The Spaceship Came Before the Record

The received account of Afrofuturism treats it as a look. Capes, pyramids, spacecraft, borrowed science fiction images applied to records that would have sounded much the same without them. It is a generous reading and I am fairly sure it is backwards. In the cases that matter, the world was built first and the music was made to live inside it. That is not decoration. It is a method of production, and in one instance it produced a science fiction feature.

Start with the paperwork, because a mythology invites vagueness and a court record does not. On the twentieth of October 1952, at the Circuit Court of Cook County, Herman Poole Blount legally became Le Sony'r Ra. The Arkestra followed in 1955. Space Is the Place, the feature, was released in November 1974, directed by John Coney and co-written by Sun Ra with Joshua Smith, running eighty five minutes. Twenty two years separate the name from the film. By the time a camera crew arrived, the cosmology was not a pitch. It was a going concern with a band, a record label and somewhere for everyone to live.

The production history makes the point better than any manifesto could. Newman and Coney did not set out to adapt a mythology. They went to shoot Arkestra concert footage, and the story was assembled around material that already existed. The fiction was not written and then costumed. It was found running, and a film was built into it.

One honesty note, because the link below is not that film. Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise is Robert Mugge's documentary from 1980, fifty nine minutes, shot around Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington between 1978 and 1980. It is a portrait of the Arkestra at work, not the 1974 feature. Anyone arriving there expecting Space Is the Place will not find it.

The museum kept the prop

George Clinton has been unusually plain about the sequence. "I figured another place you wouldn't think black people would be was in outer space," he said of the concept, and Mothership Connection arrived in December 1975. The ship itself came after the record. It began landing on stage in October 1976, designed by Jules Fisher and Peter Larkin, and stayed until 1981.

The detail I cannot get past is that the original was lost. What the Smithsonian acquired in 2011, and what now stands in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is a replica built in the mid 1990s for a reunion tour. A national museum holds a reproduction of an imaginary vehicle, catalogued under the movement's name. The object judged worth preserving from that era is a prop from a story, and the institution filed it correctly. A documentary portrait of the band sits in the catalogue here.

Detroit is the centre of this, not the edge

Underground Resistance is where the costume reading falls apart completely. The balaclavas and the anonymous logo are usually explained as a position against celebrity, which is true and half the story. Interstellar Fugitives, from 1998, is a fiction about a gene called the R-1 that lets a person resist when everything around them says comply, and the artists on it recorded as characters from that fiction, under those names. The premise is not a sleeve. It is the personnel. The 2005 sequel is subtitled Destruction of Order and carries the argument forward. That row is the record rather than a film. The short documentary on the collective runs nine minutes and does the introducing.

The cleanest case comes out of a cinema

Greg Broussard took the name Egyptian Lover before he was a DJ and before he had made a record. He has been asked often enough to have a settled answer, and both halves come from outside music. The Egyptian half came from a touring King Tut exhibition, which gave him a picture of a young man running his own empire. The Lover half came from Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik. He wrote the whole thing on the back of a jacket, in a neighbourhood where the available alternative was a fighting name.

So the empire was first, the drum machine was second, and Egypt, Egypt came in 1984. An interview feature has him telling a version of it. A persona assembled from a museum show and a silent film, then supplied with a sound.

Four artists, one order of operations. Persona, then apparatus, then output. Criticism that starts at the music and reads the imagery as packaging has the sequence reversed, and that costs something specific. It turns the work into genre affectation, theatre applied to the serious business of the records, when what is happening is a refusal of the available terms and the construction of somewhere else to work from. A man who legally changes his name in 1952 is not accessorising.

For anyone assembling a programme of fantastic cinema, the consequence is that none of this belongs in a music sidebar. Space Is the Place is a science fiction feature that exists because a science fiction premise had been running for twenty two years and eventually needed a camera pointed at it. That is a stranger origin than most genre films can claim, and no studio had anything to do with it.