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The New Mythology of AFRO-FUTURISM
(Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Erykah Badu)
By Kandia Crazy Horse
- Marc Baptiste
- Too cool for the old school: Erykah Badu, retro-future soul sista No. 1, performs in Charlotte this weekend.
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Throughout Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock & Roll, the anthology I compiled and edited for Palgrave Macmillan, there was consensus that major labels, radio and the Western rock/pop audience have a difficult time assessing and supporting progressive black music. Whether an aspiring black artist is as "far out" as Rastafarian punks Bad Brains, as dulcet as Shirley Caesar-inspired Leela James (whom Joss Stone wishes she could be when she grows up) or as possessed of arresting avant-garde compositional and playing chops as the embattled visionary Meshell Ndegeocello, said black artist will ultimately find cold comfort in the marketplace. Once and future Fugee Lauryn Hill was one of the few to ride her urban multi-kulti, womanist sensibilities to superstardom, but she blew it. For now, innovative Dixie rockist favorites OutKast and N.E.R.D. are hanging tough.
On a purely business level, progressive black music may be lagging behind its more popular sibling hip-hop because there's no millennial Motown to gather, harness and groom all of this far-flung urban/roots talent. Black exec Kedar Massenburg tried for a hot moment in the mid-90s, when Motown was signing D'Angelo, Badu, and others; James Poyser's Axis Music clique in Philly has also been quite fruitful. Still, with the exception of some out-of-the-box thinking by ATL execs at LaFace (OutKast) and So So Def (Hamilton), Massenburg's multimillionaire peers — Dr. Dre, P. Diddy, Master P — mostly followed the Russell Simmons model to overwhelming success in the increasingly corrupt hip-hop nation, making only token gestures to signing artists less informed by Thug Life than by the late Curtis Mayfield's lingering template of radio-ready polemics.
Artistically, even in the 90s, when it became cool to be black and the suburban "wigga" abounded (actually, you can date that back to Norman Mailer's infamous 50s "White Negro" or the 1920s Jazz Age), the radical expression of the Cosmic Negro — Betty Davis-idolater Joi (Gilliam-Gipp); Skin of feminist metal band Skunk Anansie; singer/songwriter David Ryan Harris, the godfather of ATL black rock; and Ndegeocello — was too threatening to embrace. If music is black and not ghetto-centric — if, in this particular pop moment, it don't extol the virtues of the pimptastic hip-hop economy and its chilling reenactment of antebellum master-slave relations — then it's always suspect to gate-keeping whites and a certain conservative black audience that rarely embraces any black art that hasn't been sanctioned by mainstream institutions and taste-makers. Black audiences are guilty of not championing their own until "whitefolks done took [our] blues an' gone." Ndegeocello's second masterpiece, Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, tellingly opens with the line, "You sell your soul like you sell a piece of ass."
Any given neo-soul release fuses most American popular forms from bluegrass to hip-hop, as the African presence shaped them all. Yet black artists are perennially denied the gushing kudos their hybrid-happy peers get (think Beck, P.J. Harvey, the White Stripes, Cat Power). Love and theft, born of the Triangular Trade and its entertainment-industry equivalent minstrelsy, is supposed to flow only one way, apparently to the benefit of artists and hit men of the dominant culture. This is the world where Dead Elvis is crowned King of Rock & Roll instead of long-lived Chuck Berry. Where white-chocolate apprentice Nikka Costa's boogie-queen sexuality can be rewarded but Joi's authentic freaky-deke cannot. Where Carolina-bred alt-country sun king Ryan Adams is anointed for adopting Dylan's Village troubadour pose but black Brit bard Seal's brilliant re-imagining of Marvin Gaye's partnership with Leon Ware is deemed boring.
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