How Afrofuturism Works

Black 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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we're coming to your town, so you better
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Speaker 2 (00:08):
That's right, we are finishing up. These are the last
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and wind it all up here in Atlanta on September ninth.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yes, and you can get all the info you need
and links to tickets which are on sale now at
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or you can go to linktree slash SYSK.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
You should have said this CoA and welcome to the podcast, right,
because I want to issue a CoA on this one.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
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

(01:26):
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

(01:47):
go check out lots and lots of stuff yourself, because
that's all I've been doing.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, we should title it Afrofuturism one on one.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Maybe not even what's what's below one on one?

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Ninety nine?

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Okay, ninety nine, that won't make it.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
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

(02:54):
defining Milli Vanilli from the outset.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
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

(03:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
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

(04:08):
sort of sci fi bent.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
Through the lens of African Americans.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
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?

Speaker 3 (04:25):
And should we call it this?

Speaker 2 (04:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
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

(05:03):
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

(05:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
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

(06:00):
percent of those were Will Smith.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
Oh wow.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
So aside for Will Smith, four percent of movies.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
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.

(06:31):
And I'm not sure what that means. Why I didn't
say eleven unless one was on the fence.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
I have no idea.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
I don't know. Yeah, that is an odd way to
put it, for sure.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
I bet a trick he could explain it, though.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
Yeah, get a life.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah, and for our younger listeners, William Shatner is an actor.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
Right from before you were born.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
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

(07:34):
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

(08:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
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

(08:39):
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

(09:00):
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

(09:21):
sounds so cool.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
Because I love alternate history.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
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

(09:45):
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

(10:06):
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

(10:29):
that was it. There wasn't like a genre, There wasn't
a movement or anything like that.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
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

(10:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
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

(11:25):
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

(11:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
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

(12:25):
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

(12:49):
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

(13:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
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

(13:42):
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,

(14:05):
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

(14:28):
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,

(14:52):
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

(15:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
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

(16:12):
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

(16:33):
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

(16:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
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

(17:29):
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

(17:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
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

(18:32):
the some other more inclusive names that kind of encompass all,
you know, kind of worldwide black culture.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
But there are people that kind of are on both
sides of the fence.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
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

(19:22):
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.

(19:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
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.

(20:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
Not light.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
It's actually very heavy in a lot of cases, but
maybe not to be taken seriously by some people.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
But you know, I just I don't think it's like that.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
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.

(21:15):
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

(21:37):
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

(22:01):
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

(22:23):
taking it through a black lens. And it's I saw
it puts defamiliarizing what we think of as like the future.

Speaker 3 (22:31):
Oh I like that term.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
Yeah, I thought so. I thought you would.

Speaker 3 (22:34):
Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
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.

(22:58):
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

(23:25):
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

(23:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:55):
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

(24:19):
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

(24:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
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

(25:11):
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.

(25:34):
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

(25:54):
up of what the idea of jazz or just composed
music could be. He was an out there cat in
all the right ways.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
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

(26:25):
wasn't just like a concept album that he put.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
This is his whole career career.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
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

(26:52):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
Yeah, that's good. Don't lead them down that.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
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

(27:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:50):
It's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
The mothership there.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
Is it like life size?

Speaker 1 (28:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
Hey, we have also played there.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
Actually, George Clinton all over the place.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
But he was.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
He just knew what he liked. Apparently took acid.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
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,

(30:08):
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

(30:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
Yeah, man, it's so cool.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
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

(31:09):
is is a modern representation of sort of what afro
futurism is and still plays these small shows.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
And his stuff is.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
Really really good and just soulful and like intense and weird.
It's really cool.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, it's super cool. I've never heard his stuff, but
I'm going to check it out now.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah, if you can see him live, because that's when
it gets really kind of awesome.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Well, take me to a show.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
Well, he didn't play a lot. I just saw he
played in New York recently, because Michael Stipe of course
was there.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
You finally up to New York. What's your problem?

Speaker 2 (31:43):
I saw Matt in court the other day, so we
were only able to text from across the court room.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
There's got to be a story there.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
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

(32:31):
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

(32:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Tell, Yeah, and he put his own like cool psychedelic
futuristic spin on it, you know.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
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

(33:41):
overlooking it if you don't include it in afrofuturism.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
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

(34:06):
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

(34:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
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

(35:21):
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

(35:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
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

(36:21):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
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

(36:57):
get to read now. Yes, she was pretty neat. I
strongly recommend going and reading The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah, should we take another break?

Speaker 3 (37:09):
Yes, Okay, we'll take another break.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
We'll talk about kind of where things stands now, and
also just talk about a lot of other great artists.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
Right after this, so Chuck, things really started to change,

(37:53):
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,

(38:18):
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

(38:40):
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?

Speaker 3 (38:59):
Wesley Snipes? Yeah, he was in Blade.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
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

(39:23):
that you might think of, but there are certainly elements
of it in everything he's done, especially this last one.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
And Nope, that was so cool.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, I mean, no spoilers there, but that movie was
not the movie I thought it was.

Speaker 3 (39:36):
It was way more sci fi and wayless horror. Sure,
but I think he's.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
You know.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
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

(40:13):
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

(40:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, I guess we can talk about music a little more.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
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

(41:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:44):
And then when I was.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
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,

(42:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
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,

(42:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
You saw them in court last week.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
And then the only time I saw them was on
their reunion tour.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
A couple of years ago.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
Oh yeah, cool.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
No, but it's one of the greatest albums of all time.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
So good.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
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

(43:35):
sort of Kirby stuff through the African American lens, and
things like the Unkillable Buck instead of the Incredible Hulk
and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
It's really cool looking.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
And then they are I think influenced by one of
the first African American comic book.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
Writers was Larry Fuller.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
In the late sixties, he created a character named ebon
Ebo n which I.

Speaker 3 (43:59):
Think was the first black superhero, at least among the first.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
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

(44:22):
it's a It's just cool. I like that whole concept
for sure.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
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

(44:46):
wildly successful, they're award winning, and they are afro futuristic,
like to a t.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
Yeah, and apparently we have Chadwick Boseman to thank for
keeping all of the African characters from having British accents.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:23):
It was pretty good.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
I practiced it earlier and I was like, I can't
do it, so I wasn't gonna try.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
But hats off to us.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
So halasa halasasa.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
That's how Trevor Noah said it, and of course he
was on this. I never mind.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
Well, he's from South Africa, so I'll defer to him.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Down on the term.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
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

(46:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yeah, Ethno Gothic, that one's neat.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
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

(47:25):
also like to tell the stories through the lens of
you know, Africans, and so African futurism is rooted in
all these cultures.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
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

(47:53):
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

(48:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:27):
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think it's so mainstream now.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
That's exactly right, and that means mainstream yep. That means
that everybody needs to figure out a new artistic path
to blaze.

Speaker 3 (48:49):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
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

(49:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
She said, Well, she I was just about to say,
she's also my celebrity crush, So you mean I share.

Speaker 1 (49:33):
That I gets pretty great.

Speaker 3 (49:34):
Yeah, it's hard not to.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
I got to keep you and you, me and Janelle
Monet out of the same room.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Oh that's good. That Dirty Computer Man, what a great record.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
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

(50:04):
I go to.

Speaker 3 (50:05):
I'm not gonna go see Taylor Swift. I'll go to Beyonce.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
H hice.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Taylor Swift, her show, like this tour is apparently three
hours long.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
Just like it was so great.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
Oh I saw that coming.

Speaker 1 (50:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:54):
Okay, agreed.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Since Chucks had agreed, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Okay, I'm gonna call this brown fat.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Oh yeah, delicious.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
Yeah, we talked about that in our Oh gosh, why
am I blinking now?

Speaker 1 (51:12):
I think it was our Intermittent Fasting episode.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, I thought it was our Taylor Swift episode.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
You were guessing. No, you were speaking, you were.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
Speaking some facts.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Brown Fat's main biological purpose is to release heat to
keep the body temperature stable.

Speaker 3 (51:40):
I think I said that.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
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

(52:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
Oh. Congratulations Tuesday, Govalls.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
And that is from Sarah Batton.

Speaker 1 (52:24):
Thanks Sarah, thank you very much, and thanks to Brown
Fat too for being so great that Sarah wrote a
listener mail about it.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
Yeah. I mean that's a band name.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
I don't even think I'd.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
Recognize it at the time as such.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever

Speaker 3 (53:10):
You listen to your favorite shows.