Stuff You Should KnowBlack sci-fi writers were shut out of their genre in the 20th century so they created their own vision of the future. That sentiment spread to music and film and today it’s so engrained in pop culture it doesn't need its own label.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know. No, no, no, yes, yes, yes.
You should have said this CoA and welcome to the podcast, right, because I want to issue a CoA on this one.
Okay.
This is one of those that is so broad and dense and awesome that like I almost feel bad doing it as a you know, forty five ish minute episode of podcasts. Yeah, because afrofuturism is so vast. It's like it's hard for sometimes these to not feel like we'll explain what it is and then just like list a bunch of awesome people. Yeah, you know, but this, you know, this one is of all of our episodes, this one is meant to wet the appetite more than most. I think, as an introduction to what afrofuturism is, so you can go check out lots and lots of stuff yourself, because that's all I've been doing.
Yeah, we should title it Afrofuturism one on one.
Maybe not even what's what's below one on one?
Ninety nine?
Okay, ninety nine, that won't make it.
I can't remember. There's actually a number for it, and it's like remedial college courses that you have to take to catch up. Man, I can't remember, but we'll look it up and maybe that'll be there.
Yeah, because we will get email saying how could you not mention so and so? How could you not mention so and so's other thing even though you mentioned them. It's just one of those things. There's just too much. But hopefully this will just introduce people to this idea and this concept of this cultural aesthetic in philosophy.
Yeah, and this is definitely one of those episodes that we should try to define what we're talking about first, which, by the way, we took guph for not telling people in depth who Milli Vanilli were. I was so taken aback by that, Like, you know, it just didn't even occur to me that we needed to go further into defining Milli Vanilli from the outset.
I know, I thought even our younger listeners, I thought that was such a big cultural thing that you know, like I know about things before I was born.
Nope, nope, Well this is not Milli Vanilli. This is what we're talking about. Afrofuturism and afrofuturism. Like you said, it's a huge, big thing that has a lot of different definitions, but probably the most succinct way I can define it, and this is me defining it, is that it is the visions of the future or fantasy worlds or alternate realities, which all fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction or speculative literature. Yeah, through a African American lens, right.
Yeah, and I'll just drill down a little bit and say that incorporates obviously literature, but music and dance and every kind of art you can think of, movies obviously in television, really kind of anything that has this cool sort of sci fi bent.
Through the lens of African Americans.
And we'll get into more definitions, because you know, it's one of those things that people can really pick apart as far as what counts and what doesn't. And then after it's around for a while, like should we even be calling it this now?
And should we call it this?
And we'll get into all that, but suffice it to say that, like all of this stuff is just really cool and awesome and serves and has a title because it is serving people that has been underserved when it comes to science fiction.
Yeah, so it's kind of evolved in parallel as its own thing, but it grew out of originally science fiction writing. So when most people think of afrofuturism, they think of sci fi novels essentially. Yeah, but once you start to look into afrofuturism and start to understand what it is, you see it popping up all over the place, like it was right there in plain sight for me and I never really realized what I was looking at. I was just kind of taking all of it as like individual like artistic things rather than a part of a collective. So it's cool to see that there is one giant movement that it's a part of. But like I said, it does definitely have its roots in science fiction, which is pretty appropriate because as far as any literary genre goes, science fiction has explored the themes of race and racism and otherness and alienness more than any other I would.
Say, yeah, And I have a little stat to sort of drive home my underserved point, and this was from twenty sixteen in Voxo. It's a little dated and things have gotten better since then, for sure, but eight percent at the time, eight percent of the top grossing sci fi films of all time featured black protagonists, and four percent of those were Will Smith.
Oh wow.
So aside for Will Smith, four percent of movies.
And then of course, if you look at you know, the big two Star Trek and Star Wars. You know, the Star Wars got a lot better now, but the original trilogy had one black character, of course, Lando, and then Star Trek, which I know nothing about, and I'm sure things have changed since then as well, But at the time, I think only had and all of the Star Trek properties had it said less than twelve black characters. And I'm not sure what that means. Why I didn't say eleven unless one was on the fence.
I have no idea.
I don't know. Yeah, that is an odd way to put it, for sure.
I bet a trick he could explain it, though.
I speaking of every time I read or research about Star Treker, it just comes up. I have to go watch that William shattn or Saturday at Live appearance from the Bees.
Yeah, get a life.
He's speaking at a Star Trek convention. It's just priceless every single time. If you've ever seen that, just look up William Shatner Star Trek Convention Saturday Night Live and you won't be disappointed.
Yeah, and for our younger listeners, William Shatner is an actor.
Right from before you were born.
And acting is where you perform something that you're actually not on screen, any screen. That's right, So that eight percent is actually progress compared to the early twentieth century. And most people don't think that there were any black sci fi writers. If you think about that, kind of thing at all until the sixties, really, when a guy named Samuel Delaney came along. He's often credited as the first black sci fi writer. He made a huge splash in the sixties, kind of almost single handedly taking the genre of sci fi out of the realm of Martians are invading an Earth outpost to let's explore sexual irritation, gender fluidity, race in really like high handed manner, producing books that were over eight hundred pages long in some cases. But he really moved things along. So not only was he one of the first African American sci fi writers, he was one of the first to take sci fi into much deeper directions.
Yeah, for sure.
But he's also a guy that when you see interviews with him, and I watched quite a few, super cool guy, but he's one of the first ones to say no, no, no, I had people before me. It never became hugely popular, probably for obvious reasons. But there was a guy in eighteen fifty seven named Martin Delaney who was a kind of a jack of all trades. He was a doctor and a journalist and an author and abolitionist. He wrote a book, a novel called Blake or the Huts of America, which was as a lot of these are alternate histories that kind of suppose, like what would life be like had either slavery not happened or slave rehappened in a different way, or what if, you know, the white people were enslaved and black people were on top. And it's just sort of looking at kind of a lot of things through the lens of the diaspora. And you know, I'm not into sci fi books, I never have, but a lot of this stuff it made me want to read sci fi for the first time just because it sounds so cool.
Because I love alternate history.
Yeah, for sure, and that's definitely a part of speculative fiction alternate history in general. But yeah, Martin Delaney's Blake or the Huts of America was written in eighteen fifty seven, and it wasn't until I mean, I think that another couple decades things would come out sporadically. But there was a guy named Edward Johnson who wrote Light Ahead for the Negro in nineteen oh one, and he imagined a black man who was transported to a socialist version of the United States in two thousand and six, where things were much much better. So these ideas, these all alternate histories are kind of coming out little by little, but they are very very clearly under the what you would call now speculative fiction umbrella. And they were written by African Americans much earlier than Samuel Delaney, long before he was even born. This stuff was happening. It just was happening like almost in a vacuum. Like a black author or a black leader would have a great idea to get his point across by writing an alternate history, and that was it. There wasn't like a genre, There wasn't a movement or anything like that.
Yeah.
And Delaney also points out that the like the old pulp rags, a lot of those were written anonymously and it kind of was an area of literature where people of color, women who you know, couldn't get published published as readily at the time, they could write under these pseudonyms and get their stories out in these pulp magazine articles and stuff and stories. And he's like, you know, who knows how many you know African Americans are writing this kind of stuff.
Yeah, because you did the whole thing through the mail, and apparently at the time you were more likely than not to be using a pseudonym for that stuff, because that was just like keeping the electricity on kind of writing, you know what I mean. Yeah, so that's a really great point. But I think the underlying thing here is the reason that there weren't more black authors of sci fi in part was because it was just writing in general literature in general. There was like a general push to keep African Americans out of things like that as much as possible. And then as African Americans became more and more integrated into American society, the thing that kept African Americans out of sci fi writing actually came down to one guy who was named John W. Campbell Junior. And it's just slightly hyperbolic to say he was the glass ceiling that that the gatekeeper that kept sci fi white for decades.
Yeah, he was definitely one of the one of the gatekeepers. He was an editor of I think back then it was called Astounding Science Fiction. It went by a bunch of other names, and now it's around as Analog science Fiction. In fact, yeah, in fact, yeah, I said that with a comma, but in fact it's a period. Actually there's no period, but he was the editor, and like you said, he was a guy that you know, he wrote a bunch of essays in the nineteen sixties that supported segregation. At one point he called slavery a useful educational system. And because of guys like him that were gatekeepers, these stories didn't get through and people like Delaney and Octavia Butler who were going to talk about a lot more. She talked about being in school and even her teachers saying things like, you know, unless it's like really necessary for the plot, Like you shouldn't have a black protagonist unless it's like for a reason, or you know, if you're going to talk about race in a way, you know in science fiction, maybe like make them extraterrestrial instead of black. It's sort of like a metaphor because it's kind of too heavy for people to, you know, to really take right.
Octavia Butler wrote a really great essay in nineteen eighty called the Lost Races of Science Fiction, and she took on that excuse for why there wasn't more black people in science fiction works. And she's zeroed in on Star Wars as an example, the first one. And she said war okay, planet wide destruction okay, kidnapping okay, but the sight of a minority person, too heavy, too real. So she's pointing out that, like there's plenty of real world stuff that you could consider pretty horrible. Yeah, that is just fine in science fiction, but race is too distracting. And that was like just kind of the drum that was beaten by guys John W. Campbell. And the reason why they were so powerful was because at the time, if you wanted to get your novel published, basically the most direct route was to have it serialized first in one of those magazines that guys like John W. Campbell edited, and then if you keep black authors out of black sci fi, you also largely keep black readers out of sci fi too, And just by preventing people like Samuel Delaney from getting his stories serialized, black sci fi writers were basically kept out. And as Janette Ing, who won Best New Writer of twenty nineteen for science fiction writing, I can't remember which award, I think it was actually maybe that same award from Analog Science Fiction. In fact, she said that sweet it really is. She said that John W. Campbell had kept science fiction stale, sterile, male white exalting of imperial aspirations, colonialism, settlement, and industrialism and she was basically just, I mean, we're not gonna harp on this the whole episode, but there was a huge block in this particular genre, and it was just a handful of people who everybody else went along with it.
Seems like, for sure, I think that's a great initial fifteen minute overview, and we'll come back and talk just about the term itself and where it came from right after this. All right, So afro futurism, it's kind of hard to say quickly sometimes. It was coined by a white writer named Mark Dairy in the early nineties and nineteen ninety three and a piece called Black to the Future. And in that piece he interviewed a few writers, Delaney, a music writer named Gregory Tait, and Tricia Rose, who was a sociologist, and basically was like, the whole point of the essay was why are there so few working novelists, African American novelists working in this genre? What happened to get us here? Why aren't there more now? And what can we do about it to change this in the future. And he's like, especially like science fiction seems especially suited for people of color because and this is a great quote he said, in a very real sense, they're the descendant of alien abductees, and like, when you think of it like that, it makes a lot of sense that sci fi would kind of be, you know, something that really fits.
Yeah, and he was right. It turned out to be a great fit for African American sci fi writers. But still at the time there were basically four that he could think of, including Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler. Then also a guy named Steve Barnes who's written basically everything that has anything to do with science fiction, and then another fantasy author named Charles Saunders. And that was basically it. And this was the mid nineties that this guy was writing this essay and doing these interviews. But he hit it right on the head that it is a really great basis or springboard for black writers to kind of explore the past and the future. But he defined it as a speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture. And he took what was already happening and firmly labeled it and put a lot of constraints on it. When he coined the term afrofuturism and then defined it like that.
Yeah, and that's where there is some I guess debate over whether or not it should be strictly limited through the lens of African Americans and the diaspora or just Black culture worldwide as a whole. And you know, well, I think at the end we'll talk about some of the some other more inclusive names that kind of encompass all, you know, kind of worldwide black culture.
But there are people that kind of are on both sides of the fence.
And I mean, I guess for me, you know, I just I just think it's all great, So nitpicking about you know, the exact definition is not for me, but we have to point it out that that it's out there, and then there is a debate.
Yeah, and one of the big things is whether it's specifically African American, because there's a lot more black communities out there than just African Americans. They're one of many. You've got the entire continent of Africa and all of its various groups. You've got the diaspera, like you said, African American descendants or African descendants living in Europe, and Asia and all around the world. Then there's even like sub types as well, like the African American diaspora is made up of people whose ancestors were enslaved in America and then once they were free, moved out of America into Mexico, Canada, wherever. So there's a lot of different groups. And what Mark darry did was situated exclusively in the realm of African Americans. That's a big that's a big point of debate still today.
The other thing Womack points out in that book, which you know is very easy for like a middle aged one guy to overlook, is the fact that these afro futurist themes are a way of she talked about a method of self liberation, self healing. So you know, to imagine a future for your race is a hopeful thing. So if you're in a hostile world, it's probably very easy to have a very bleak depiction of the future of your people. And these stories like they're sure it's science fiction, and it's you know, science fiction is always just sort of.
Not light.
It's actually very heavy in a lot of cases, but maybe not to be taken seriously by some people.
But you know, I just I don't think it's like that.
I think that it can offer very heavy commentaries and it can offer hope to people that like, hey, if we can write about ourselves in the future, that means we can imagine ourselves like thriving in the future.
Yeah. And similarly, it's a way for African Americans and people of African descent in general to stake a claim of the future too, right, because if you think about the future, and I think Mark Darry made the point like, if you look at Tomorrowland from a Disney World in Disneyland, it's super white, and the future in general is just white. It's like a projection of current times. And afrofuturism says, nope, there's a different way of looking at it too, and that this was the one that kind of triggered them understanding. For me, the distinction between afrofuturism and just any other kind of say sci fi that features like a black character is that you're not just taking like an African American and making him or her them an astronaut in the structure of the current imagined future, which again is super white. The basis of afrofuturism is completely reimagining the future, completely reimagining the past through a black lens, kind of like if you if black people were in charge of producing the future. This is a vision of what it could be like kind of thing. Yeah, rather than just following along the current trajectory that we've been on all this time in America, which is a super white trajectory that includes other people, but the basis of everything, the structure of everything is through the white lens. This is taking it through a black lens. And it's I saw it puts defamiliarizing what we think of as like the future.
Oh I like that term.
Yeah, I thought so. I thought you would.
Yeah, that makes sense.
There's one guy who we have to mention who is, you know, a complicated guy to say the least, and that is one of the first sort of twentieth century afro futurist writers, who is George Schuyler. And he wrote generally for black publications, but he wrote all these books. He wrote novels and essays and shorts, stories and things. Sometimes there were pulp stories, and they were exactly what we've been talking about. That was one in the thirties, these serialized pulp stories about a global black uprising against white colonialism. But he wrote these under pseudonyms, the pseudonym Samuel I. Brooks and Skuyler himself in IRL would write essays kind of slamming stories that he wrote as Brooks. He wrote he said it was hokum and hack work in the purest vein and was a very conservative guy in his real life, and like backed Joseph McCarthy's campaign against communists, and he was sort of opponent of the civil rights movement. And it's just, man, I need to dive into this guy a little more and see that's some serious complication right there.
You know for sure he is. But he wrote that book Black No More, where you you could visit a machine, pay fifty dollars and after a three day process be turned from black to white. And it completely up ends society and civilization, both in the white community and the black community. And he wrote that as George Skyler, the conservative guy, but he's considered one of the first progenitors of the of afrofuturism in the twentieth century. And then simultaneously chuck as guys like Skyler are writing and Samuel I. Brooks, who's the same guy as they're writing afrofuturism. A musical form of afrofuturism is kind of developing too. And if you look back in the past, it was just a few people popping up and doing something that eventually, a couple decades later you could say, I'll fall into this same general category.
Yeah, I mean these are all sort of in the cases of Skyler and the guys we're about to talk about, is all these are all like retroactive titles, right because that and wasn't around back then. But you can't talk about afrofuturism without talking about George Clinton and Sun Raw on the music side, and I spent the basically all day listening to a Sun Raw playlist, and it is you know, I have to be in the mood for this kind of jazz. Is it's tough, it's very free form, it's very odd, and it's not like, you know, this very melodic, super listenable kind of thing. It's challenging music. And Sunraw was a really interesting guy. He was born in Birmingham in nineteen fourteen as Herman Blount, and he moved to Chicago in the forties and played a little more traditional type jazz. But in the sixties he went to New York and things, really he really freed himself up of what the idea of jazz or just composed music could be. He was an out there cat in all the right ways.
For sure, and he made more than one hundred and fifty albums with this orchestra, and the whole premise of it was that he was essentially kind of like the prophet returned from Saturn to help lead humanity, if not just African Americans off of Earth, because things like slavery had ruined Earth. And he had this whole mythos. This wasn't just like a concept album that he put.
This is his whole career career.
Yeah, yeah, for decades. This is how he lived and he inspired a lot of people. And I'm with you, that kind of jazz is hard for me to listen to, no matter who's playing it. But he had an album from nineteen fifty seven that I think is super easy to listen to called Supersonic Jazz. Yeah, I think it's technically before, Yeah, it's before he moved to New York and really set up the orchestra, but it's clearly son raw like you can you can tell. So if you want to try Son Raw and you've tried some of his later stuff and you're like, I'm not ready for this, listen to Supersonic Jazz that album first and see what you think.
Yeah, that's good. Don't lead them down that.
That confusing so confusion jazz fa Yeah, much more accessible is George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, right, Yeah, I'm a big fan. I always have been. I tend to lean more towards the Funkadelic records than the Parliament, even though I love the Parliament stuff too. But he is someone I've seen a few times and live, and I'm going to see him again next month where at Symphony Hall where we're performing. I just like to share the same stage. Not at the same time, obviously, but just to be on the same stage that George Clinton will be on or had been on.
It's pretty cool.
Yeah, we're not worthy, but always a great show. His band is is awesome. I mean, it's all it's very space age. He used to have the mothership that would come down on the stage and he would enter the mothership. Just it's a great sort of feast for the eyes and ears.
Hey, that reminds me before you go on. I'm sorry to interrupt, but there just coincidentally, the main exhibit right now at the National Museum of African American History in DC is Afrofuturism. Oh cool, And one of the cool things they have on display is a replica of the UFO that George Clinton would come on the stage and.
The mothership there.
Yeah.
Is it like life size?
Yes, yeah, it's like an exact replica because apparently somebody threw away the one that he used in the seventies, and in the nineties when they started touring again, they made a replica and I think that's the exact one that's in the Smithsonian.
Yeah.
Well, the first time I saw him was when he started up again and he was on that lat of Paloza tour and he played a show. I saw him at the Lalla Palouza, but I saw him the night before at the Center Stage Theater.
Hey, we have also played there.
Actually, George Clinton all over the place.
But he did the show at the Center Stage and you know, he was getting up there in age at the time back then. I imagine when I see him next month, like he's an older guy now.
But he was.
He was still getting down back then, and he had the BAC Boys came out at the end and because they were playing Lolla Plues and it was sort of like this all star thing and it was pretty great. But Clinton was a kid who listened I'm sorry. He watched Star Trek and Buck Rogers and was into sci fi and it was just again, it was one of those things where he didn't see any representation.
He just knew what he liked. Apparently took acid.
Later on and watched two thousand one of Space Odyssey in Fantasia when he took LSD for the first time, and that, you know, had some pretty profound impacts.
So one of the things that I didn't realize because you know, we're living in the post Parliament era, but one of the things that Parliament did was unite a generally fractured black community. After the MLK assassination, Apparently there was a lot of just fracturing in the black community, and a few years later George Clinton came along and kind of tried to bring people together by by throwing a party for for for the African American community in the United States and the world. Really and so the whole whole premise was that George Clinton and the rest of the p Funk All Stars, who includes like Bernie Warrel or Bernie Warrel and Bootsy Collins. They were aliens who'd come to Earth to teach everybody how to party. Yeah, they were this is a quote afronauts capable of funketizing galaxies.
Yeah, man, it's so cool.
I want to quickly mention local Atlanta guy Lonnie Holly as well. Lonnie, you remember Matt Arnett, our friend who well we know Matt through a lot of different way here in Atlanta, but big supporter of the arts, and Matt is Lannie's kind of friend, and I guess I guess he's his tour manager and manager. But Lonnie Holly is is a modern representation of sort of what afro futurism is and still plays these small shows.
And his stuff is.
Really really good and just soulful and like intense and weird. It's really cool.
Yeah, it's super cool. I've never heard his stuff, but I'm going to check it out now.
Yeah, if you can see him live, because that's when it gets really kind of awesome.
Well, take me to a show.
Well, he didn't play a lot. I just saw he played in New York recently, because Michael Stipe of course was there.
You finally up to New York. What's your problem?
I saw Matt in court the other day, so we were only able to text from across the court room.
There's got to be a story there.
We were both fighting the man, you know, we were both right and basically just the bureaucracy of Atlanta had kept us down and find us for various things hashtag hero Yeah, I can get into it later, but both of us were like, this is such bs.
So yeah, so the whole parliament mythos that kind of developed. It actually did help bring people together quite a bit. And it was just kind of a point where not just black people, but white people and people of all color who were into funk could really just come together and agree on that, which is like if you just kind of look at it like that, it's like, yeah, they had a band and a lot of people like them, but if you just kind of scratched just one level down, that's really significant to make something on purpose, to purposefully bring people together and not to talk about problems, not to hammer issues out or anything like that, but just to kind of give everybody a place to kind of breathe and chill together and get away from the rest of the issues and just kind of come together. That's what Parliament did, and I think that's pretty neat and they're not the only group that ever did that, But it seems that George Clinton's express purpose was doing that from what I From what I can.
Tell, Yeah, and he put his own like cool psychedelic futuristic spin on it, you know.
And another just real quick side thing. Another a musician that's often overlooked but sometimes cited as afrofuturist is Lee Scratch Perry, who created dub reggae, and he did do some kind of far out stuff. He was a far out dude apparently. But like just his music alone has like this spacey vibe to it that you just you're overlooking it if you don't include it in afrofuturism.
Yeah, for sure, we have to talk about art a little bit. I mean, all of this is art, obviously, but Jean Michel Basquiat one of the great artists in our history here in North America. He is one of the first afro futurists of in the fine art world, and he was a guy that was was listening to Funkadelic in Parliament in groups like that, and hip hop culture informed his art. There was this graffiti artist and Moore named Rammelsey who I looked into. This guy man, I had never heard of him. He died in twenty ten, but he was a sculptor and a writer and a performance artist and graffiti artist, and his stuff looks really really cool. And he was definitely one of these guys that was, you know, dressing up is like this futuristic showgun. He was blending cultures and genres and baskingout was buddies with him. So all these people were doing this stuff. You know, it wasn't like, Oh, I'm going to seek fame and fortune as a graffiti artist who dresses up like a futuristic samurai.
Right.
They were doing this stuff because it was like what moved them. And it stands out because there weren't a lot of black people doing this kind of thing.
Right, that's the initi of a movement. That's where it starts, rightly. Octavia Butler is also I mean, she was a hallmark, a founder of black science fiction writing and also afrofuturism. But just like you were talking about Rammelsey in Basquiat, like she wasn't trying to create like a place for black people to write in science fiction. This was just what she did to escape her own life and her own self consciousness. She wrote sci fi stories like that's where she went, and she was really good at it. There's a really great kind of biography on her called The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler that was in Vulture. That's worth reading. It really dives into her life and her career. She was a really exceptional person, but she just kind of started slow, was very much underpaid and overlooked, and just kept at it and kept at it, and finally in the nineties people really started to recognize her and went back and looked at some of her past work and said, this writer's pretty amazing.
Yeah, she was the first sci fi writer to get a MacArthur Genius Grant. And there's a TV show last year or the year before from her book Kindred from nineteen seventy nine, which I didn't see. I saw the FX canceled it after one season, but that was about the premise looked really cool. It was about a modern black woman who time travels to meet her in the people who enslaved her. And I remember seeing the trailers and stuff. At the time, I was like, this looks really good, but I didn't realize that it was in Octavia Butler book. So I just learned that like today or yesterday.
Yeah, that was just one book, Kindred. She also had a series called the xeno Genesis series from the eighties. Parable of the Sewer was the beginning of a series that she wrote, and I think it came out in nineteen ninety three, and that was the one that got everybody's attention. And then they went back and were like, oh good, this lady has a whole cannon that we get to read now. Yes, she was pretty neat. I strongly recommend going and reading The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler.
Yeah, should we take another break?
Yes, Okay, we'll take another break.
We'll talk about kind of where things stands now, and also just talk about a lot of other great artists.
Right after this, so Chuck, things really started to change, where afrofuturism went from this cool thing that kind of existed sporadically into being the find by a white journalist in the mid nineties into becoming mainstream starting in the late nineties, thanks in large part, and I didn't really realize this until you said it to Will Smith getting roles like men in Black Independence Day, I am legend, like just tons, He's been in tons of sci fi movies. I never really realized it before, but he was a huge kind of glass ceiling breaker for African Americans in sci fi because up to that point, it was like if you saw a black person in a sci fi movie or a horror movie, you just knew that they were one of the first ones to die. That's just like this long standing kind of trop Yeah. Yeah, And it started to change in the nineties where they're like, oh, actually we can use a black protagonist and they can actually carry the movie at least if you get Will Smith in there. Who else can we give a chance to?
Wesley Snipes? Yeah, he was in Blade.
Yeah.
The Matrix of course featured not in the lead, but they featured, you know, people of color in their trilogy. I think more and more in the second and third movies even and then you know today I was like, is Jordan Peel and afro futurist filmmaker, and I read some stuff and like he's he dabbles in it. It's it's not like straight up afrofuturism in the traditional sense that you might think of, but there are certainly elements of it in everything he's done, especially this last one.
And Nope, that was so cool.
Yeah, I mean, no spoilers there, but that movie was not the movie I thought it was.
It was way more sci fi and wayless horror. Sure, but I think he's.
Kind of, you know, carrying that torch along in his own way, in a way that's kind of dabbles in afro futurism that that is way more mainstream, which is a valuable thing.
You know.
Yes, that is a great example of what I was talking about earlier, where I didn't really realize. I'd heard the term afrofuturism before, obviously, but I'd never really he looked into it until we started researching this, But when I did, I realized, like it just pops up all over the place. And that's a really good example of his Jordan Peele's movies, Like they're not necessarily like the whole point is afrofuturism. It's just it just shows up. It's like an influence, it's a part of the whole thing. And there's Coulson Whitehead's another good example of that too. He is like one of the gleaming beacons of literature right now, and in his very realistic novels, fantastic stuff can happen. And that's afrofuturism popping its head up as well. Can It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the future, but it falls under speculative fiction or speculative literature in some way, shape or form.
Yeah, I guess we can talk about music a little more.
Yeah, let's because again, just like in movies in the late nineties, things, even starting in the early mid nineties, things really started to take afrofuturistic turn in music.
Yeah, and by way of hip hop, if you look at the history of hip hop, the DNA of afrofuturism is kind of woven throughout it. You know, earlier groups, groups that I really like, like Diggable Planets and I don't know if you ever listened to any Cool Keith stuff, but Cool Keith had a character and a concept album he did called Doctor Octagon that was very weird and awesome. I won't give away it's kind of weird. He's a he's a time traveling guynecologist, So I guess I did kind of give it away, but it's really good Wu Tang and of course specifically Riza with Bobby Digital.
And then when I was.
Looking at you know, like Beyonce uses kind of afro futuristic aesthetics and a lot of her videos and stage shows, and so Launch does too. But when I was kind of reading about them and Janelle Monet, who's certainly really represents afrofuturism, I could I was like Missy Elliott, Like, why aren't we talking about Missy Elliott? Because she was before all of them, and was could really get out there as far as you know, talking about writing around in spaceships and stuff.
Yeah, and all of her videos are super afrofuturistic, even when she's just sitting there in front of the camera like raping, like she's doing weird stuff, or she's in outer space or she's in virtual reality or something like that. Yeah, she's definitely at least influenced, if not an influencer, of afrofuturism. Another one I saw that I hadn't considered, but I'm like, oh yeah, totally diggable planets. Especially their first album, they were from outer space. They were insects from outer space who'd come to help the world out, and I just never thought about that before.
Yeah, that saw that. Well, I got a side story I'll tell you off air. But I saw them in college in Athens and then and.
You saw them in court last week.
And then the only time I saw them was on their reunion tour.
A couple of years ago.
Oh yeah, cool.
So it was a big break in between, but it was great. But their second album I think was really awesome, and it wasn't afro futuristic.
No, but it's one of the greatest albums of all time.
So good.
All right, Well, we can't talk about all of the people, but we'll talk about a couple of more because I wanted to mention John Jennings and Stacy Robinson, who are there in the comic book world, and they work under the name Black Kirby, which is obviously a riff on the great comic book artist Jack Kirby, and they reimagine sort of Kirby stuff through the African American lens, and things like the Unkillable Buck instead of the Incredible Hulk and stuff like that.
It's really cool looking.
And then they are I think influenced by one of the first African American comic book.
Writers was Larry Fuller.
In the late sixties, he created a character named ebon Ebo n which I.
Think was the first black superhero, at least among the first.
Yeah. I saw one of the Black Kirby characters as Major Sankofa or Sankopha. I'm not quite sure how you say it, but it sancophies like a. It means like the spirit of going looking backward into the past and taking what's good there and take moving it into the future. And it was Major Sankofa instead of Captain America, and it's a It's just cool. I like that whole concept for sure.
Yeah, And if we're gonna talk comics, we have to shout out Stanley and Jack Kirby because they created Black Panther and that is sort of maybe the biggest, most mainstream example of afro futurism on the big screen that we've ever seen. These Black Panther movies are huge, They're wildly successful, they're award winning, and they are afro futuristic, like to a t.
Yeah, and apparently we have Chadwick Boseman to thank for keeping all of the African characters from having British accents.
Yeah.
Man, can you imagine like colonization a hooy, like all these people British accents. So he insisted that they speak with a South African accent, not the British kind, but the Osa. I did it that that dialect, that's the accent they were speaking with, the Hosasa. Yeah, I did it. I got a three times.
It was pretty good.
But I think it's hasa Nope, oh it's not not anymore. Okay, Well, Trevor Noah says it different. It's a hard thing to do. It's that uh the Zulu uh you know, I click language for lack of a better term, but it's it's hard to do it because you have to click at the same time that you're saying something.
Yeah.
I practiced it earlier and I was like, I can't do it, so I wasn't gonna try.
But hats off to us.
So halasa halasasa.
That's how Trevor Noah said it, and of course he was on this. I never mind.
Well, he's from South Africa, so I'll defer to him.
Yeah, So where are we now with afro futurism. We are in a better place than we've ever been as far as just more and more stuff. It's becoming more mainstream, not as just sort of different in other than it used to be. But this is where we've gotten to the point where people start to drill.
Down on the term.
Some people say, like, you know, is it just too broad of a thing to call sort of all this stuff afro man I keep messing that up afro futurism when it You know, there are people like I said beginning that said no, it should always I believe his name was. He's a science fiction fantasy writer Nigerian American name Tochi Anyabuchi said this should always be addressing or at least allegorizing black suffering. Otherwise it shouldn't count. And so people have formed other words like astro blackness. That's a pretty cool one.
Yeah, Ethno Gothic, that one's neat.
Yeah, I like that one too, the black fantastic magical realism. There's another another Nigerian American science fiction writer name Indie Okora for I think I'm pronouncing that right, And she coined the term African futurists and was like, you know, these these African American stories are great, but like, I also like to tell the stories through the lens of you know, Africans, and so African futurism is rooted in all these cultures.
Yeah, African futurists and African jujuist for fantasy kind of stuff. But yeah, that was that debate I was talking about earlier. It is like, is it just through the lens of African Americans or what? Yeah, so you said it, it's gone mainstream. We've reached the point where it's becoming so mainstream that it's just part of pop culture. It's not like a separate, tangential or additional part of pop culture. It's infused into pop culture. And so you get to the point where you're like, do you even need a name for this anymore? It is what it is. And if that's the case, then then people like Samuel Delaney and all the people who came before him, Octavia Butler Son raw George Clinton, were fully successful Even if they didn't intend to create something like that, they were still successful in their own way.
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think it's so mainstream now.
There are, for sure studio executives that are, like, we need a black people in space thing. Netflix has theirs, why don't we have ours.
That's exactly right, and that means mainstream yep. That means that everybody needs to figure out a new artistic path to blaze.
That's right.
And I don't feel bad making fun of those studio execs because they are they don't want to pay their artists fair wages, and that's why the writers are on strike.
Just real quick, a couple more people. Manzel Bowman is a graphic designery, does amazing stuff. Lena Iris Victor an amazing painter. Camasi Washington kind of carrying on the vibe of son Rab but way way more melodic. And then, like you said, Janelle Money, she's the poster child of afro futurism right now with her concept album Dirty Computer and a book set in the same world Memory Library, and she's just totally going nuts on it. And you me, by the way, just loves her, has a crush on her.
She said, Well, she I was just about to say, she's also my celebrity crush, So you mean I share.
That I gets pretty great.
Yeah, it's hard not to.
I got to keep you and you, me and Janelle Monet out of the same room.
Oh that's good. That Dirty Computer Man, what a great record.
Yeah, And I'm going to see Beyonce later this year, and I've never been to a big pop show like that in my life, and I just I like having you know, I'm not even I'm not even the hugest Beyonce fan, just because it's not something I listened too much, but like, you know, I want to go to one of these big pop shows, and like, who else should I go to.
I'm not gonna go see Taylor Swift. I'll go to Beyonce.
H hice.
Well, I mean I'm sure that Taylor Swift show was great too, but yeah, Beyonce's looks like, I don't know more at my speed.
Taylor Swift, her show, like this tour is apparently three hours long.
Yeah, it's supposed to be amazing. My mom went, Actually she got free tickets to a friend. Yeah, and doesn't go to stuff like that and like big concerts and stuff, and isn't even a big Taylor Swift person, and she was.
Just like it was so great.
Well, I think we all knew at the beginning of this episode that there was one hundred percent chance Taylor Swift was going to come up.
Oh I saw that coming.
Well, if you want to know more about afrofuturism, you can do a lot worse than going to Instagram and search for that hashtag and start looking. Just look all over the internet and you will find a whole new world of pretty cool stuff, including some stuff you already knew about but never really thought about.
Okay, agreed.
Since Chucks had agreed, it's time for listener mail.
Okay, I'm gonna call this brown fat.
Oh yeah, delicious.
Yeah, we talked about that in our Oh gosh, why am I blinking now?
I think it was our Intermittent Fasting episode.
Oh yeah, yeah, I thought it was our Taylor Swift episode.
Hey, guys, just finish listening to Intermittent Fasting and was so excited when brown fat was mentioned. I learned about brown fat this past year in school in my biochemistry class, and it's more amazing than what Josh was even guessing in the episode.
You were guessing. No, you were speaking, you were.
Speaking some facts.
Brown Fat's main biological purpose is to release heat to keep the body temperature stable.
I think I said that.
Actually to do this, it actually breaks down white fat in a way that allows for more heat to be released per fat molecule burned than if regular cells were breaking down the white fat. Because this helps keep body temperature stable, people who live in cold environments adapt to living there by having more brown fat cells than people who do not. Babies are also born with high brown fat levels and keeps them helps them adapt to life outside the womb for the first few days. I just really want to thank you guys for everything you've done for me over the years. Started listening in twenty eighteen in high school. Just graduated with my bachelor's in chemical engineering from the University of Tennessee.
Oh. Congratulations Tuesday, Govalls.
And that is from Sarah Batton.
Thanks Sarah, thank you very much, and thanks to Brown Fat too for being so great that Sarah wrote a listener mail about it.
Yeah. I mean that's a band name.
I don't even think I'd.
Recognize it at the time as such.
Brown Fat. Yeah, like one of those albums where the name of the band, the first song, and the album are all the same. You know, I can't think of one right now, but it's definitely out there.
Yeah.
Okay, Well, this whole conversation's petered out. So if you want to get in touch with us and let us know you graduated college, we say congratulations in advance. You can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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