Aside from the cheerful candy-colored queer eroticism of Janelle Monae’s video for “Pynk,” one of the things that strikes me is the way Monae flips the trope of women in a car into a narrative of black female pride and empowerment.
Women in cars are, of course, a well-worn visual feature of many rap music videos. In general, both the lyrics and the visuals suggest that women are, like cars, accessories, functional objects to be used, and less valuable than the cars they ride around in.
A couple of examples:
Dr. Dre, “Still D.R.E.”:
Wyclef Jean’s semi-tongue-in-cheek “Young Thug”:
In “J.D.’s Gafflin’,” Ice Cube talks about
[jacking] them motherf*ckers for them Nissan trucks.
So, while for male rappers, cars are a symbol of sexual dominance, credibility, and hypermasculinity, for Janelle Monae, cars are vehicles for freedom, independence, and irreverent fun.
Sort of like a combination of this:
Not unlike this:
Interracial buddy road movies have a long history in Hollywood, beginning with the 1958 prison-escape movie The Defiant Ones, featuring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.
Perhaps it’s time for an interracial girl-buddy road film — or, for that matter, any girl-buddy road film in which the heroines don’t need to be destroyed in the end.
Bentley’s lyric “What made you men folk treat us women like you do?/I don’t want no man that I got to give my money to,” are a far cry from blues portrayals of women as emotionally dependent upon men, like Bessie Smith’s in her only known film appearance:
In the inner sleeve of his 1972 album Music of My Mind, Stevie Wonder also drew on Afrofuturist iconography.
This was the first album in which Wonder had total creative control, and he heavily featured the futuristic sounds of the synthesizer.
Superheroes and comics also figure heavily in the Afrofuturist aesthetic. Marvel introduced T’Challah, the Black Panther, in 1966 in Fantastic Four #52, in which the FF travel to Wakanda.
In the 1970s, DC got in on the game, with an issue of Superman’s GirlfriendLois Lane in which Lois has Superman use futurist technology to make her black for a day, in order to “get that story.”
The complete story is linked on your syllabus. What was woke back then might seem cringeworthy now.
However, by 1970, most of the transformative social projects begun in the 1960s had ended in violence and chaos. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, followed by the murder by the Hell’s Angels of a Black concertgoer at the Altamont Music Festival (see Black Woodstock and the Opposite of Woodstock), and the “Days of Rage” in Chicago initiated by Students for a Democratic Society, in 1969, showed that what had begun with optimism and hope was headed in a dark direction.
The 1960s were definitely over when, on March 6, 1970, the Weather Underground (formerly Students for a Democratic Society) blew up a townhouse in Greenwich Village in which they were fabricating bombs, killing three Weathermen. Less than two months later, on May 4, 1970, four students were killed by the National Guard in a protests at Kent State University in Ohio.
From “Epilogue,” Green Lantern #76, April, 1970 (Dennis O’Neal and Neal Adams)From “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!” Green Lantern #76, April 1970 (Dennis O’Neal and Neal Adams).
If we think of the escapist trend in 1970s funk as a retreat from the hardships of the day-to-day struggle, the religious-science-fiction-cosmological-Afrofuturist trend in 1970s and 1980s funk goes beyond escapism, and advocates for a kind of spiritualized black self-empowerment. Is this vision also escapist? Or is it meant to unify the African-American community in the quest for a better future? If so, can it succeed?
Watch the legendary P-Funk Mothership landing live in concert for the first time in 1976, and note that Parliament-Funkadelic repeatedly reference the 19th-century spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”:
The landing of another mothership at the end of Black Panther.
The filmmakers are making the case that the way out of the Oakland ghetto, and the way to true equality, is through science and technology — an idea that is Afrofuturist to its core.
“Wake Up,” by Funkadelic, is a sonic manifesto of Afrofuturism.
One of the earliest pioneers of the Afrofuturist aesthetic in music was jazz pianist Sun Ra. To learn more about Ra’s philosophy, listen to the lectures he gave as a visiting professor at UC-Berkeley in 1971, all linked here.
The opening titles from Ra’s 1974 film Space is the Place.
Ra live with his Arkestra in 1979:
Some femme Afrofuturism:
Grace Jones.
Janelle Monae.
Legendary sci-fi author Octavia Butler.
clipping, the rap group co-led by Daveed Diggs, created the song “The Deep” in 2017, about an underwater utopia created by the descendants of African women thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade, who could breathe underwater.
The techno turntabling of DJ Jeff Mills, a.k.a. The Wizard.
Roots musician Jake Blount used spirituals in his 2022 album The New Faith to express what he calls
an Afrofuturist story set in a far-future world devastated by climate change. Jake Blount and his collaborators embody a group of Black climate refugees as they perform a religious service, invoking spirituals that are age-old even now, familiar in their content but extraordinary in their presentation. These songs, which have seen Black Americans through countless struggles, bind this future community together and their shared past; beauty and power held in song through centuries of devastation, heartbreak, and loss.
Professor O'Connell's Music History Blog: Class Assignments, Readings, Listening Examples, and Random Stuff 