Weekend Music: Space Is the Place

A pan African vision of remembering your origins and imagining a future that honors those but moves forward.

Tricia Rose on the definition of Afrofuturism.

Tricia Rose is a professor of Africana (???) Studies at Brown University. In the audio clip above from the NPR show “Studio 360” she weaves a thread of futurism through black american music linking Sun Ra’s space jazz (“Space is the Place”) with Parliament/Funkadelic’s ghetto sci-fi funk of “Mothership Connection” and Afrika Bambaata’s epic electrofunk in “Planet Rock“. In the present, Lupe Fiasco becomes a robot in “Daydreamin’”. The impetus behind futuristic music in black American pop culture comes from a desire to escape the f**keupness of the current situation (slavery, inner city violence/poverty) and to imagine a better self using the vehicle of science fiction.

See also:

MUSIC: “I’m Not a Robot” by Newcleus. Although immortalized for the frivolity that is “Jam On It”, Brooklynites Newcleus explored sci-fi and spirituality in most of their work.

FILM: Brother from Another Planet. Black space alien crash lands in New York City and ends up in Harlem where the residents, sympathetic to his alien status, accept him and protect him from galactic bounty hunters seeking to return him to the slavery of his home planet.