Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco

by Jonathan Wright

  The best Be-Bop Deluxe has that strange mixture of optimism and distance common to a lot of great science fiction; it’s not ironic, but in Nelson’s voice you can hear that all is not well. And that’s one of the great qualities of the era in which Bill Nelson made those records. There’s a lot said nowadays about the grimness of the 1970s, strikes and bin bags on every corner, but it was also a colourful (orange and brown) era, full of plastic and sugar. Maybe life was something of a comedown after the idiot grin of the 60s, but the 70s had a wit that the face-value 60s didn’t. In a way, the 70s was the 60s grown-up, shorn of some of its dafter idealism but still enjoying new freedoms.

  It’s a more knowing decade and in some ways better for it; and while many of the bands of the 70s had a thudding prog heftiness to their work, all 10-minute keyboard solos and bombast instead of heart, Be-Bop Deluxe had a lightness to their best moments. A song such as Maid In Heaven takes two-and-a-half minutes to make its point, not usual for the era. It stood out in the blimp-laden charts like a tiny chrome fighter plane.

  Times change, though, and Be-Bop’s career was faltering. They had one of those classic unexpected hit singles along the way – the ballad Ships In The Night – and then Nelson changed line-ups, sensing the arrival of the actual future. The final Be-Bop Deluxe had heard Bowie’s “Heroes”, was leaner, and wrote songs like Electrical Language and the aptly named New Precision. It was a harbinger of the times, the shift from Retro Future to No Future. And the band duly evolved into Nelson’s next project, Red Noise, which was even more in tune with the era.

  “Well, I guess a certain pessimism had crept in,” he says. “My generation witnessed the betrayal of some of science fiction’s more idealistic concepts. The Orwellian Big Brother thing was materialising in the real world as a technology-driven application of right-wing, anti-liberal ideas, the growth of surveillance cameras, notions of ‘political correctness’, etcetera…

  “The once vibrant 60s counterculture had either run out of steam or become absorbed into the ultra-corporate mentality that led to Thatcherite values and yuppie greed. Within the space of a generation, it had mutated from a life-changing, visionary process to just another lifestyle product. So, suddenly it seemed as if the ‘near-future’ might be little more than a superficial, glossy dystopia rather than anything truly transcendent. And what was even more disconcerting was that many people seemed eager to embrace such a world. Willing, artificially happy servants of the state, oblivious to the puppet masters pulling their strings.”

  This was the attitude that informed Red Noise’s Sound-On-Sound album, with its jerky rhythms, its more cynical lyrics (A Better Home In The Phantom Zone, Art/Empire/Industry) and its generally more claustrophobic atmosphere. It’s as if Bill Nelson had gone straight from the sky towers of Dan Dare to the grim slums of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the space of one album. The dry wit was still there (every dream home needs a copy of the great Revolt Into Style single, with its fantastic Who quote in the last two seconds) and there was a willingness to engage with the times, but this was uneasy music.

  Nelson engaged with the times so much he became a chartbound producer, working with The Skids on their own era-busting Days In Europa album, in which synth sounds and electronic beats got a bit tangled up with Germanic 1930s imagery.

  “As I’d been listening to experimental music since the mid-60s, it was no problem for me to help The Skids incorporate elements of electronica into their music,” he says. “Electricity had long been a symbol of modernity so it was natural that pop music would become more electronic as it struggled to outgrow its earlier roots. The sound of electricity seemed like the sound of the future at that time… drum machines, Moog synthesizers, delay units, guitar synths and tape loops were things I’d embraced within Be-Bop Deluxe, so I was perfectly comfortable with electronica when it became a more popular trend.”

  And as a solo artist, he was becoming more and more part of the times. (In his current career, he shuns the word ambient and says he’s “flirted with minimalism but never got into bed with it.”) Like many great guitarists of the 1970s, he became fascinated with the possibilities of other instruments, and slowly Nelson drifted from the spiral twist of his best rock records to a dreamier sound and released a series of quieter, albeit still complex recordings, on his own label, which was named after one of his heroes, Jean Cocteau. He also continued to display a singular genius for naming records – my favourite being Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam. But as time went on, Bill Nelson’s drift away from the mainstream increased, like an astronaut who has deliberately cut the cord connecting him to the mothership. He is happy with, and plays, all aspects and eras of his extraordinary career, but still returns to that one influence.

  “I think it’s true to say that my music has become less concerned with outer space and more with inner space, though there are still affectionate nods to the influences and inspirations of my younger days when I enjoyed sci-fi in so many forms,” he says. “Sometimes, I’ll use sci-fi imagery as a mask for something more down to earth, or simply as a means of conjuring surreal, non-linear images in the listener’s mind. The symbols of science fiction can provide me with a set of creative metaphors. Maybe to evoke the enigmatic passing of time and its associated joys and disappointments, its gains and losses.”

  Nelson still looks to science fiction for titles – Fancy Planets, Modern Moods For Mighty Atoms, Speedboats From Another World and Dance, Mighty Robot, Dance! being some of my new favourites – and he’s still inspired by that world he grew up in, still making music as extraordinary and other-worldly as he did with Be-Bop Deluxe.

  “We may not have personal jet packs and flying cars but we’re definitely living in a sci-fi future, albeit a more subtle and insidious one than we’d previously imagined,” he concludes. “Nevertheless, I still believe that sci-fi provides a valuable platform for ideas and that it has value beyond mere entertainment. It promotes dreams and is a product of dreams, suggesting possibilities and potentials beyond the here and now. A vehicle powered by the engine of imagination, a machine that transports us to tomorrow in style.”

  Which is also a brilliant description of the best music. Bill Nelson, still dreaming, still on the beam.

  But What Does George Clinton’s Mothership Mean?

  - Minister Faust -

  Starchild! Citizens of the universe! Recording angels!

  We have returned to claim the pyramids.

  Partying on the Mothership, I am the Mothership connection

  Mothership Connection (Starchild),

  Parliament (1975)

  When this time is up, the Mother Plane comes into the atmosphere to take in fresh air for our Brothers inside, then she retakes her position. At the dropping of the bombs… America will burn 390 years and take 610 years to cool off. The Great Mystery Babylon (America) will perish…

  Supreme Wisdom Department, Our Mother Plane

  Catechism of the Nation of Islam

  George Clinton, as everyone knows, is the singer and composer, the founding Funkitecht, the speaker of Parliament, the jester, the judge of doomed America, the Afrofuturist Neo to Sun Ra’s Morpheus, the prophet of humanity coming together (and coming together), the Star Child, and the revealer of the great vehicle of soular salvation, the Mothership. Just as accurately, you can say he’s the rainbow-dreadlocker who propelled the evolution of hundreds of hip-hop acts while partying eternally in the slap-bass depths of sex, drugs and penisoid spaceship album covers.

  What George Clinton is not – and could never, ever pass for – is a bow tie-wearing, bean pie-slinging, Supreme Wisdom-quoting member of the Nation of Islam. Which is contradictory when you consider he’s the same man who has configured a Mother Plane/Mothership connection in his musical mania.

  To explain for those who don’t keep up with NOI scripture, it’s prophesised that the Mother Plane will one day destroy the Euro-American Empire in an Afro-Asiatic Ragnafunk. So was Clinton merely mocking the hyperdestructive, apoc
alyptic starship from Elijah Muhammad’s religion when he came up with the Mothership? Or was he reverse-engineering the vehicle so that humanity – of all colours – could be elevated from the misery and the madness of the Empire and united into one nation under a groove?

  Yes, George Clinton’s Mothership was a metaphor, and maybe a parody, and definitely a remix. But it was also a literal thing, a gigantic prop-vehicle descending onto the stage of Parliament Funkadelic concerts so that Clinton could pop out in his alter-ego of the Starchild, a name invoking Arthur C Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s psychedelic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, and its celestially evolved astronaut, Dave Bowman. Clinton’s Starchild emerging from his starship also summoned up peace-messenger Klaatu (rather than galactic executioner Gort), disembarking his own cosmodisc in Edmund North’s and Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), and the Christ-like, slender alien (and interstellar orchestra conductor) from Steven Spielberg’s Mothership in 1977’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

  What’s unspoken and all-too-often unnoticed in the above is just how completely white a universe those stories projected. The only Africans in 2001 are literal animals; most of the film’s sets gleam as white as the movie’s final scene in the Astro-Hilton. CE3K depicts a 1970s USA that would be a Republican racial utopia, and its hyperevolved aliens (like its own Star-Christ) are actually albinos (even whiter than almost all of Star Trek’s super-intelligent xenomorphs, because in Trek, the darker the aliens, the more primitive and usually the more violent). Klaatu, of course, was as white as everyone else the day that Euro-America stood still (although it’s remotely possible, however unlikely, that inside that robot suit, Gort was actually a brother).

  So in the ancient days when hard SF still ruled the genre but the New Wave was crashing upon its shores, why would George Clinton (with bassist Bootsy Collins, horn-men Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, keyboardist Bernie Worrell and vocalist Philippé Wynne), or any other African (or Asian, or Latin-American) give even a demi-damn for a genre that screamed nothing but silence about their mere existence? When even a masterpiece such as Phil Dick’s The Man In The High Castle reduced the absolute, planetary genocide of Africans to a single sentence?

  What is the meaning of George Clinton’s Mothership when connected to a literary form that made all Africans into (not in HG Wells’ sense, but in Ralph Ellison’s) invisible men and women?

  SF fans – and people who caricature them with the familiar catalogue of clichés – know that SF has strong appeal for the alienated, not the least for its depiction of aliens. And SF wouldn’t be the first venue of the excluded to exclude yet somebody else. But because the very nature of SF is yearning for the unknown (even inside ourselves) and deliverance from the mundane or the world of pain, SF, despite its long history of pure whiteness, has ensnared many of those whom the White Empire attempted to banish to the Phantom (or maybe Spook) Zone.

  As science fiction scholar Lisa Yaszek recounts in Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, And The History Of The Future, Afrofuturism is as old as SF itself. Not only was intellectual giant WEB Du Bois creating Afrofuturist fiction in the early 20th century, the subgenre goes back to the 19th century. Key texts include Blake, Or The Huts Of America (1857), by liberationist Martin Delany, in which West Africans in the USA and Cuba mount a triumphant revolution; and Edward A Johnson’s Light Ahead For The Negro (1904), the story of a time-travelling African-American propelled into a future “racially egalitarian socialist America.”

  Between 1936 and 1938, conservative journalist George Schuyler wrote a serialised SF novel, Black Empire, that while being a satirical attack on early pan-Africanism (perhaps most of all on Marcus Garvey’s spectacular, two million-strong Universal Negro Improvement Association), it was also damn near the Star Wars of African-American culture, whose members embraced, without the intended irony, Schuyler’s story of a pan-African global revolution led by a super-scientist mastermind, Dr Henry Belsidus.

  Nor was Afrofuturism restricted to literature. The brilliant painter Aaron Douglas repeatedly invoked ancient African civilisations while depicting Africans not merely dwelling in but constructing their own futures, as in 1944’s Building More Stately Mansions.Many of Douglas’s paintings vibrate with dancing figures who could easily be moving to Scott Joplin, Ellington, Fela, or to P-Funk itself.

  Perhaps no Afrofuturist artist is more famous than Sun Ra, the jazz musician in permanent self-delusion (or kayfabe?) whose costumes and presentation fused ancient Egypt with ancient aliens. Sun Ra claimed he himself descended from the “angel race” of Saturn, years before Erich von Däniken published Chariots Of The Gods?

  If the ultimate source of all epic fantasy is religion, certainly epic SF owes a great debt to it too. So it should be no surprise to find Afrofuturism at the heart of the Nation of Islam, which like many US-grown religious movements such as Mormonism and Scientology contains a cosmology far more developed (and cherished) than anything in SFF: a fusion of Ancient Egyptian, mystical Islamic, Freemasonic and other esoteric philosophies, producing visions of a technotopian Afroasiatic past destroyed by white villains and a black future ensured by millenarian vengeance. The NOI’s eschatology references the Book of Ezekiel’s wheel-within-a-wheel (often cited by ‘ufologists’ as the one of the earliest attestations of extraterrestrial vehicular visitation). That wheel alternates, in NOI beliefs, between a massive orbital disk (the Mother Ship) and a gigantic bomber (the Mother Plane). The NOI scripture called Supreme Wisdom Department: Our Mother Plane explains the apocalyptic role of the Mother Plane/Ship: specifically, to destroy “America, the Great Mystery Babylon”:

  [The Mother Plane’s] position is 40 miles out from the Earth’s sphere… At the dropping of the bombs, the flames will reach 12 miles, in all directions… Allah will even cause the air which we breathe to ignite along with the atmosphere. Every atom will burn in and over America from a height of 12 miles down.

  Afrofuturism – in fiction, in art, in music, in religion – offered everything from deliverance and utopianism to apocalyptic vengeance. Since SF is so frequently escapist, why wouldn’t it appeal to people living under the dictatorship of Jim Crow and his mutant sons, whose ancestors had been ripped from their home civilisations to toil in the savagery of a continent-wide gulag and rape-camp? The 19th-century liberationist Harriet Tubman famously observed that she freed a thousand Africans, but could have freed more if they’d understood they were not already free. So the question should never be, “Why Afrofuturism?” so much as “Why not Afrofuturism?”

  Enter George Clinton.

  The liner notes to the retrospective album Tear The Roof Off: 1974-1980 read in part:

  Funk upon a time, in the daze of the Funkapus, the earth was on the One. Funk flowed freely and freedom was free from the need to be free. Even Cro-Nasal Sapiens and the Thumpasorus Peoples lived side by side in P(eace).

  But soon there arose bumpnoxious empires led by unfunky dictators. These priests, pimps, and politicians would spank whole nations of unsuspecting peoples – punishing them for their feelings and desires, constipating their notions and pimping their instincts until they were fat, horny and strung-out…

  The descendants of the Thumpasorus Peoples knew Funk was its own reward. They tried to remain true to the pure, uncut Funk. But it became impossible in a world wooed by power and greed. So they locked away the secret of Clone Funk with kings and pharaohs deep in the Egyptian pyramids, and fled to outer speace [sic] to party on the Mothership and await the time they could safely return to refunkatize the planet.

  Combine liner notes such as those with a series of outlandish, spacey, silly-sexual album covers by artist Pedro Bell (and no, they don’t rival the Afrofuturist art of Douglas or the Dillons, but they delivered the effective dose of fun and funk), the stunning psychedelic guitar work of Eddie Hazel (mute the sound during Dave Bowman’s hyperspace plummet at the climax of 2001 and play the guitar solo in Maggot Brain at full blast), costumes that could make KI
SS blush and the Starchild emerging from his own UFO, and you have an unforgettable Afrofuturistic spectacle that has influenced artists for generations to come, including more than 440 songs (and counting) energised by P-Funk samples, as itemised by whosampled.com.

  The Africentric/Egyptian-focused 1990s hip-hop crew X Clan would never have existed without P-Funk supplying the swagger and the samples at the base of its songs. Public Enemy’s video for Do You Wanna Go Our Way? leaps from the P-Funk mould of Afrofuturist struggle against the Empire (although with more aggression). Kelis’s Flesh Tone and Janelle Monáe’s ArchAndroid descend from P-Funk’s Afrofuturist concept albums.

  Reginald Hudlin, producer of Django: Unchained and writer/resurrectionist of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther and BP animated series, told me: “George Clinton is the number one influence on me as an artist. His motto. ‘Nothing is good unless you play with it,’ and the aesthetic that extends from that, shapes my own take on Afrofuturism. He is a genius.”

  And as Afrofuturist commentator Greg Tate wrote to me, seating Clinton and his fellow Afronauts inside the same spacecraft: “The cool thing about George, Sun Ra, [and authors Samuel] Delany [and Octavia] Butler, is they were science fiction fans who all decided to put blackfolk and black mythology in the frame. Afrofuturism is of course just the trendy-going name for what they were all just doing to satisfy and explore their own imaginations – beauty of which is you get to listen to Cosmic Slop, Mothership Connection, Clones Of Dr Funkenstein, Motor Booty Affair and make the links to Afrofuturism via [their references to] space operas, Marvel comics, Egyptian mythology, [and] Atlantis.”

  But does Clinton really care about any of this Afrofuturism stuff, or has it all just been showjizz? Check out YouTube footage of Clinton interviewing himself on a Martian-looking landscape, and it’s hard to think he wants anyone analysing him too deeply: