share her story. The NastyGal film will be released in early 2017.

Watch the trailer below:

"...be true to your artform. And by that, I mean do what's in your heart more so than what's in your head." - Betty Davis

Enjoy Davis' 2nd studio album, They Say I'm Different :

#girlpower♡

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"I'm very aggressive on stage, and men usually don't like aggressive woman. They usually like submissive women, or woman that pretend to be submissive." Betty Davis is a 60s-late 70s funk, R&B, and soul singer who was known for her free expression. Davis is the first NastyGal, known for her progressive, carefree image that was...

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"The Artful, Erotic, and Still Misunderstood Funk of Betty Davis" By Emily Lordi

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"The Artful, Erotic, and Still Misunderstood Funk of Betty Davis" By Emily Lordi

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New York Times Article

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Like many uncompromising, creative women, the funk-rock diva Betty Davis is often called a pioneer. The term is a tribute, of course, a way of defining her legacy in terms of the inroads that she made for later artists. Certainly Davis, who released three exquisitely raw, libidinous albums in the nineteen-seventies, can be said to have presaged more recent expressions of black female desire in popular music-for instance, Janelle Monáe's, in her new album and "emotion picture," "Dirty Computer." Still, such legacy narratives can understate past struggle and overstate subsequent progress, as if the past were mere prelude to our more liberated present. A new film about Davis resists that inclination, asking how much Davis paid for her transgressions-she stopped recording in the nineteen-eighties and disappeared (many thought she had died)-and how much further ahead our time might be had she flourished in hers.

Directed by the London-based filmmaker Phil Cox, " Betty: They Say I'm Different" is an impressionistic meditation on Davis's career and reclusion that combines documentary tropes (rare concert footage, talking heads) with poetic motifs (a symbolic crow, Kabuki dancers). It also covers the basics of Davis's story: born Betty Mabry in Durham, North Carolina, in 1944, she grew up near Pittsburgh, where her father worked in the steel industry; her mother and grandmother nurtured her love of the blues. At seventeen, she came to New York, where she modelled, studied fashion and acting, and managed a club while pursuing her primary vocation as a songwriter. (She was ambitious: according to Lester Chambers, whose band, the Chambers Brothers, recorded Davis's ode to Harlem, " Uptown," in 1967, "She wouldn't shut up about the fact she had a tune that was perfect for us.") She exerted an especially strong influence on Miles Davis, whom she married in 1968, when she was twenty-three and he was forty-two. She introduced him to Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, and got him to trade his suits for hip leather and scarves; he, in turn, urged her to sing.

Their marriage, while mutually inspiring, was poisoned by Miles's abuse. Davis left him after a year, and threw herself into her music-mid-tempo avant-garde funk driven by her sexually brazen persona and her vocal shrieks and purrs. (She considered herself "more of a projector" than a singer, she told an interviewer. "I'm into sound.") The three albums she recorded between 1973 and 1975 featured a Who's Who of musical greats: the drummer Greg Errico and the bassist Larry Graham, of Sly and the Family Stone; the disco icon Sylvester; the Santana guitarist Neal Schon; the Pointer Sisters. While Davis's best-known lyrics touted female promiscuity (" Don't Call Her No Tramp") and S & M (" He Was a Big Freak"), she also sang about music history, in " They Say I'm Different" and " F.U.N.K.," and social fatigue, in " 70's Blues." (Her compositions had alluded to racial discrimination as early as "Uptown," in which the singer determines to get to Harlem even if "a taxi won't take me.") "He Was a Big Freak," while best remembered for its startling opener-"I used to beat him with a turquoise chain"-displays her deftness as a writer by matching language with role play. "When I was his princess, silk and satin and lace I'd wear for him," Davis sings, a grammatical inversion that evokes a courtlier courtship tradition. Onstage, she sported a glorious Afro while shouting, strutting, and crouching in thigh-high platform boots and sequinned bikini tops. (She was all business behind the scenes, drinking mineral water and eating rice cakes when others were doing drugs.) Richard Pryor and Muhammad Ali came out to see her. But her career was not a success in conventional terms-radio stations banned her songs, and her record sales were disappointing. After being dropped by her label, Island Records, Davis eventually moved back to Pittsburgh. Decades later, when interviewers asked her what she had been doing, she answered, "I just lived," or, "Nothing really."

Several commentators in "They Say I'm Different" speculate about her disappearance, pointing to the death of her father and her battles with the music industry as likely causes. There are also hints of mental illness, and of the intimate abuses that, as the #MeToo movement has revealed, have debilitated countless women. "After we did the first record," Errico says, "her life seemed like it was changing, and things were getting intense. And then years went on, and she disappeared. I mean, really disappeared. Then, after decades go by, I talked to her, but she was very, very quiet, very withdrawn . . . . So whatever did happen . . . you know, it's been heavy, it's been deep."

Meanwhile, the camera pans through a modest yet meticulous apartment-beige carpet, clear plastic storage bins neatly stacked against the wall. Here, one sees Davis herself-mainly, her manicured hands. She writes in a notebook and lights incense, her robin's-egg-blue nails and silver cuffs providing hints of lasting glamour. Davis, who is now in her seventies, did not want to be shown in the film ("Nobody wants to be looking at an old woman," she told Cox), but she collaborated with Cox on a pithy, elliptical narrative, drawn in part from her interviews and song lyrics, which plays in voice-over. "Me and Miles were married in '68. He got me a limo, and I filled the trash with his suits," she notes. And, later, more grimly: "I told no one of how Miles was violent . . . . So I wrote and sung my heart out. Three albums of hard funk. I put everything there. But doors in the industry kept closing. Always white men behind desks telling me to change-change my look, change my sound . . . . I needed to 'fit in,' or else no contract . . . . I learned that stars starve in silence."

She recovers, in reclusion, and the film respects her silence. It does this especially by swerving away from the convention of the latter-day reunion that ends such music documentaries as "The Buena Vista Social Club" and "Standing in the Shadows of Motown." Four members of Davis's former band, Funk House, all about her age, meet up in a club and call her. They invite her to play and record again; one of them brightly notes that she could release her own music through social media, without a label. Davis demurs. What could it possibly mean for her to "come back" now? Agreeing to be located but not to be rediscovered, she remains as uncompromising in her solitude as she was at the height of her fame, and the film becomes that rare documentary that makes its subject more, not less, elusive.

Davis is seldom listed among Janelle Monáe's many influences (Stevie Wonder, Prince, Lauryn Hill), and certainly the younger singer's high-tech concepts, virtuosic performances, and meticulously produced songs are far removed from Davis's proto-punk aesthetic. But Monáe, too, is an ambitious child of the working class who left a midsized American city (Kansas City) to develop a fierce alter ego (the rebel android Cindi Mayweather) and to curate a formidable musical crew (the Atlanta-based Wondaland Arts Society); like Davis, she also is closely linked with a visionary male mentor (Prince). The title of Monáe's 2013 album, "The Electric Lady," alludes to Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland," but it also implicitly cites the coterie of women that inspired Hendrix himself: that group, called the Cosmic Ladies or Electric Ladies, was together led by Hendrix's lover Devon Wilson and Betty Davis.

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The Artful, Erotic, and Still Misunderstood Funk of Betty Davis

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Like many uncompromising, creative women, the funk-rock diva Betty Davis is often called a pioneer. The term is a tribute, of course, a way of defining her legacy in terms of the inroads that she made for later artists.

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"Don't Call Her No Tramp" By Betty Davis 

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"Don't Call Her No Tramp" By Betty Davis 

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Song

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"They Say I'm Different" By Betty Davis 

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"They Say I'm Different" By Betty Davis 

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Song

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Album

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What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky By Lesley Nneka Arimah

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What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky By Lesley Nneka Arimah

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Afrofuturist Sci-Fi

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It means twenty-four hour news coverage. It means politicians doing damage control; activists egging on protests. It means Francisco Furcal's granddaughter at a press conference defending her family legacy.

"My grandfather's formula is sound. Math is constant and absolute. Any problems that arise are the fault of those who miscalculate it."

Bad move, lady. This could only put everyone on the defensive, trotting out their transcripts and test results and every other thing that proved their genius. Nneoma tried to think of where she'd put her own documents after the move, but that led to thinking of where she'd moved from, which led to thinking of whom she left behind.

Best not to venture there. Best instead to concentrate on the shaky footage captured by a security camera. The motion-activated device had caught the last fifty feet of the man's fall, the windmill panic of flailing arms, the spread of his body on the ground. The newscast then jumped to the Mathematicians who had discovered the equation for flight. They were being ambushed at parties, while picking up their children in their sleek black cars, on their vacations, giving a glimpse of luxury that was foreign to the majority of the viewing public, who must have enjoyed the embarrassed faces and defensive outbursts from well-fed mouths that knew nothing of rations.

By blaming the Mathematicians instead of the Formula, Martina Furcal and The Center created a maelstrom around these supposedly infallible scientists and protected her family's legacy. And their money. Maybe not such a bad move after all.

Nneoma flipped through the channels, listening closely. If the rumor that Furcal's Formula was beginning to unravel around the edges gained any traction, it would eventually trickle down to the 2,400 Mathematicians like her who worked the globe and made their living calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like poison from a wound.

She was one of the fifty-seven registered Mathematicians who specialized in calculating grief, down from the fifty-nine of last year. Alvin Claspell, the Australian, had committed suicide after, if the stories were to be believed, going mad and trying to eat himself. This work wasn't for everyone. And of course Kioni Mutahi had simply disappeared, leaving New Kenya with only one grief worker.

There were six grief workers in the Biafra-Britannia Alliance, where Nneoma now lived, the largest concentration of grief workers in any province to serve the largest concentration of the grieving. Well, the largest concentration that could pay.

It was the same footage over and over. Nneoma offed the unit. The brouhaha would last only as long as the flight guys took to wise up and blame the fallen man for miscalculating. "Cover your ass," as the North American saying went, though there wasn't much of that continent left to speak it.

A message dinged on the phone console and Nneoma hurried to press it, eager, then embarrassed at her eagerness, then further embarrassed when it wasn't even Kioni, just her assistant reminding her of the lecture she was to give at the school. She deleted it-of course she remembered-and became annoyed. She thought, again, of getting rid of the young woman. But sometimes you needed an assistant, such as when your girlfriend ends your relationship with the same polite coolness that she initiated it, leaving you to pack and relocate three years' worth of shit in one week. Assistants came in handy then. But that was eight weeks ago and Nneoma was over it. Really, she was.

She gathered her papers and rang the car, which pulled up to the glass doors almost immediately. Amadi was timely like that, always been, even when she was a child. Her mother used to say that she could call Amadi on her way down the stairs and open the door to find him waiting. Mama was gone now and her father, who'd become undone, never left the house. Amadi had run Father's errands until Nneoma moved back from New Kenya, when her father had gifted him to her, like a basket of fine cheese. She'd accepted the driver as what she knew he was, a peace offering. And though it would never be the same between them, she called her father every other Sunday.

She directed Amadi to go to the store first. They drove through the wide streets of Enugu and passed a playground full of sweaty egg-white children. It wasn't that Nneoma had a problem with the Britons per se, but some of her father had rubbed off on her. At his harshest Father would call them refugees rather than allies and he'd long been unwelcome in polite company.

"They come here with no country of their own and try to take over everything and don't contribute anything," he'd often said.

That wasn't entirely true.

When the floods started swallowing the British Isles, they'd reached out to Biafra, a plea for help that was answered. Terms were drawn, equitable exchanges of services contracted. But while one hand reached out for help, the other wielded a knife. Once here, the Britons had insisted on their own lands and their own separate government. A compromise, aided by the British threat to deploy biological weapons, resulted in the Biafra-Britannia Alliance. Shared lands, shared governments, shared grievances. Her father had only been a boy when it happened, but held bitterly to the idea of Biafran independence, an independence his parents had died for in the late 2030s. He wasn't alone, but most people knew to keep their disagreements to themselves, especially if their daughter was a Mathematician, a profession that came with its own set of troubles. And better a mutually beneficial, if unwanted, alliance than what the French had done in Senegal, the Americans in Mexico.

As Amadi drove, he kept the rearview mirror partially trained on her, looking for an opening to start a chat that would no doubt lead to him saying that maybe they could swing by her father's place later, just for a moment, just to say hello. Nneoma avoided eye contact. She couldn't see her father, not for a quick hello, not today, not ever.

They pulled up to Shoprite and Nneoma hopped out. Her stomach grumbled and she loaded more fruit in her basket than she could eat in a week and cut the bread queue to the chagrin of the waiting customers. The man at the counter recognized her and handed over the usual selection of rolls and the crusty baguette she would eat with a twinge of guilt. The French didn't get money directly, but she still couldn't stop feeling as if she funded the idea of them. Ignoring the people staring at her, wondering who she might be (a diplomat? a Minister's girlfriend?), she walked the edges of the store, looping towards the checkout lane.

Then she felt him.

Nneoma slowed and picked up a small box of detergent, feigning interest in the instructions to track him from the corner of her eye. He was well-dressed, but not overly so. He looked at her confused, not sure why he was so drawn to her. Nneoma could feel the sadness rolling off him and she knew if she focused she'd be able to see his grief, clear as a splinter. She would see the source of it, its architecture, and the way it anchored to him. And she would be able to remove it.

It started when she was fourteen, in math class. She'd always been good at it, but had no designs on being a Mathematician. No one did. It wasn't a profession you chose or aspired to; you could either do it or you couldn't. That day, the teacher had showed them a long string of Furcal's Formula, purchased from the Center like a strain of a virus. To most of the other students, it was an impenetrable series of numbers and symbols, but to Nneoma it was as simple as the alphabet. Seeing the Formula unlocked something in her and from then on she could see a person's sadness as plainly as the clothes he wore.

The Center paid for the rest of her schooling, paid off the little debt her family had and bought them a new house. They trained her to hone her talents and go beyond merely seeing a person's grief till she knew how to remove it as well. She'd been doing it for so long she could exorcise the deepest of traumas for even the most resistant of patients. Then her mother died.

The man in the store stood there looking at her and Nneoma used his confusion to walk away. The grieving were often drawn to her, an inadvertent magnetic thing. It made her sheltered life blessed and necessary. The Center was very understanding and helped contracted Mathematicians screen their clients. No one was ever forced to do anything they didn't want to. Nneoma worked almost exclusively with parents who'd lost a child, wealthy couples who'd thought death couldn't touch them, till it did. When the Center partnered with governments to work with their distressed populations, the job was voluntary and most Mathematicians donated a few hours a week. Unlike Kioni, who worked with those people full time, and unlike Nneoma, who didn't work with them at all. Mother Kioni , Nneoma had called her, first with affection, then with increasing malice when it all turned ugly. The man in the tidy suit and good shoes was along the lines of her preferred clientele and he could very well become a client of hers in the future, but not today, not like this.

At checkout, the boy who scanned and bagged her groceries had a name tag that read "Martin," which may or may not have been his name. The Britons preferred their service workers with names they could pronounce, and most companies obliged them. The tattoo on his wrist indicated his citizenship-an original Biafran-and his class, third. No doubt he lived outside of the city and was tracked the minute he crossed the electronic threshold till he finished his shift and left. He was luckier than most.

At the car, she checked her personal phone, the number only her father, her assistant, and Kioni knew. Still no message. They hadn't spoken since she'd moved out. She had to know Nneoma worried, in spite of how they'd left things. None of their mutual New Kenyan contacts knew where to find her and Kioni's phone went unanswered. Maybe this was what it took for Kioni to exorcise her.

On the way to the school, Nneoma finished off two apples and a roll and flipped through her notes. She had done many such presentations, which were less about presenting and more about identifying potential Mathematicians, who had a way of feeling each other out. She ran a finger along the Formula, still mesmerized by it after all this time. She'd brought fifty-seven lines of it, though she would only need a few to test the students.

When things began to fall apart, the world cracked open by earthquakes and long dormant volcanoes stretched, yawned and bellowed, the churches (mosques, temples) fell, not just the physical buildings shaken to dust by tremors, but the institutions as well. Into the vacuum stepped Francisco Furcal, a Chilean Mathematician who discovered a formula that explained the universe. It, like the universe, was infinite and the idea that the formula had no end and, perhaps, by extension, humanity had no end, was exactly what the world had needed.

Over decades, people began to experiment with this infinite formula, and in the process discovered equations that coincided with the anatomy of the human body, making work like hers possible. A computer at the Center ran the Formula 24/7, testing its infiniteness. There were thousands and thousands of lines. People used to be able to tour the South African branch and watch the endless symbols race across a screen ticker-style. Then the Center closed to the public, and the rumors started that Furcal's Formula was wrong, not infinite, that the logic of it faltered millions and millions of permutations down the line, past anything a human could calculate in her lifetime.

They were just that, rumors, but then a man fell from the sky.

As they neared the school, they could see a few protesters with gleaming electronic placards. The angry red of angry men. Amadi slowed.

"Keep going, there are only ten."

But the number could triple by the time she was ready to leave. How did they always know where she'd be?

The car was waved through the school's outer gate, then the inner gate where Amadi's ID was checked, then double checked. When the guard decided that Amadi wasn't credentialed enough to wait within the inner gate, Nneoma stepped in. Her driver, her rules. The guard conceded as she'd known he would and Amadi parked the car under a covered spot out of the sun. Nneoma was greeted by Nkem Ozechi, the headmaster, a small, neat woman whose hands reminded her of Kioni's. She had a smug air about her and walked with a gait that was entirely too pleased with itself. She spoke to Nneoma as though they'd known each other for years. On a different day, Nneoma might have been charmed, interested, but she just wanted the session to be over with so she could go home.

The class was filled with bored faces, most around thirteen or fourteen (had she ever looked so young?) with few caring or understanding what she did, too untouched by tragedy to understand her necessity. But schools like these, which gathered the best and brightest several nations had to offer (according to Nkem Ozechi), paid the Center handsomely to have people like her speak and it was the easiest money she earned.

"How many of you can look at someone and know that they are sad?"

The whole class raised their hands.

"How many of you can tell someone is sad even if they are not crying?"

Most hands stayed up.

"How many of you can look at a person who is sad, know why they are sad and fix it?"

All hands lowered. She had their attention now as she explained what she did.

The talk lasted fifteen minutes before she brought it to a close.

"Some Mathematicians remove pain, some of us deal in negative emotions, but we all fix the equation of a person. The bravest"-she winked-"have tried their head at using the Formula to make the human body defy gravity, for physical endeavors, like flight."

The class giggled, the fallen man fresh in their minds.

"Furcal's Formula means that one day the smartest people can access the very fabric of the universe."

They applauded politely.

The headmaster stepped from the corner to moderate questions. The first were predictable and stupid. "Can you make people fall in love?" No. "Can you make someone become invisible?" No. Nkem Ozechi might have been embarrassed to know that their questions were no different from the children in the lower schools. Then (again predictably) someone posed a non-question.

"What you are doing is wrong." From a reed-thin boy with large teeth. Despite his thinness there was softness to him, a pampered look.

Nneoma put her hand up to stop Nkem Ozechi from interrupting. She could handle this. "Explain."

"Well, my dad says what you people do is wrong, that you shouldn't be stopping a person from feeling natural hardships. That's what it means to be human."

Someone in the back started to clap until Nneoma again raised her hand for silence. She studied the boy and noted on his wrist his father's occupation (lawyer), his class (first). She'd argued down many a person like his father, people who'd lived easy lives, who'd had moderate but manageable difficulties then dared to compare their meager hardship with unfathomable woes.

"Your father and those people protesting outside have no concept of what real pain is. As far as I'm concerned their feelings on this matter are invalid. I would never ask a person who hasn't tasted a dish whether it needs more salt."

The boy sat with his arms crossed, pouting. She hadn't changed his mind, you never could with people like that, but she'd shut him up.

In the quiet that followed another hand raised. Not her , Nneoma thought, not her . She'd been trying to ignore the girl since she walked into the classroom. She didn't need to look at her wrist to know that the girl was Senegalese, and had been affected by the Elimination. It was etched all over her, this sorrow.

"So you can make it go away?" They could have been the only two people in the room.

"Yes, I can." And to kill the dawning hope, "But it is a highly regulated and very expensive process. Most of my clients are heavily subsidized by their governments, but even then." And in case any hope remained, "You have to be a citizen."

The girl lowered her eyes to her lap, fighting tears. As though to mock her, she was flanked by a map on the wall, the entire globe splayed out as it had been seventy years ago and as it was now. Most of what had been North America was covered in water and a sea had replaced Europe. Russia was a soaked grave. The only continents unclaimed in whole or in part by the sea were Australia and what was now the United Countries but had once been Africa. The Elimination began after a moment of relative peace, after the French had won the trust of their hosts. The Senegalese newspapers that issued warnings were dismissed as conspiracy rags, rabble-rousers inventing trouble. But then the camps, the raids, and the mysterious illness that wiped out millions. Then the cabinet members murdered in their beds. And the girl had survived it. To be here, at a school like this on one of the rare scholarships they offered to displaced children, the girl must have lived through the unthinkable. The weight of her mourning was too much and Nneoma left the room, followed by Nkem Ozechi who clicked hurriedly behind her.

"Maybe some of them will be Mathematicians, like you."

Nneoma needed to gather herself. She saw the sign for the ladies room and stepped inside, swinging the door in Nkem Ozechi's face. None of those children would ever be Mathematicians; the room was as bare of genius as a pool of fish.

She checked the stalls to make sure she was alone and bent forward to take deep breaths. She rarely worked with refugees, true refugees, for this reason. The complexity of their suffering always took something from her. The only time she'd felt anything as strongly was after her mother had passed and her father was in full lament, listing to the side of ruin. How could Nneoma tell him that she couldn't even look at him without being broken by it? He would never understand. The day she'd tried to work on him, to eat her father's grief, she finally understood why it was forbidden to work on close family members. Their grief was your own and you could never get out of your head long enough to calculate it. The attempt had ended with them both sobbing, holding each other in comfort and worry, till her father had gotten so angry at the futility of it, the uselessness of her talents this one particular moment and had said words he could not take back.

The bathroom door creaked open. Nneoma knew who it was. The girl couldn't help but to seek her out. They stared at each other a while, the girl uncertain, till Nneoma held out her arms and the girl walked into them. Nneoma saw the sadness in her eyes and began to plot the results of it on an axis. At one point the girl's mother shredded by gunfire. Her brother taken in the night by a gang of thugs. Her father falling to the synthesized virus that attacked all the melanin in his skin till his body was an open sore. And other smaller hurts, hunger so deep she'd swallowed fistfuls of mud. Hiding from the men who'd turned on her after her father died. Sneaking into her old neighborhood to see the crisp new houses filled with the more fortunate of the French evacuees, those who hadn't been left behind to drown, and their children chased her away with rocks like she was a dog. Nneoma looked at every last suffering, traced the edges, weighed the mass. And then she took it.

No one had really been able to explain what happened then, why one person could take another person's grief. Mathematical theories abounded based on how humans were, in the plainest sense, a bulk of atoms held together by positives and negatives, an equation all their own, a type of cellular math. A theologian might call it a miracle, a kiss of grace from God's own mouth. Philosophers opined that it was actually the patient who gave up their sadness. But in that room it simply meant that a girl had an unbearable burden and then she did not.

The ride back home was silent, Amadi sensing her disquiet and resisting the casual detour he'd make past the junction that led to her father's house whenever they ventured to this side of town. At home, Nneoma went straight to bed, taking two of the pills that would let her sleep for twelve hours. After that she would be as close to normal as she could be. The girl's memories would lessen in rawness, becoming like a story she'd read in a book once. The girl would feel the same way. When Nneoma fell asleep, it was deep, black, dreamless thing with no light.

The next morning, she turned on the unit to see much of the same coverage as the day before except now the fallen man's widow had jumped into the fray, calling for a full audit of the Center's records and of Furcal's Formula. Nneoma snorted. It was the sort of thing that sounded right enough to win public support, but the truth was that the only experts who knew enough to audit anything all worked for the Center and it would take them decades to pore over it. More likely this was a ploy for a payoff, which the woman would get. The Furcals could afford it.

Nneoma told herself she wouldn't check her messages again for at least another hour and prepared for her daily run. A quick peek revealed that there wasn't anything waiting anyway. She keyed the code into the gate to lock it behind her, stretched, and launched.

The run cleared the last vestiges of yesterday's ghosts. She would call Claudine today to see how serious this whole falling thing was. There'd only be so much the PR rep could legally say, but dinner and a few drinks might loosen her tongue. Nneoma lengthened her stride the last mile home taking care to ease into it. The last time she'd burst into a sprint, she pulled a muscle and the pain eater assigned to her was a grim man with a nonexistent bedside manner. She'd felt his disapproval as he worked on her. No doubt he thought his talents wasted in her cozy sector and tolerated this rotation till he could get back to the camps. Nneoma disliked Mathematicians like him and they disliked ones like her. It was a miracle she and Kioni had lasted as long as they did.

As she cleared the corner around her compound, she saw a small crowd gathered at her gate. Protesters? she wondered in shock before she registered the familiar faces of her neighbors. When she neared, a man she recognized but could not name caught her by the shoulders.

"We called medical right away. She was banging on your gate and screaming. She is your friend, no? I've seen her with you before." He looked very sorry and suddenly Nneoma didn't want to know who was there to see her and why.

It was just a beggar. The woman wore no shoes and her toes were wounds. How on earth had she been able to bypass city security? Nneoma scrambled back when the woman reached out for her but was arrested by her fingers, delicate and spindly, like insect legs.

Those hands had once stroked her body. She had once kissed those palms and drawn those fingers into her mouth. She would recognize them anywhere.

"Nneoma we have to go, we have to go now." She was frantic and kept looking behind her.

Every bare inch of her skin was scratched or bitten or cut in some way. Her usually neat coif of dreadlocks were half missing, her scalp raw and puckered like someone had yanked them out. The smell that rolled from her was all sewage.

"Oh my god, Kioni, oh my god."

Kioni grabbed her wrists and wouldn't surrender them. "We have to go!"

Nneoma tried to talk around the horrified pit in her stomach. "Who did this to you? Where do we have to go?"

Kioni shook her head and sank to her knees. Nneoma tried to free one of her hands and, when she couldn't, pressed and held the metal insert under her palm that would alert security at the Center. They would know what to do.

From her current angle, Nneoma could see more of the damage on the other woman, more scratches, more bites on her arms concentrated below the elbow. And then something nagged and nagged at her till she remembered the Australian and the stories of him trying to eat himself.

"Kioni who did this?" Nneoma repeated, though her suspicion was beginning to clot into certainty and she feared the answer.

Kioni continued shaking her head and pressed her lips together like a child refusing to confess a lie.

Their fight had started when Nneoma had done the unthinkable, violating every boundary of their relationship (and a handful of Center rules) and asked Kioni to work on her father. Kioni, who volunteered herself to the displaced Senegalese and Algerians and Burkinababes and even the evacuees, anyone in dire need of a grief worker, was the last person she should have asked for such a thing. Nneoma had called her sanctimonious and Kioni had called her a spoiled rich girl who thought her pain was more important than it actually was. And then Kioni had asked her to leave.

Now she needed to get Kioni to the Center and get her help. Whatever was happening had to be fixed. She remembered again the Australian who had killed himself.

"They just come and they come and they come."

Nneoma crouched down to hear Kioni better. Most of her neighbors had moved beyond hearing distance, chased away by the smell. "Who comes?" she asked, trying to keep Kioni with her. Aid must be on their way.

"All of them, can't you see?"

She began to see what was happening to her former girlfriend.

How many people had Kioni worked with over the last decade, five thousand? Ten? Ten thousand traumas in her psyche, squeezing past each other, vying for the attention of their host. What would happen if you couldn't forget, if every emotion from every person whose grief you'd eaten came back up? It could happen if something went wrong with the formula millions and millions of permutations down the line. A thousand falling men landing on you.

Nneoma tried to retreat, to close her eyes and unsee, but she couldn't. Instinct took over and she raced to calculate it all. The breadth of it was so vast, too vast. It was just her and Kioni together, their burden excessive, even for two.

The last clear thought she would ever have was of her father, how crimson his burden had been when she'd tried to shoulder it, and how very pale it all seemed now.

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Catapult | What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky

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It means twenty-four hour news coverage. It means politicians doing damage control; activists egging on protests. It means Francisco Furcal's granddaughter at a press conference defending her family legacy. "My grandfather's formula is sound. Math is constant and absolute. Any problems that arise are the fault of those who miscalculate it."

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"Superwoman (Where Were You I Needed You)" By Stevie Wonder 

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"Superwoman (Where Were You I Needed You)" By Stevie Wonder 

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Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)

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Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)

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"WTF (Where They From)" feat. Pharrell Williams  By Missy Elliott 

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"WTF (Where They From)" feat. Pharrell Williams  By Missy Elliott 

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WTF (Where They From) [feat. Pharrell Williams]

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WTF (Where They From) [feat. Pharrell Williams]

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Missy Elliott Brings the Afro-Futuristic Funk on New Single “WTF” By Michael A. Gonzalez 

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Missy Elliott Brings the Afro-Futuristic Funk on New Single “WTF” By Michael A. Gonzalez 

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"I'm so futuristic," Missy Elliott raps on her new Pharrell Williams produced single "WTF (Where They From)." With a funky video that dropped today, Missy teamed with director Dave Myers to deliver a soul sonic return to form that reminds me of a cross Wong-Kar Wai and Spike Jonze. "I'm so far ahead of ya'll man, I'm on top of the stars." Known for being a perfectionist, Missy's last announced album The Block Party was supposed to be released in 2008, but was shelved. Missy has known "W.T.F." producer/rapper ("Ni**a, I think like a spaceship") Pharrell since they were teenagers growing-up in Virginia Beach and their collaboration is a seamless funky club banger that brings the electro-funk sweat as she has done so well since the beginning of her storied career.

Years before Afro-Futurism began a household phrase, Missy Elliott introduced her futuristic sound on Supa Dupa Fly changed the sound of Black music in 1997. With the release of her first single "The Rain," Missy seemingly became an "overnight" sensation. Yet, contrary what many fans might've known at the time, Miss E put in much work behind the scenes before becoming a visible success. She has released six top-selling solo discs (including 2002's double platinum Under Construction), won numerous awards and worked with various artists including Madonna, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, the Pussycat Dolls, Jazmine Sullivan, Keyshia Cole and Ciara.

"Since day one I've always did the kind of music that I wanted to do," Missy told me in 2005 when her last album The Cookbook was released. "Of course, when I told my mother that I was going to be a superstar, she thought that I was crazy. She wanted me to join the Army or the Navy, like my father. I met Timbaland in 1988 soon after his group SBI (Surrounded By Idiots) with Magoo and Pharrell had broken-up. We tried to get Teddy Riley's attention, but he wasn't checking' for us."

Nevertheless, after a chance meeting with Donald "DeVante Swing" DeGrate of platinum group Jodeci ( Forever My Lady, Diary of a Mad Band) in 1992, she and Tim were invited to join his budding production team Swing Mob in Rochester, New York.

Serving as the Jodeci's main songwriter and producer, DeVante was like a '90s Sly Stone, full of musical genius. Dubbed "Da Bassment," DeVante's house was where the future of electro-funk lived, worked and dipped dry baloney sandwiches into steaming bowls of Ooodles of Noodles. But, after four years of Black pop and poverty, Missy left well versed in the art of rapping, production and the business of music. Shortly after leaving, Missy and Tim worked on various projects with Adina Howard, SWV and Gina Thompson. Luckily, all of that changed when Missy and Tim were introduced to the late pop star Aaliyah in 1996. "Craig Kallman from Atlantic Records flew us to Detroit and Aaliyah just embraced us," Missy says. "Me and Tim were so nervous, but the three of us totally clicked."

Creating the seductive first single "If Your Girl Only Knew" during their first session, Kallman was impressed enough to ask the pair to produce six more tracks for Aaliyah's forthcoming One in a Million (1996) album. "At first, some DJs refused to play the single, because they just wasn't feeling it. Puff was the popular producer then, and one DJ said he wouldn't play the track because it, 'Didn't mix well with Puffy's records.' Thank goodness they got over that!"

Since then, Missy has had much success, but it's still been ten years since we've gotten any long-form (her last solo single was 2012's double release, "9th Inning" and "Triple Threat," both Timbaland productions) cyberfunk rap from her. The fan in me is hoping that, much like D'Angelo last year, Missy gives us the surprise album we've all been waiting for. "You have to respect her, because she always knows what she wants," says her sound engineer Jimmy Douglass, "and she's willing to make the needed sacrifices to get it done."

In 2005, Missy said, "Sometimes I'm conscious of what the audience will think, but that's a monkey I shake off my back. At the end of the road, if I fail, at least I won't regret it, because I still made something I loved and a piece of art that I wanted to do, instead of trying to please everyone else."

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Missy Elliott Brings the Afro-Futuristic Funk on New Single "WTF" * EBONY

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"I'm so futuristic," Missy Elliott raps on her new Pharrell Williams produced single "WTF (Where They From)." With a funky video that dropped today, Missy teamed with director Dave Myers to deliver a soul sonic return to form that reminds me of a cross Wong-Kar Wai and Spike Jonze.

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As an African coming to South Africa from the first African nation to gain independence from British colonial rule,Ghana, I realize now I had naive ideas about what freedom, liberty and equality truly mean globally. Having lived in places like NYC most of my life, I was aware of the provocations of my racial identity and the way it triggered those who found discomfort in my happiness and glow up. I learned that Melanin can often be seen as threatening but coming here really placed my body and identity into a whole new yet very familiar conversation on racially influenced bias and segregation which created an expected undertone for interaction with those different from me. I was suddenly on edge in a whole new way. It was all so blatant.

To constantly experience my body as a political tool started out intimidating but in this experience I have discovered it a strength..

Apart-ness - Apartheid
This idea of separation meant to cripple one group while elevating the other is quite audacious. I mean... How do you come to AFRICA and put up a sign reading "Europeans Only" that keeps us off our own land? Forcibly separating millions of people based on color while forbidding cross racial interaction and bonding. Displacement, disruption and division carried out legally and in plain daylight. One would wonder, Is there no shame left in this world? Going as far as specifically serving lower grade food to an entire group of people, depriving them of access to basic comforts, forcing them to learn in a language they do not desire to speak, beating, killing, destroying bodies, families and lives for your own gain while justifying this grave evil with bogus religion and science. Such epic audacious manipulation and theft which continues to this day. How can there be no anger? No bitterness? It lurks beneath the shadows like ghosts sitting heavily on my shadow. The Gods and ancestors are displeased. Still in agony from generational pain.

Controlled by fear of losing what was not theirs to be begin with, a minority chose hatred and separation as a pathway to maintaining control and wealth. Operating off apathy to other humans, cruelty was normalized just as we see it being done today. Separation creates isolated experience which in turn dulls empathy for those outside of our immediate world.

Seeing the effects of this gross injustice and the deeply rooted ways in which it affects my peers causes my mind to spin and my blood to boil. Yes we are angry. Angry over the incomplete dreams of our forefathers. Angry over the audacity of our greedy oppressors. Angry over the state of our world...

It's difficult to even begin to reconcile all this and so I put my frustration and unresolved conflicts into song. Shedding the old rage to birth a new SELF that reaches inward for strength and reconciliation. My spirit possesses a firm resolve that while we waste energy and time seeking God outside, seeking a face we do not recognize, a face of a God who looks nothing like us, one who seems to believes we are lesser than, we distract ourselves from the power of the great God within us. The fearless, powerful God that runs through our veins and spirit. That which cannot be corrupted or destroyed.

NGIWUNKULUNKULU , which means I AM GOD, serves as a reminder of our identity as Godly beings with supernatural potential. It is alsoforme, a release of anger and frustration towards myself and the "white man". A journey to clarity and purpose. An honest expression of my desires for my people, and a reminder of the divine nature of the feminine.

It is time for the black man to re-envision himself as super-powerful. Indestructible, free androoted from the core of the inner being. We must extend our hands beyond our immediate borders to build community and solidarity. Standing firmly on the strength of ancestral bonds and powers of beings who walked this earth with dignity, unimaginable spiritual strength and immense intellect unique to who we are yet connected to cultures worldwide. We must rediscover the SELF with love, compassion and purpose as an entry point to being able to extend that to life around us. Gracefully letting go of the weight our past in order to levitate and fly free. No longer shackled in mind, body or spirit.

Just as separation was the tool of destruction, we as black people and humans across this grand globe must come together in dialogue with an open mind and heart toheal. There is much progress to be made.We must rise to love and build ourselves. Remaining unafraid of our excellence and God nature, we must push boundaries and occupy spaces otherwise closed off to us in order to amplify our voices. We must speak up against evil and stand up for what is right. We must create new spaces where we are reminded of who we are and who we want to be. We must invest in generational wealth and the breaking of generational curses. We must reconnect the dots between us and our brothers and sisters in the diaspora. These are our greatest allies. This is our time and we are coming... POWER TO THE GOD WITHIN.

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As an African coming to South Africa from the first African nation to gain independence from British colonial rule,Ghana, I realize now I had naive ideas about what freedom, liberty and equality truly mean globally.

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Black Girl Magic Y'all Can't Stand It by E. Von Solt

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Black Girl Magic Y'all Can't Stand It by E. Von Solt

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Thesis on Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer

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Afrofuturistic Art in 2017 By Andre Naquian-Wheeler 

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Afrofuturistic Art in 2017 By Andre Naquian-Wheeler 

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Artists to check out

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Beyoncé began her Grammys performance last month by flaunting her swollen belly and donning a golden baroque headdress in another Lemonade-era reference to the Yoruba goddess Oshun. Meanwhile, projections of the singer appeared and dissolved according to the numeric rhythms of the Fibonacci series, and the poetry of Somali writer Warsan Shire reverberated in our ears. This disorienting stew of virtual reality and live performance, mythology and art, Western and African references, concluded with a tableau vivant in which Tina Knowles (Beyoncé's mother), Beyoncé, and Blue Ivy sat together posed like royalty. Here were three generations of black women staring right at us: the past, present, and future of blackness.

Beyoncé's performance was afrofuturism on steroids. Performed to an audience of 26 million, it was a pivotal moment: afrofuturism, a black aesthetic that has been curated and developed since the 70s through sci-fi films like Space is the Place and Blade, the writings of Octavia Butler, and the jazz of Sun Ra, was entering its largest platform yet.

What is afrofuturism? Even afrofuturists struggle to answer that succinctly. The aesthetic is multicultural, transhistorical, and concerns itself with the past, present, and future effects of the African and black diaspora. Professor John Jennings, co-curator of last year's New York Public Library exhibition Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination, explains the pluralistic aesthetic like this: "Afrofuturism is not science fiction, but about imagining different spaces of creative thought that don't put your identity in a box." Still, afrofuturism is better seen than explained. Pop blessings like Solange's "Cranes in the Sky" music video, Janelle Monáe's ArchAndroid album cover, and TLC's "No Scrubs" video could all be listed as "Required Viewings" for an "Afrofuturism 101" course.

As the aesthetic enters the mainstream, here are six artists using afrofuturism to explore the identities and lives of African and black people in 2017.

Olalekan Jeyifous
"Afrofuturism doesn't exist as prominently in the public imagination as I believe it should and can," says Olalekan Jeyifous, a Brooklyn-based artist and designer. A graduate of Cornell University, Jeyifous makes work that imagines what the future of Nigeria, his home country, could become. His latest project, Shanty Megastructures (on show at the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon this month), features 360° virtual-reality renderings of futuristic African metroplexes. Cars fly in the air, wind turbines spin, yet, despite all the eco-technological advancements, the distinctive shanty buildings found in cities like Lagos remain. Jeyifous firmly believes in the power of afrofuturism. "There's a slow-evolving tolerance for the different and the weird and a broadening of the acceptable and the possible," he says. "For instance, look at what artists like André 3000 did for our perceptions of your average menacing and masculine rapper. 10 years later, you have a guy from the Deep South who goes by the moniker Young Thug, wearing a dress on his album cover and the culture by-and-large is cool with that."
vigilism.com

Awol Erizku
Born in Ethiopia, Awol Erizku primarily concerns himself with photographing people of color. He takes his visuals a step further by replacing figures in classical works - which for the longest time have been predominantly and unapologetically white - with people of color. As he told i-D last year, this aesthetic was birthed out of a lack of representation: "When I was a kid and I went to museums, I saw a lot of art that didn't represent me, so I'm trying to bring what I find valuable." Last month, he collaborated with Beyoncé on her much-talked-about photo series I Have Three Hearts, which revealed her second pregnancy. The shoot borrows from both Renaissance iconography and African mythology, mixing two contrasting cultures to create an intriguing gumbo. Water is also a recurring theme in the photo series. Erizku captures Beyoncé twirling around at the bottom of a pool, like the African spirit Mami Wata, a divine mermaid-like figure. While in the next set of images, the singer sits with a veil covering her face, like the Virgin Mary. Like Erizku's previous projects, the photo series imagines a future in which black people can reconcile their African heritage and Western culture in a harmonious personal history.
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Inyegumena Nosegbe
"I believe that afrofuturism is a state of being; it's simply thriving, unapologetically, in your blackness," says Inyegumena Nosegbe, a recent graduate of Parsons's Communication Design program. During her Parsons years, Nosegbe created Curated Culture, a quarterly art publication that spotlights the overlooked works of past and present black artists. In one edition, the work of Jean-Michael Basquiat is displayed alongside work by contemporary afrofuturist artists. In the same issue, the past is brought into the present through an analysis of 70s ads targeted towards black consumers. Nosegbe's other projects include Dear White America (trigger warning: graphic scenes), a collection of the crime scene photographs of victims of police brutality. Nosegbe hopes her work sparks action within her audience. "The next step is to develop something that moves us away from talking about improving our lives, to actively putting in the work that will take us there," she says.
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Krista Franklin calls her collages a life-long project in disruption. They came about, initially, because she was a "mediocre drawer," she says. "Out of my frustration I turned to cutting up pictures and reconstructing them," she says. "Later, it became more intentional and I was using the acts of 'cutting up,' deconstruction, and reconstruction in order to decolonize my gaze and the narratives that I'd been indoctrinated with about myself, my community, and my ancestry as an African-American/black woman." Franklin, who holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, first engaged with afrofuturism in the late 90s through a LISTSERV. "A modest number of African diaspora writers, critics, and cultural producers congregated online to discuss and work to define what the term encompassed and included," says Franklin. "Some of the individuals on that LISTSERV were Alondra Nelson, Tricia Rose, Nalo Hopkinson, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), and Greg Tate." She cites people who may not even know/have known of afrofuturism as major points of inspiration: Aaliyah, Pharrell Williams, Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Harriet Tubman. "No one ever refers to [Tubman] as an Afrofuturist," says Franklin, "But she was probably one of the first examples. I mean, she led folks to a future freedom following a star in the sky, and using the technology of a gun." Krista Franklin

kristafranklin.com

Martine Syms
Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Martine Syms is perhaps best known for her 2013 piece "The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto." A poetic statement written for "whomever will join me in the future of black imagination," it outlines the purpose and meaning of afrofuturism by waving away concerns with aliens, flying cars, and time travel and forcing the reader to take accountability for the future. Its central question is: "Earth is all we have. What will we do with it?" One of Syms's other most poignant pieces is the website ReadingTrayvonMartin.com. Described by the artist as a "personal bibliography," the site is a collection of all the essays, articles, and law documents that Syms read and bookmarked related to the Trayvon Martin murder case. As you scroll through the links, a black hoodie, a can of Arizona tea, and a bag of skittles sit in the center of the screen. The website conveys not only the all-consuming, sometimes confusing, wave of media attention the tragic murder received, but also the personal obsession over facts and news coverage that our 24/7 digital age can foster. As technology (Twitter and the cellphone tapings of police shootings, for example) continues to affect the fast-changing landscape of Black politics, creating an archive of this future-in-progress is a big deal.
martinesyms.com

Laolu Senbanjo
Laolu Senbanjo's intricate designs employ the same spiraled motifs used by the Yoruba people during religious rituals. (The Yoruba have a rich West African history dating all the way back to the 7th century BCE.) At first, his Christian Nigerian parents called the traditional drawings "demonic," Senbanjo remembers. "There are a lot of neocolonial problems with Yoruba mythology," he explains. "We took the [Christian] religion from Britain, but not the technology, unfortunately. In school, they would teach us about Greek mythology, but they would not teach Yoruba mythology. Thankfully, my grandmother was very adamant about teaching me." When he moved to Brooklyn, Senbanjo discovered a welcoming, supportive audience for his art. He collaborated with Nike on pair of special edition Air Max sneakers and was recently called on by Beyoncé. Remember the chalk-white body paint in the "Sorry" music video? That was Senbanjo. "[Beyoncé] is the kind of person that knows exactly what she wants to achieve and looks for people who are in line with the picture she wants to paint," he says. Seeing Yoruba mythology enter the mainstream brings Senbanjo great joy. Not because Western audiences are appreciating West African culture, but because West Africans are now appreciating West African culture. "Nigerians are embracing this part of our culture that has long been buried," he says, audibly beaming.
laolu.nyc

Credits

Text André-Naquian Wheeler
Images courtesy of the artists

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why afrofuturism is the art movement we need in 2017

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Beyoncé began her Grammys performance last month by flaunting her swollen belly and donning a golden baroque headdress in another Lemonade-era reference to the Yoruba goddess Oshun. Meanwhile, projections of the singer appeared and dissolved according to the numeric rhythms of the Fibonacci series, and the poetry of Somali writer Warsan Shire reverberated in our ears.

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Afrofuturism and Black Identity in Art, Culture and Politics By Patina Lee 

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Afrofuturism and Black Identity in Art, Culture and Politics By Patina Lee 

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" For those who adopt the Afrofuturist paradigm, the ideas can take you light-years away from the place you call home, only to return knowing you had had everything you needed from the start. Readers, our future is now."[1]

This is how Ytasha Womack introduces Afrofuturism to her audiences, in the beginning of a book of the same name. If you scratch beneath the surface and start exploring what the term means, you'll find that it is branched into several paths, shaped by a similar ideology. As we will have seen, it might sound that what Womack alludes to in her introduction applies to Afro Surrealism, which some tend to observe as an independent category. Rather than separating one from another, we will try to look at all the aspects of Afrofuturism and how its layers are intertwined, reclaiming racial identity in a unique, inspiring manner.

Afrofuturism - How The Term Came To Be

As it usually happens with ideas that emerge spontaneously, Afrofuturism didn't have a name for a long time. Many of its considered proponents were Afrofuturists without even knowing - years, even decades before the term was coined in 1994 by the writer Mark Dery, who used it in his essay Black to the Future in order to identify a phenomenon he had observed. Namely, Dery discerned a certain trend among young African Americans that was based on science fiction and technology, at the same time being connected to black people and searching for their role in a constructed narrative. The black college students that the author describes were passionate about their vision of popular culture and fiction, presuming that these are the media with an unprecedented power to affect social change. One of the then-students and a prominent Afrofuturist to be, Alondra Nelson, mentions the Internet as a predominant factor in bringing all the people together, discerning the beginning of a new era in black history.[2]

Defining Afrofuturism

So what is Afrofuturism? Womack quotes the curator Ingrid LaFleur who defines it as " a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens".[3] To this concise definition, Womack adds her own personal touch, making the terms future and liberation come together. The context that this correlation provides might be one of the most important aspects of the movement - although the term movement should be used with precaution, given that its pacifist, non-intrusive spirit is contradictory to what revolutionary movements may imply today. In fact, the beauty of Afrofuturism lies in its potential to make a change without interfering with anyone else's reality. In that sense, Afrofuturism is a methodology rather than a movement.

Afrofuturism In Music

During the nineties, the possibility of Afrofuturism as an actual "thing" was considered from various angles, and thus many of its proclaimed pioneers were found among the figures from our collective history. Traces of Afrofuturism exist in music, visual arts, books and popular culture, all of them contributing to a genesis of Afrofuturist aesthetics. As a figure with one of the most distinct styles, both in visual terms and in terms of sound, the avant-garde musician Sun Ra is considered to be the main pioneer of Afrofuturism. Then, there is the funk legend George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic; Jimi Hendrix and his otherworldly guitar playing; a list of musicians and DJs from our time, producing electronic music or hip hop jams that include surreal elements, participating in the establishment of a new, mythical black experience. In terms of their appearances and the themes of their songs, we could also consider the iconic Erykah Badu and Grace Jones as two great Afrofuturist women in the music industry. Apart from them, one of the most notable Afrofuturist musicians of our time is certainly Janelle Monáe. Some argue that even the Knowles sisters, Beyonce and Solange, bring the motive of black women into the "future is now" context within pop culture.

Sun Ra

Sun Ra is not merely a pioneer, but also a symbol of Afrofuturism in his own respect. His music was a form of meditation on the African heritage, but also innately progressive, inasmuch as the artist himself was a gifted and intelligent individual, which was apparent from his early beginnings. Performing for many years with his band Arkestra (which continues to perform to this day), his costumes and stage designs were suggestive of science fiction and cyber reality. At the same time, through their aesthetic appeal and gestures, the musicians reflected on ancient Egypt and other motives from the precolonial Africa. But one of the main reasons why we can safely say that this artist is the original Afrofuturists lies in the way that he re-invented himself as a person and a performer, having denied his given name Herman Blount, and turning his entire life story into a myth. At some point - and the actual date remains unknown - Ra claimed to have had an epiphany, which he described as a journey to Saturn (or at least to what he had thought was Saturn). The journey supposedly turned Ra's body into " something else", and made him see through himself.[4] In addition, the "aliens" also made him see that he should drop college (which he did). The musician was persistent in his endeavor to make this story his personal life experience, so much that you would eventually stop questioning it. He even succeeded in keeping his date of birth secret. In a way, Ra's iconic existence was a personification of Afrofuturism.

Science Fiction and Its Relationship with Black Culture

Although we can find lots of Afrofuturist motives in music, it is almost certain that one of its main mediums is a sci fi narrative, transfigured into a book, a comic or a film (just like it usually happens with science fiction). In the process of fantasy reading, we often find our own traits portrayed in one of the universal identities, usually taken from the idealized character that we encounter in these stories - the main hero, the anti hero, sometimes even a really cool villain. Furthermore, seeing that character on screen could have an even greater effect on people. However, in the period between 1950s and 1990s, there had been almost no black cosmonauts, magical beings, heroes or space travelers in the majority of the world's favorite sci fi scripts. In case they do appear, such as in the original Planet of the Apes or Night of the Living Dead, they usually do not last long enough to see the end of the story.

PUMZI from Awali Entertainment on Vimeo.

A New Sci Fi World

This pattern was abandoned in the 90s, partly thanks to some of the ground-breaking movies from this period, such as The Matrix and Blade. The former is known for its multietnic visionary depictions, including the mythical city of Zion, appropriated from the famous William Gibson novel Neuromancer. The latter had its plot line revolve around a black vampire, introducing this type of fictional character to the broader audiences for the first time. Apart from the mainstream movies (Ytasha Womack also mentions Will Smith and his constant reappearance as the leading black sci fi hero), there is an increasing number of books written on the subject of reassessing black history through some of the most miraculous stories. One of them is William Hayashi's Darkside Trilogy that envisions black population living on the dark side of the Moon even before Neil Armstrong was sent off.[5] But this continues to be a very popular topic today - such as Ayesha Hameed's story of the Black Atlantis, inspired by the music of an Afrofuturist electronic duo Drexciya. In her story, former slaves adapt to living underwater and coexist with the rest of the Atlantic inhabitants (the show will be on view in London on November 5th).

Afrofuturism and Afro Surrealism - Is There A Cultural Difference Between the Two?

There were some words about Afro Surrealism earlier and how it stems from the same root, but ends up being somewhat different from Afrofuturism. This type of surrealism is ontologically opposed to European Surrealism, being that it considers real life and the present moment as a platform for the creation of the "surreal". In their manifesto, written by D. Scot Miller, the author claims that Afro Surrealism is " Ambiguous as Prince, black as Fanon, literary as Reed, dandy as André Leon Tallysees".[6] It is inter-sexed, inclusive, cross-boundary, silly and profound (his exact words), and in that sense, in the context of the present, it is surreal. The manifesto mentions the name of Kehinde Wiley and his observation that " There is no objective image. And there is no way to objectively view the image itself". Interestingly, the term was invented in 1988 (before Afrofuturism), by Amiri Baraka, the famous writer associated with the Black Arts Movement. He used it to describe a particular style of writing that he recognized in Henry Dumas' work, based on the ancient mysteries that are ambiguously relevant both to the past and the present.

The Motive Of Alienation and the Non-Human

Alondra Nelson mentioned the significance of the Internet in the development of Afrofuturism referring to an online discussion poll that she had launched in the late nineties. It helped bring all of the thinkers, students and scholars together, and generating a community. The members of this group talked about a phenomenon of "cultural abduction", and apart from the examples that we have already mentioned in this article, this also applied to the systematic ignorance of black scientists whose names were not put in history books. Ytasha Womack goes one step further in analyzing the black experience and the injustice that the African Americans were subject to, in particular. She reminds the readers of the first version of the US Constitution, according to which African people were not considered people at all. Just like the Native Americans and women, Africans were considered not entirely human (three-fifths human, to be precise). However unimaginable this concept may sound to a person living in the 21st century, it is this "dehumanization" of black people (and of anyone who wasn't a white male) that was maliciously used in laws, in order to reinforce the white privilege. In addition, the USA is not the only example of this brutal behavior, nor are the African Americans the only ones who suffered the consequences of such system.

Ytasha Womack uses this example, and inspired by Mark Dery's writings, she compares black people to alien abductees. After examining the plot line of Blade Runner, Dery found relations between slavery and alien abduction, finding a semantic bond between the "alien" and the "other". This metaphor has been recognized as a powerful form of criticism by an Afrofuturist professor Reynaldo Anderson, who speaks about the Africans as the " first alien abductees, kidnapped by strange people who take us over by ships and conduct scientific experiments on us. They bred us. They came up with a taxonomy of the people they bred: mulato, octoroon, quadroon."[7]

People of African Descent - Writing Other Histories, Modeling the Future and Living in the "Now"

Let us reflect, once again, on Sun Ra and his idiosyncratic character. While he may be an extreme example, his mystical, futuristic life story is a perfect illustration of how Afrofuturism can operate. Our history has been shaped by the white civilization, which is something we rarely question, assuming all of the facts to be true - and assuming there's nothing to add to the truth told by the white people. Being that science fiction is one of the main premises of Afrofuturism, we can rely on its curiosity, its imaginative potential and its borderline altruistic nature to help us re-think the past, and re-imagine the possible futures. In that sense, Womack's beautifully put introduction states correctly that the future is now. Creatives, writers and musicians of African descent unite in telling their stories through an afrofuturist perspective, constructing new worlds and realities that anticipate possible futures, coinciding with the present, and at times, reclaiming the past. Being very similar, ideologically, to the Black Arts Movement , Afrofuturism is Afro-centric and affirmative. It offers another channel, another perspective on what has been given. It stems from the idea that the world and the Anthropocene need not be arranged according to the ideals and the stories of a white male figure (at least not any more). It is about assessing and reassessing race, cultural differences, but also some less obviously related phenomena - philosophy, and historical events. It is a way of seeing, or as Womack (whose amazing book I've quoted many times) says herself, a prism for evolution.
References:

Womack Y., (2013), Afrofuturism : the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. Lawrence Hill Books

Rambsy II, H., (2012), A Notebook on Afrofuturism. Cultural Front

LaFleur, I., Visual Aesthetics of Afrofuturism , TEDx Fort Greene Salon, YouTube, September 25, 2011 [October 14, 2016]

Szwed, J. F., (1998). Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. Da Capo Press

Hayashi, W., , [October 16, 2016]

Scot Miller, D., AfroSurreal Manifesto. Black Is The New Black - A 21st Century Manifesto , http://dscotmiller.blogspot.co.uk/ [October 16, 2016]

Anderson, R., (2012). Critical Afrofuturism: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric, Sequential Art, and Post-Apocalyptic Black Identity.

Featured images: Sun Ra; Drexciya - Mantaray, video still. All images used for illustrative purposes only.

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Afrofuturism and Black Identity in Art, Culture and Politics | Widewalls

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" For those who adopt the Afrofuturist paradigm, the ideas can take you light-years away from the place you call home, only to return knowing you had had everything you needed from the start. Readers, our future is now."[1] This is how Ytasha Womack introduces Afrofuturism to her audiences, in the beginning of a book of the same name.

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Seven Steps to Perfection: A Guide Towards the Afrofuture in Music By Alex Smith 

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Seven Steps to Perfection: A Guide Towards the Afrofuture in Music By Alex Smith 

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Music and Afrofuturism

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Seven Steps to Perfection: A Guide Towards the Afrofuture in Music By Alex Smith · Illustration byMax Loffler · February 22, 2019
In the '90s, R&B and hip-hop music videos by groups like Blaque, OutKast, and Missy Elliott burst out of the hive with the vibrancy of ritual, referencing everything from atmospheric independent African diaspora films, like Daughters of the Dustto Star Trek. These videos were high fantasy-but with the ubiquitous '90s video sheen of exaggerated colorwash and fisheye-lens effects.

Also during the '90s, the term Afrofuturism was coined to discuss the rising interest in surreal, fantastical, and futuristic Black literature (from the likes of Samuel Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Charles Saunders), and its connection to other forms of Black art (music and visual art in particular) that married science fiction tropes and ideas with Black radical politics, spirituality, and lived experiences. The idea then was to project idealized forms of Blackness into the future without eschewing any of the aesthetic markings that made Black existence in a post-colonial world unique. Artists imagined urban habitation adorned with updated ritual practice, the ghetto as space station geared out in chrome, and general narratives about space travel to coincide with the ecstasy of the music: the layered, heavy beats and hazy, jazz-inspired productions that were the norm of the time. This gave way to the explorations of Erykah Badu, Kendrick Lamar, and Janelle Monae.

The idea of Black music reaching into the pockets of the future is a real one. From Sun Ra to Alice Coltrane, from Funkadelic to Afrika Bambaataa, Black music has often appeared to be nonlinear, simultaneously calling upon the ancestors through ASR-10s, sound systems, and now even cell phones. This practice is a key aspect of Afrofuturism. While detractors or skeptics might call Afrofuturism simply "sci-fi with an ankh for the dash symbol," it's about more than just coating science fiction with the trappings of a Pan-African aesthetic, more than just Luke Skywalker in a dashiki. For Afrofuturists, particularly in music and the visual presentation of that music, it is the insistence that, because of consistent Black struggle against oppression, that the possible future is often more desirable than the well-known present.

Black Panther came out in February of 2018 and absolutely destroyed box office records, becoming the first comic book film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture-it's since become a reference point for a pop culture vision of Afrofuturism. Certainly Black Panther's success has opened the world up to the possibility of Afrofuturism, of Black people being involved in creating alternative fantasies, projecting those fantasies into the real world through sustainable self-determination. Much like the film's fictional African country Wakanda, there's a sense that before Black Panther, Afrofuturism was a niche interest, shut off from the rest of the world outside of academia and literature and the underground, only to be revealed to mainstream pop culture in grand, fully-realized form. Well, that is only partly the case. It's certainly true that Afrofuturists have always been visionaries, but the artists working with these themes today often dismiss trends that other musicians they're grouped with are mired in. It's a movement, not a monolith.

The argument persists: Is futurist Black music marginalized because the mainstream favors what it views as Black mundanity or negativity, or is it less acknowledged because the communities involved in making that music tend to revel in their rebel status? As always though, there's often more than just what's on the surface. Finding one's community and finding one's tribe is essentially a continuous journey, and the paths to liberation, like the ongoing civil rights movement that both inspires (and is inspiring to) Black art, music, and culture, are multifaceted, offering multiple answers to that argument. There isn't an essential scene of musicians creating Afrofuturism as a genre; it's a nebulous idea with its own trappings but not locked in a specific sound. Elements of Afrofuturism can be found in many movements, from the emergence of house music in the queer Black dance clubs of Chicago to the formation of the truly futurist vanguard sounds of Detroit techno. More important than fixing a genre or sound to the concept of Black futurity is the journey it takes to get there, the path that Afrofuturism helms towards liberation.

Here are seven steps to an Afrofuturist revolution in sound.

The Epiphany

The epiphany is the initiation, the first step towards what we'll call "Afrotopia." This moment is where the creative takes a step outside of their comfort zone and experiments with shaking up the status quo. Divine Styler's Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light is a wild, noisy hodgepodge of transcendent beats, punk rock edge, and ecstatic lyrical spellwork. Often heralded as the first noise-rap record-indeed, there is a ton of feedback on this recording- Spiral Walls represents Divine Styler's not-so-subtle movement from the boom-bap hip-hop of previous outings into a stranger, more daring, future-forward headspace.
Further listening:
2Mex and Longevity, Sweat Lodge Infinite

Eagle Nebula, Nebulizer

Ancestral Memory Mapping

Moor Mother is a legend among noisemakers, with her Fetish Bones album gaining worldwide acclaim. Her hometown of Philadelphia already knew her genius well; on her early material, she crafted strange, witchy screeds tracing a nonlinear path of African ancestry to the present day. Finding the ancestral map, understanding a lineage that connects the past to all timelines, is essential post-epiphany praxis for any Afrofuturist.
Further listening:
The Revolt

Elucid's Osage album is a blistering, 16-minute track that unfolds in 10 parts, wrapped in dark beats and chaotic glitches, the perfect soundtrack for a rebellion. Dedicated to Osage Avenue, a street in Philadelphia bombed by the police in 1984 in an attempt to rid the city of a group of Black radicals named MOVE, the Osage record is pure anger, channeling reality as lived apocalypse. Elucid laces lines like, "I was raised on thug poetry / Broke loops and coded roots" with vocal samples from MOVE members and ghostly, violent-sounding production RZA could be caught head-nodding to. Anger and outrage is an essential part of the Afrofuturist milieu, and Osage delivers it.
Further listening:
Hprizm, Magnetic Memory

Nicole Mitchell and Haki Madhubuti, Liberation Narratives

Enter the Dystopia

After the revolt comes dystopia-the uncertainty, the cracked neon lights, the fractured husks of armored cars that litter the ghetto landscape as a reminder of some catastrophe narrowly averted. Okanex's Summons is the perfect record for navigating this possible future. These are lush, synth-drenched beats; stammering 808s and gated reverb ride over simmering melancholic chords like the ephemera of a cyberpunk dreamscape. An instrumental record, it's the perfect soundtrack for night driving or battling rival gangs for control of the dirt.
Further listening:
John Morrison, Southwest Psychedelphia

Reshaping the World

When it is time to rebuild, Mourning [A] BLKStar, a Cleveland Afrofuturist R&B/jazz collective, will provide the hypnotic backbeat. This record soothes, conjures, and uplifts, crystallizing the past (the soulful gospel of "Wanders") and pointing towards the future (the dirge-y crunch of "Shine Sails Again").
Further listening:
Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program, Stargate Music

The Afrotopia

Alien Cartoon is a frenetic, Afrobeat-laden celebration, a rare instance of Black boy joy unfiltered and uninhibited by hip-hop machismo, electronic music's pseudo-intellectual posturing, or by normative patterns of rhythm. Initially designed to be the soundtrack for a bizarre fashion show, Ibaaku creates music for Miles Morales, the current Spider-Man, to swing to after the revolution. Moving from dense, drum-heavy tracks like "Yang Fogoye" to romantic, slow-plucked elegies like "Monkey Boy," Alien Cartoon gives us a vision for what life will be like unfettered by struggle, never forgetting what got us there.
Further listening:
Onyx Ashanti, Exploration (2011)

Wizard Apprentice, I Am Invisible

Transcendence

Ah, we made it, traveler! We have shed our corporeal bodies and have become one with the ether. Let's listen to Somewhere to Decent to Live, by electronic dub musicians Space Afrika. A duo from the U.K., they have shied away from the Afrofuturist label in interviews, despite their name and despite tracks like "Gwabh" evoking the power of said name. The subtle tribal rhythms of West Africa weave a path underneath sparse, droning sounds that don't so much as envelope the listener as they seem to constantly be opening doors and pathways to larger spaces. With Somewhere Decent to Live, we have finally transcended genre, we've shed material fiber, and we've come back into the whole. Proponents of Afrofuturism's adherence to the movement's roots in African traditions and nonlinear expression will say that we are back where we started, back where we've always been.
Further listening:
JoAnn McNeil, Soft Reset

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Seven Steps to Perfection: A Guide Towards the Afrofuture in Music

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Seven Steps to Perfection: A Guide Towards the Afrofuture in Music By Alex Smith · Illustration byMax Loffler · February 22, 2019 In the '90s, R&B and hip-hop music videos by groups like Blaque, OutKast, and Missy Elliott burst out of the hive with the vibrancy of ritual, referencing everything from atmospheric independent African diaspora films, like Daughters of the Dust to Star Trek.