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

by Jonathan Wright

  George Clinton: I know you’ve heard it a lot of times, but I’m going to ask anyway: what is the question you hate most from journalists?

  George Clinton: That question.

  George Clinton: Last thing. Fuck’s up with your hair? What’s that shit for? Like, is there some kind of a “I lost my virginity braid?”

  George Clinton: Man, fuck you.

  So which is it? Parody, homage, sampling, remixing, or just plain riffing? P-Funk’s lexicon includes terms such as funkintelechy (funk + intellect + technology), reminiscent of the NOI term ‘tricknology’. The song Mothership Connection announces: “We have returned to claim the pyramids, partying on the Mothership,” reflecting Pan-Africanism’s larger intellectual project of reclaiming Ancient Egypt as an African civilisation.

  Still, as P-Funk scholar Ted Friedman explains, Clinton’s Mothership mission wasn’t NOI radioactive vengeance, but radio-active dance. Parliament’s late 1970s concept albums include the war between the Starchild and his nemesis, Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk. “Starchild’s goal,” writes Friedman, “is never to kill Sir Nose, but to make him dance – to catch The Funk, the way unwilling victims catch Jes Grew in Mumbo Jumbo… Starchild ‘funkatises’ Sir Nose by shooting him with his weapon, the ‘Bop Gun.’”

  Indeed, the Mothership looks way too much party to serve The Party, but it wouldn’t be the first time something ultra-Africentric got denatured on the way to market. When Bob Marley sang One Love, he wasn’t anthemising pan-racial harmony, he was singing Garvey’s slogan for African unity and self-determination. Dreadlocks used to be the marker of devotion to Haile Selassie I, the incarnation of God who was soon to destroy the global White Empire, rather than the marker of white hipsterism, marijuana ‘non-addiction’, bad hygiene, and total absence of African friends they are today.

  Then again (again), how serious does Clinton have to be about the Mothership or anything else for Africentrists to take him Africentrically? So what if P-Funk is 99 per cent style, spectacle, and sex? It’s pop music, goddammit. Did Clinton create a coherent Afrofuturist übernarrative to convey personal and planetary evolution? Fuck no. Did Boston’s UFO album covers emulate HG Wells’ anti-imperialist novel War Of The Worlds? Outside of rock operas, how much pop music ever aims at telling coherent übernarratives? Neither U2’s No Line On The Horizon nor Lady Gaga’s Born This Way is exactly Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Nobody expects them to be, and nobody should demand more of Clinton than the gigantic alms he offered into galactic palms.

  So where’s the Mothership now? Not with Clinton, who’s still planet-hopping with his latest P-Funk incarnation, the P-Funk All-Stars. Instead it’s on its final mission, keeping the original model of the USS Enterprise company at the Smithsonian Institution. Is that sad? Clinton’s frequently misquoted slogan, “Free your mind and your ass will follow,” clarifies that no matter how funky the beat, the intellect should be in command. Doesn’t matter that the physical Mothership is mothballed. The real Mothership is in your mind.

  Roots And Antennae, Tongues And Flight: Boney M Aboard The Black Star Liner

  - Mark Sinker -

  Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.

  None but ourselves can free our minds

  Redemption Song

  Bob Marley

  “In the Yardbirds’ For Your Love, unknown tongues are produced by the juxtaposition of three incongruous sections of major length. The unknown tongue of the Zombies’ She’s Not There is a gasp.” For more than 30 demanding pages, in his 1970 book-length essay The Aesthetics Of Rock, Richard Meltzer elucidates the idea of the “unknown tongue.” The most sustained passage in the essay, it’s (presumably) key to the aesthetic he’s outlining: “That of the Ivy League’s Tossing And Turning is felt as part of a crescendo towards the end of a group of grammatically separable (but contextually unified) lines sung with increasing speed and increasingly rich harmonies… Like the last reverberation of an orgasm, which the song connotes, the very last note of the Searchers’ Ain’t That Just Like Me is tonguelike.”

  I say ‘presumably’ because ‘elucidates’ is a misleading word here: no one ever accused Meltzer’s first book of being an easy read. His style is riddlingly allusive – he assumes that you know every pop song he cites in granular detail, and every philosophical or avant-garde reference too. This juxtaposition – a swift flipping between incongruous discourses – is the heart of his tale. It’s high-end provocation, of course: not because he’s insincere, but because he wants to force you, unprepared, to experience his puzzled excitement, surprise, curiosity and gleeful disbelief. It’s a study of the energy of unplanned encounter – and at the same time a kind of portrait, of the oddity, the thrill, the difficulty of such encounters. Gathered into one volume from their original magazine context, the book’s paragraphs – absurdist, super-condensed, opaquely referential – at times combine into a near-total murk.

  Let’s try to shed some light. Meltzer found the term “unknown tongue” in Time magazine in the early 60s, some unnamed reviewer’s well-meaning attempt to pin down the emotive qualities in Ray Charles’s voice, whatever the sung material. ‘Speaking in tongues’ is of course the religious phenomenon mentioned in the New Testament and found in Pentecostal churches all across the southern states: ecstatic believers breaking into polysyllabic streams of words from unrecognised languages, proof to all present of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Across a single compressed transitional instant, the familiar then the utterly unfamiliar, and as something alien seems to call to you, comes a shock of recognition, of worlds beyond singer and listener: this I think is roughly what Meltzer was dabbing at.

  Meltzer’s terrains of concern were 60s rock and pop and 50s jazz; Boney M belong to the late 70s. Meltzer was extrapolating from the thrilled, anxious, fascinated response of the (young) white world to black American music in the first half of the 20th century, and the shifting layers of unexpected mutual encounter that made up popular and semi-popular music in the 60s: the US reaction to the UK response to US music in the 50s, for example, and how both white Anglophone camps responded to black US music as it adapted to and resisted these several responses and reactions. We are discussing a reggae-tinged pop group, far bigger in Europe, India and the Far East than the US – but (despite being put together in Germany by Eurodisco svengali Frank Farian) also popular in the Caribbean, birthplace of its singer-dancers. The extended interworld stage for the further encounter really is anywhere on Earth…

  In the social turmoil of the post-war period, when the chances of unplanned collision with the hitherto unknown were greatly heightened (not least via records sold and new forms of long-distance broadcast), rock became the descriptive journal of such chances, as much in form as content – the collective book of all the newly meeting tongues. Whence much of its excitement, its novelty as well its tacit politics, and its allure as it percolated out into the wider post-colonial world. Reggae’s forebears had sprung up in Jamaica, first echoing the R&B stations broadcasting from New Orleans and such, but quickly distinct. Jamaican workers arriving in the UK brought these sounds to London clubs, quickly seeding a local fandom, while by 1968, five years after independence, this tiny island was hosting some half a million tourists a year.

  The official posterchild for this new pop voicing is of course Bob Marley, unmistakeably stellar from the mid-1970s. Despite (but also because of) his stubbornly militant particularity – the undeniably non-local provenance of his sound, his look, the beat and lilt of his music, the dissident poetry of his Rastafarian faith – he fitted comfortably enough within the rebel rhetoric of rock ordinaire. To the world at large he seemed impeccably dread, choosing to manifest as the cultural monster we fear yet are drawn to, his locks the very avatar of on-street cthulhoid trolling, an avatar globally beloved to this day. But there was another, very different popular vector: Boney M. No one has ever called Boney M dread: words and phrases used to describe them include wholesome, inauthentic, cosily unthreatening, manufactured
easy listening, music for all the family, reggae for people who don’t like reggae. And yet, despite this or perhaps at the root of it, they were quietly and unshakeably strange.

  With digressions – new wave boilersuits, jazz-age Gatsby togs – Boney M dressed as well meaning but puzzled ambassadors from another galaxy: space-disco elegance, slender long-limbed people, the three women gorgeously attired in glittering robes and brimless cloche helmets, sometimes with antennae, the even taller Bobby Farrell in a jumpsuit, his strange mushroom cloud of an Afro the signature completing their instantly recognisable silhouette. When he wasn’t miming the deep-voiced elements, Farrell danced as they sang, endearingly child-like, almost clumsy, a lovely gangly elder from a wiser, sadder civilisation imitating our eccentricities in all diplomatic earnestness. Sun Ra had raided the same wardrobe – neo-Egyptian Jazz Moderne, King Tut’s gift to Art Deco – for the same effect: the regal visitor chiding us, in stern sorrow or gently simple kindness.

  Made at Hansa by the Wall, the Berlin studio famous for Giorgio Moroder’s early work and David Bowie’s post-pop experiments, Boney M’s LPs were studio patchworks of hooks and tricks, clues and mimicry, the very essence of a quilty pleasure. From song to song, producer Frank Farian switchbacks through silliness, sentiment, scribbles of disco strings, prog-ruffled electro-throb, bubblegum hymnal, and sweet local carols and percussion overheard from every exotic port on the Atlantic. These weren’t concept albums so much as ragbags of contradictory fragments, as hopeful and confusing as the music selection sent out to the cosmos on Voyager I in 1977.

  And of course the two songs that made them famous – where the subject matter most overlaps with Marley’s – were Brown Girl In The Ring, a traditional Jamaican skipping chant that can suddenly fall on the wised-up mind as a child’s innocently happy sketch of a slave market, and Rivers Of Babylon, a 1970 Rastafarian parable about racial kidnap and exile: “By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, and there we wept, when we remembered Zion. For the wicked carried us away in captivity, required from us a song. How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land?”

  The rocksteady tune is by the Melodians, but these words are straight from Psalm 137: Zion is Africa, the unspoiled homeland far away; Babylon is bondage, a metaphorical name for the enslaving imperium, its cruel economy and technologies, its degraded culture, its capital the vast iron Tower of Babel where all the world’s tongues exploded into mutual incomprehension. King Alpha is Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian monarch hailed in Jamaica since the 1930s as a symbol of freedom and return, heir to Solomon and Sheba, messiah and Godhead on Earth.

  Here in compacted juxtaposition is the yearning faith of this most eloquent element of the kidnapped Caribbean peoples – that Selassie, so earnest at the UN about the oneness of all peoples, the guarantee of rights irrespective of race or colour, would ferry them back to their distant land – as well as their identification with the Israelites in tribulation under the invader Nebuchadnezzar, a tale of captivity two-and-a-half millennia ago, to be found as a figure for the faithful in exile in a ghastly world, in all kinds of dissident Christian discourse, from non-conformist hymns to gospel. With the flipside of the single for Boney M being a playground song, simple and joyful, the obliquely hinted terror of its subject dissolved in a child’s absorption and unknowing grace.

  Versions of both appear on the 1978 LP Nightflight To Venus, which presents the group – in a welter of unexpected rock drums and a cheerfully ethereal chant over a muted Sabbath riff and a tweaked version of Fauré’s Pavane – as a rocketship for interplanetary tourists. They leave this idea as underdeveloped as any other on the record, but in 1984 returned to a similar theme: Ten Thousand Lightyears, which begins with Exodus (Noah’s Ark 2001) and continues for several songs about spaceships as vehicles of escape from calamity – before once more dissolving back into their usual limpid tropical gulfstream of discombobulated fragments, muffled surprises, likeable mistranslation.

  An artform deepens, progresses and matures via selection, refinement, self-defining resistance to and isolation from all that’s distracting around it. A rock group evolves round a vocal or instrumental sound or a beat, or else a stance – and as it cuts itself off from interruption and conversation and chance meeting, often becomes a bore. Against this, argues Meltzer – not least in what he calls “unknown tongue” – value in pop derives from unplanned juxtaposition, dissident or seductive, profound or daft, these transitions into serendipity, often within a song, but as often in the way the song drops back into everything around it.

  Boney M’s oeuvre is exactly not such a maturing, self-refining artform. Producer Farian has a bizarrely miscalibrated attention span – songs go on too long, ideas vanish too quickly, the multifarious elements, gathered from such incongruously scattered sources, fold back into themselves as abruptly as they appear. Sententiously manipulative arrangements, glad-handing clichés, momentary scenes and arguments bafflingly out of place within the cheery-yearning escapist disco milieu, the impasto of half-grasped echoes, myth and music semi-translated and repeated through a child’s guileless eyes and ears, lyric lines often only just in English: as a pop lingua franca it’s a pick’n’mix from everywhere and nowhere, the spatchcock pidgin of the recently globalised communication arena – and it’s this that renders the mix at once so attractive and so maddening, so new, so odd, so confusing…

  Hence: glimpses of sharp social fracture and recalcitrance (Ma Baker, Belfast, Rasputin). On the 1981 LP Boonoonoonoos, the title a dialect word meaning plentiful or beautiful as an adjective, delight as a noun, more songs about slavery and world destruction, with We Kill the World (Don’t Kill the World) at its centre, an anti-pollution message-song threatening Armageddon. A stoical song about the Moroccan anti-colonial war, Road To Agadir, written by Mike Batt of The Wombles. A cover of the Yardbirds’ Still I’m Sad. On the 1977 LP Love for Sale – a Cole Porter song originally sung by three prostitutes in a 1930 musical – the group had appeared dressed as half-naked slaves, in chains. Here at the inadvertent street-corner meet-point of everything you never imagined…

  In the 1994 film StarGate, the much-mocked archaeologist played by James Spader becomes gradually more and more excited about the links he’s finding to ancient Egyptian culture. Despite his perilous situation trapped on a faraway alien slaver-world, he’s amazed and happy. Spend days sifting through Boney M songs and you begin feeling something similar – all these clues and hints and symbols and glimpses, who’s leaving them, what’s the plan, where off-planet are we being directed, and how? It’s an idiotic feeling, obviously – the question of artistic agency is more or less null with this group, given its lack of input and their svengali’s disastrous attention span – except every time curiosity slumps back into boredom, shock recognition again: the otherworldly tongue within (or out of) the glidingly banal.

  Which is perhaps all just a relic, from my own listening history, of words heard and melodies sung long ago. I’m not a Christian or any kind of believer, but I spent a lot of time when small in church choirs and congregation, caught between confident unbelonging and the shared, almost unconscious kindness and generosity and melancholy hope for better things, that suffuses so much church music, the remembered unisons of rooms-full of untutored voices. Of course it’s not all that’s there – there’s judgmentalism and bad history and fear and worse – but the idea that, like the child singing happily about the brown girl on the slaver’s block, you could somehow channel that unspoiled guileless innocence everywhere, that all that stands in our way is our cynical adult knowledge of evil and exploitation in the world, our will to refine, to extract, to select merely for excellence, to build cruel iron towers on the sad songs of the overlooked.

  Music for a Concrete Island: JG Ballard and the Prefabrication of Post-Punk

  - Jason Heller -

  “Jimmy B was tone deaf. Actually tone deaf,” said Michael Moorcock in a recent exchange with Adventure Rocketship! He was speaking of the late J
G Ballard, one of Moorcock’s friends and fellow innovators in the New Wave of science fiction in the 60s and 70s – a movement that subverted and revolutionised speculative fiction in much the way that rock music reconfigured popular culture during the same era.

  Even if Ballard hadn’t been tone deaf, it’s hard to imagine him having an affinity for rock, let alone post-punk. The subgenre rose in the late ’0s as both an extension and a rejection of punk rock. As such it sought, in part, to assault even the most riff-hardened eardrum. Ballard definitely had no such armour. In his definitive collection of nonfiction, The User’s Guide To The Millennium, his coverage of rock music begins and ends with a single, dismissive mention of The Beatles – the band that, according to the author, sent the ’60s “lurching on their gaudy way.”

  Granted, a good deal of punk’s aggression was purely thespian. Art students and erstwhile hippies comprised much of the original punk scene, and many of them adopted cartoonish crudeness and personae as a form of protest. It was almost anti-colonial in nature; a stultified orthodoxy suffused youth culture in the 70s, one that demanded reverent recognition of the cultural legitimacy of rock. Like any will to power, that gave way to tyranny – in this case, of the aesthetic stripe. Punk fell prey to the same paradox that so many revolutionary movements do: in trying to keep its ideology cohesive, it established its own tyranny. Counterrevolution inevitably ensued.

  That counterrevolution was post-punk. Sharp yet amorphous, it was punk with all the rules removed. Although some early practitioners of British punk rock such as Wire, Swell Maps and The Fall presciently latched onto post-punk’s off-kilter, self-deconstructionist ethos, the frontal assault was led by none other than punk’s own Trotsky: John Lydon, formerly known as Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols.