Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (9 page)

Currently, Craft is living in Italy with his wife, who is a turntablist. His latest music exploration is “breaking the sound barrier,” he says. “When you think of music in the West like pop and rock, the frame of that music is based on twelve notes, the chromatic scale. Those twelve notes are cool; it gave us a lot of cool music, but is that all there is? If I drop a spoon, it might not be one of those twelve notes. But what if I make the sound of that spoon? You can use any sound and build music from it.” Noting that Mahalia Jackson and the famous blues musicians played “blue notes,” or notes between the scale, Craft says there are a host of sounds we're just not exploring.

“When you think about all the great music that came from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, all the music we dig today comes from twelve notes. I'm not saying get rid of those twelve notes. I love what music has done and what it will be. But as a musician who is concerned about music, I say, what's beyond those twelve notes?”

Jimi Hendrix's use of reverb on the guitar is viewed in Afrofuturistic terms as the use of new sound. “If you have an electric guitar and it's loud, you will hear some crazy sounds,” says Craft. “Jimi Hendrix did it with feedback. It's not the idea of notes, but beyond those notes we have sound. If you go to school, they teach you theory about an A major chord, C major, based on the chromatic scale, which are technically numbers. They're telling us that music is really math. It seemed to me that when you listen to music, you're not thinking about trigonometry or anything, you're just feeling it. It dawned on me, music is not about math, and it's about sound.” Is there an undiscovered world of music with sounds we've yet to utilize?

“It's an art form you can't see. It's aural. It's sonic. If it's sonic and emotional, can't you take any sound and get it to speak? Instead of playing the guitar like Jimi, you take a bread knife and take it up and down a string, put it on a floor and step on it. You can make all these crazy sounds, but can you get them to communicate? The challenge for futuristic invention is to get new sounds to communicate.”

Janelle Monáe is a modern-day musical paradox. Sporting a coiffed 1950s pompadour and snug tuxedo, the Kansas-born singer's futuristic sound is rich with romance-craving droids and time travel. She was discovered by Outkast's Big Boi, another Afrofuturistic point person, who introduced her to Bad Boy Records' Sean Combs, arguably hip-hop's greatest marketer. Monáe's music, look, and frenetic dance channel James Brown,
Stankonia
, big-band-era Duke Ellington, and the best in uplifting sonic sound. Her shock-and-awe demeanor and masculine façade are a visual shout-out to Grace Jones. Her powerful vocals evoke memories of jazz greats.

Her music has a story.

Monáe's alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, is a silver metallic-dipped android sent to “free the citizens of Metropolis from the Great Divide,” a secret society using time travel to suppress freedom and love throughout the ages. When the ArchAndroid returns, the android community will be free. The space saga includes love, revolution, and heroism, complete with an android uprising, freedom fights, and ultimate peace.

Metropolis combines such a wide array of time periods, sounds, layers, and intrigue that it feels like audio time travel. Even the music's mythology has a mythology. Monáe likes to say that her tunes are created at the “Palace of Dogs,” a place that cannot be spoken of.

Monáe, too, uses traditional orchestra instruments courtesy of the Wondaland ArchOrchestra as well as kinetic computergenerated beats.

Just in case the purpose of these hyperlayered metaphors and musical arrangements goes over your head, Monáe distributes the Ten Droid Commandments at her concert. Written like P-Funk hyperbole, the commandments instruct attendees on how to experience the music.

Commandment 4: “Please be aware that the songs you will hear are electric: be careful as you experience them and interact with electrical devices, drink water or touch others. The Wondaland Arts Society will not be held responsible for melted telecommunications devices or injuries resulting from lockback, sweat-tech, leaveweave, poparm, shockjaw, electrobutt, or any other maladies or malfunctions caused by the jam.”

Commandment 6: “Abandon your expectations about art, race, gender, culture and gravity.”

Commandment 7: “Before the show, feel free to walk about the premises impersonating one of the many inspirations of the ArchanDroid Emotion Picture: (Choose One) Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, Outkast, Stevie Wonder, Octavia Butler, David Bowie, Andy Warhol or John Williams.”

Commandment 9: “By shows end you must transform. This includes, but is not limited to, eye colour, perspective, mood or height.”
⁸

Like her Afrofuturistic brethren before her, including Sun Ra who donned a flashlight or cosmic crown, and George Clinton's multicolored hair and space suit, Monáe is rarely, if ever, seen without her starched shirt, pompadour, and classic shrunken tux. At the 2012 Black Girls Rock! Awards, she said her costume was an ode to her working-class parents, who wore uniforms too.

The song “Q.U.E.E.N” from the
Electric Lady
album includes fellow Afrofuturist Erykah Badu. In the video, the two are suspended in animation in a future's past museum exhibit on rebels who used music as a freedom movement. The song, a funk throwback, is an ode to the eccentric, independent ladies of the world who are labeled as freaks for being themselves.

Monáe has an ArchOrchestra; Sun Ra had an Arkestra. Sun Ra came from Saturn to teach earthlings how to love; Cindi May-weather must return to free her robotic counterparts. Sun Ra juggernauts to space using African themes, Monáe hyperlinks back to the '50s big-band jazz era in which Sun Ra cultivated his cosmos theories. Monáe was mentored in part by unconventional hip-hop duo Outkast, which featured Andre 3000—as in the year 3000. Outkast borrowed their stylistics from P-Funk themes, most notably their
Stankonia
music in honor of the funk.

The mothership is in flight.

D
r. Malidoma Patrice Somé is a scholar and noted shaman of the Dagara, a society in Ghana and Burkina Faso that has maintained ancient practices. Somé is most popular for documenting his journey to shamanism in the 1994 book
Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman.
He writes about the proverbial dive into the rabbit hole as he was studying with the elders of his community and balancing his newfound wisdom with his Western education. Somé paints a picture of a different path to knowledge that contradicts the norms of Western conventions. According to him, the Dagara have no word for the supernatural. “For us, as for many indigenous cultures, the supernatural is part of our everyday lives,” he writes. The Dagara also don't draw a line between reality and imagination either, he writes, but rather emphasize the power of thought to create reality.
¹

And the Dagara don't have a word for fiction. Out of curiosity, Somé decided to conduct an experiment. In the book, he recalls a day in 1996 when he showed the film
Star Trek
to his shaman elders. The elders watched the film, assuming that these were the day-today happenings of a group in another part of the world. He writes, “My elders were comfortable with
Star Trek
, the West's vision of its own future. Because they believe in things like magical beings (Spock), traveling at the speed of light, and teleportation, the wonders that Westerners imagine being part of their future are very much a part of my elders' present. The irony is that the West sees the indigenous world as primitive or archaic. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the West could learn to be as ‘archaic' as my elders are?”
²

But the elders also found the Trekster spaceship and outfits to be a bit cumbersome in the magic-making process. It would be much simpler if they just traveled with their minds.

The absence of Africa's contribution to global knowledge in history, science, and beyond is a gaping hole so expansive it almost feels like a missing organ in the planet's cultural anatomy. Can humanity ever know itself with this rigid segmentation of knowledge? Can ancient knowledge be recovered? Can trauma be erased? While the whys and hows that led to this void are etched in history, the obvious absence has compelled many Afrofuturists to look to the continent's myths, spirituality, and art on a never-ending quest for wholeness.

Afrofuturist artists site Egyptian deities, the Dogon myths, water myths, and Yoruba orishas more than any other African cosmology in their art, music, and literature. From the costumes of Earth, Wind & Fire to Lee Scratch Perry's Black Ark to the idea of the mothership itself, the Dogon's star bond with Sirius and ancient Egyptians' unexplained technologies are the basis for Afrofuturist lore, art, and spectacle.

These cultures are referenced largely because of the sci-fi elements and mysticism in the mythology. The Egyptian and Dogon, in particular, are the most documented African wisdoms in the world. The importance of the Yoruba orishas and African water deities to enslaved African cultures in the Americas resound with descendants and continental Africa today. Afrofuturists are intrigued by Africa's ancient wisdom and ancient wisdom from around the world. The aesthetic attracts students of the esoteric. Shamanism, metaphysics, Hinduism, Buddhism, African traditional religions, mystical Christianity, Sufism, Native American spirituality, astrology, martial arts mythology, and other ancient wisdoms are typically funneled through an African or diasporic viewpoint.

Stargazing is a popular pastime.

“Afrofuturism is about looking at and recovering those ancient ways and looking at how artists through the '60s and now are using those to talk about the future,” says D. Denenge Akpem, scholar and performance artist.

Afrofuturists love to anchor their work in golden eras from times long gone, and there's no ancient culture that merges the heights of science and the esoteric like the Egyptians and Nubians. Egypt's reign in the ancient world and Nubia's influence stand as proof that cultures of dark-skinned people ruled advanced societies and shaped global knowledge.

From naming themselves after Egyptian deities to donning the wardrobe, no stone is left unturned in the quest to reinterpret the greatness of ancient Egypt and Nubia in modern and futuristic black cultures. Ankhs, pharaoh crowns, and snakes are the visual aesthetic of the pharoahs. Gods and goddesses reappear in Afrofuturistic art, depicting an Egyptian cosmology that is as much in the past as it is the future.

Ancient Egypt's stellar deities Ra, Isis, Horus, Set, the sky goddess Nut, and beyond are common mythological inspirations. Sun Ra named himself after the Egyptian god, and Erykah Badu gained fame while wearing the Egyptian ankh—a symbol of eternal life and fertility—in videos and stage shows, which repopularized African-inspired fashion and piqued curiosity about quantum physics.

But Afrofuturists aren't the only ones reeled in by Egypt's glory. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the mysteries of the
pyramids and Sphinx, even the love-drenched tales of Cleopatra have inspired some of the greatest art, motion pictures, and literature of our time. Although anthropologists continue to crack away at the time-honored mysteries of the ancient Egyptians, the true meanings behind their mythology, architecture, religion, and writings are still cloaked in question marks, inspiring speculative history and theories that zigzag straight to space. Ancient Egypt is a treasure trove of speculation. Writers have speculated that the pyramids are celestial portals to other worlds. Others say that aliens, not humans, are the true architect, a theory often fraught with racism for its inability to imagine brown-skinned people achieving such mastery. Then there's also the speculation that Egyptians had a special connection to other worlds. Even the blockbuster film
Prometheus
implies that the hieroglyphics are the offshoots of an ancient alien language.

In 1787 Count C. Volney, French scholar and author of
Ruins of Empires
, delighted readers with the wonders and impact of Egyptian culture on the changing world and the intellect of the “black-skinned” creators.

Early Egyptian libraries and secret societies were the envy of philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato, both of whom studied in Egypt. How did this culture come to be? What secrets did it hold? What were its secret teachings? Ancient Egyptian culture and lore is as much a pipeline to the great beyond as the mystery of dark matter.

The Afrofuturistic claim on the culture places the nation at the heart of African diaspora history, a statement that counters popular culture's tendency to divorce Egypt from its African locale and people. “A lot cling on to it because it is a high point in
African history,” says Afua Richardson, comic illustrator, about ancient Egypt's popularity among Afrofuturists. “The pyramids themselves are one of the great mysteries of the world.”