Afrofuturism in Black Music

This story is an abridged version of an essay written by Tony Bolden, Ph.D., originally published on Carnegie Hall's Timeline of African American Music. You can read the full article here.

While Afrofuturism has been characterized as a philosophy, a movement, and a cultural aesthetic, among other things, there has been little discussion of the spiritual principles that essentially comprise the conceptual foundation of Afrofuturism in music. Several prominent characteristics associated with Afrofuturism, particularly flight and freedom, are manifestations of a spiritual ethos that shaped Black musicians’ worldviews and approaches to music-making in four centuries.

If we think of Afrofuturism as a search for “cosmic liberation” and “possibility in a world meant to destroy any and all forms of Black life,” as Shanté Paradigm Smalls has stated, we can think of the Spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as a precursor. Certainly, the enslaved singers who composed and sang these lyrics (“Swing low, sweet chariot / Coming for to carry me home”) associated flight with freedom and “appropriate[d] images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”

Sun Ra’s spiritualism led him to think of music as a powerful energy that can levitate listeners, taking them on sonic voyages to places and spaces of psychological peace and release from the trials and tribulations of everyday life. What distinguished Ra was his reimagination and reinterpretation of this vital component of musicianship, which led him to envision art as a multidimensional expression in multiple periods of time.

Ra simultaneously identified with ancient Egypt and considered himself a space traveler. His cosmology was rooted in Black vernacular culture. He transmuted traditional Black folk images into an African American narrative of Egyptology that celebrated flight and freedom in an ontological context later described as Afrofuturism. Yet spirituality remained a common thread in his transition from a conventional big band of swing to a swinging, space-age Arkestra.

As was often the case among stellar blues-oriented musicians, Hendrix was adept at creating tonal illustrations that represented human experiences through the medium of sound. His controversial cover of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, in 1969, provides a well-known example of this feature of his musicianship. At several points in the song, he simulates the sounds of war, particularly bombs dropping and exploding.

Where jazz musicians generally expressed thoughts and feelings in wordless sound, notwithstanding Sun Ra’s forays into film and poetry, Hendrix demonstrated that it was possible to foreground Afrofuturist sensibilities with imaginative lyrics.

Davis's simultaneous embracing of past and future realms of blackness, which typifies Afrofuturism, also exemplified conceptual elements of funk aesthetics, which tends to delight in commingling contrasts, incongruities, paradoxes, and presumed oppositions, while demonstrating aversions toward simplistic, either/or logic as well as a preference for contrarian or eccentric expression.

Most discussions of Davis highlight her irreverent aesthetic and attitude regarding gender and sexuality. Her songs often describe Black working-class women’s experiences in street culture; and she rarely, if ever, describes space travel as such. But Davis’s space-age outfit, photographed on the cover of her 1974 album They Say I’m Different, represented one component of a broader, theatrical form of visual and musical storytelling that other funk artists embellished into funklore.

Funk artists’ reactions to longstanding stigmas and taboos attached to race, gender, class, and sexuality distinguished funk from the previous genre of soul. By incorporating theatrical elements, visuals, and technologies, funk artists paved new ground in American musical history. Parliament-Funkadelic experimented more extensively with Afrofuturism than any other funk collectives.

But on a more basic level, the Mothership was blues-oriented satire akin to the great comedian Moms Mabley’s criticisms of misogyny. Since Black folk were marginalized in American society, Clinton figured that he would fly them to outer space. And the comical thing is that Black people weren’t supposed to exist in space. Popular culture created the impression that space was for white people only.

The Mothership symbolized an extraterrestrial atmosphere where Black folk could be themselves regardless and reclaim their blackness in the context of an integrated society. Modeled after the sci-fi television series Star Trek, the Mothership was commandeered by Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton) and the Children of Production, especially “Star Child.” Clinton’s Afrofuturist funk was strikingly similar to Sun Ra’s cosmology. Both artists reflect “backward and forward” visions of Black agency.

But since humans weren’t appreciative of the Funk’s virtues, it was “repossessed” and posited into Egyptian pyramids. But while Ra interpreted Black vernacular concepts in Egyptian symbolism, Clinton framed Egypt as a philosophical symbol that merged past and future into then-current, vernacular styles that reflected the concept of funk.

Badu’s Afrofuturist vision exemplifies a Black womanist spiritual ethos: “bout ta give birth to church.” As an unapologetically Afrocentric preacher-poet-singer-thinker, Badu locates beauty in Black lingo and bodily adornment (e.g., gold teeth). Equally important, her identification with the Black past is evident in her music.

Badu exemplifies the Afrofuturist question of “what if” through a Black woman’s lens. Having grown up in the post-civil rights era, when economic opportunities are increasingly scarce for Black people, she balances a near-dystopian reality with hope imbued in womanist-centered, Afrocentric spirituality.

For Badu, art, religion, womanism, morality, maternity, Afrocentricity, eccentricity, ecology, Black history, speculative fiction, and fantasy all seem interconnected. “The pattern I see,” she says, “is the return of balance through femininity, through the mother, through the womb. The universe comes out of a wombiverse.” In Badu’s songwriting, water symbolizes birth, life, resilience, and/or the lack thereof.

Shortly thereafter, the following statement appears: “We believe songs are spaceships. We believe music is the weapon of the future.”

Monáe’s queer politics and her brilliant use of sci-fi films as a primary touchstone distinguish her from other Afrofuturists. Essentially, she elaborated on theatrical aspects in funk aesthetics and used the technology of film to represent the multifaceted nature of human and non-human lifeforms in an unprecedented manner, all while centering music as a form of storytelling.

Once these definitions are established, discriminatory practices based on race, gender, class, creed, and/or sexual orientation become increasingly normalized—this is Monáe’s premise in a nutshell.

In light of Alondra Nelson’s statement that Afrofuturism also “looks backward,” let’s look briefly at elements of Monáe’s style that precede the funk era.

But her most direct connection to African past is her incredible dancing. In the past half-century, only Tina Turner rivals Monáe’s excellence in vernacular-style dancing among women. She slides fluidly on one foot like James Brown, performs the famous moonwalk like Bill Bailey, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and, of course, Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop.” Indeed, the rolodex of her dance moves include nods to blues artists like Muddy Waters and Black dancers who performed in Vaudeville.

In her “Tightrope” video, Monáe literally performs the song’s metaphor: that for Black folk, navigating through life in a world of “haters” requires so much psychological balance and emotional resilience that the immense challenges are like “tip[ping] on [a] tightrope.” Thus she urges listeners: “keep getting funky on the scene.”

We encourage you to read the full article, Afrofuturism in Black Music, and learn more about Timeline of African American Music on Carnegie Hall's website.