a few words On Pan-Afrofuturism
(2 min read + videos)
First things first:
GO. WATCH. SINNERS. RIGHT. NOW.
If you don’t like it maybe it’s not for you.
If you did like it, please continue reading.
In regards to ‘that scene,’ MT Breakdowns for Heavy Spoilers has this take that really struck me:
“This humming at the start of this continuous shot very much sets the tone for how Sammy’s music was about to unite these connected black souls together throughout time.” Adding, “as the music begins to move throughout the room, director Ryan Coogler puts the audience in the perspective of the moving magical music itself. Almost like the audience was actually this invisible mystical ghost of ancient musical power, a holy spirit of sound communing in fellowship with this congregation of sinners.”
There’s so many levels to this moment in the movie, including speaking to America’s relationship with organized religion and it’s role in restricting autonomy and expression of many groups of people.
What I want to focus on, however, is how this moment and this movie connects early Blues music as a foundation to popular American Music, as well as being historically accurate to this moment in Southern and Black history in the 1930s. It shows how descendants of African Slaves held on to a spiritual and organic power of their ancestors and collectively translated it into musical expression. It’s beautiful and at it’s core, I believe Ryan Coogler wanted to share a Pan-Afrofuturist vision of culture and music with us.
I’m gonna jump around here a bit so bare with me.
First, Pan-Africanism is a collective movement and theory developed by black scholars and activists in the late 19th Century or Reconstruction Era of the U.S. Prominent names include Martin Delany, Alexander Crummel and Marcus Garvey but I’d argue W. E. B. Du Bois created one of the most persistent and all encompassing approaches that aims at uniting black identifying people in the world, including the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean. His collection of essays, “The Souls of Black Folk” is a important representation of that time period and I think you can tie many of it’s pages directly to this movie.
When it comes to Afro-futurism, the term was developed after contributions to Jazz and Funk from musicians like Sun-Ra and then George Clinton as a part of the Parliament-Funkadelic rock movements. It came with distinct ‘futuristic’ aesthetics, dress codes and concepts that blended sci-fi and black history as it was being interpreted in the 1970s. Since then it has been a way to attribute a black outlook on what the world could look like from a black lens, especially in the late 90s and early 2000s with artists like Missy Elliott and the Neptunes. Picture very y2k, very sleek and metallic and digitally integrated spaces. Ryan Coogler also becomes a part of this pantheon thanks to his black-buster hit, Black Panther.
One of my favorite music videos that I often think about as representing this ideal is Janet Jackson’s “Got Til’ It’s Gone” which is visually based on the South African media magazine DRUM. The camera work, color palette, fashion and so forth are so intentional at depicting an uplifting and African centered form of humanity under American RnB/Hip-Hop blended backdrop. It’s an interpretation of a Pan-African world, past and current and, in my opinion, pure Pan-Afrofuturist idealism.
Loosely but still similarly, one of the most unique Pan-African and idealist spaces we have today, are the comment sections of social media, most especially YouTube music videos. Go to any major Afrobeats, Dancehall, Reggaeton, or Amapiano artists’ videos and you’ll see comments like “Love You! from *insert African, Latin American or Caribbean country here *” and with hundreds to thousands of likes on it. The connection and love to the musician, the griot, from the black diaspora is loud, and has always been. It’s just more amplified now thanks to the world wide web.
To me, music is a vision and conduit for true freedom of expression.
It can explain the unexplainable and translates feelings that thoughts and words could not on their own. One of my fav DJs, Jjess, has this event series/collection called Hard to Explain, Easy to Feel. It’s a awesome example that I think captures this exact feeling that we get from listening and enjoying music. That grey area that comes with being human but also so collectively understood when we share music.
I’ve always believed that its the closest thing we have to time travel. It holds special places for people of the past, now and the future and listening can transport you to feelings of certain time and relationship. Especially as modern music has progressed in the states, whether its Rock, RnB, Pop, Country, Hip-Hop or Electronic it never lost it’s roots. It just innovates under new names of today. So what ‘that scene’ perhaps communicates is how music is not only the foundations of where and who it comes from but also who we are now and a vision of what we can and will be in the future. Because we always have been and its always been there. It’s an awesome moment.
I find a lot of peace in remembering that we only represent 4% of the world in the U.S. There’s a whole other 96% of life out there that we can connect to. Nearly 7.5 billion people with their own points of view, unique experiences, skills, cares, concerns, worldviews and goals. I think the kids would call this feeling sonder. We are just a small part of this giant story.
The past and future of music, human spirit, and the world for that matter, is interconnected and multipolar. Shoutout Sinners for giving us a popular visual display of that fact.
GO. WATCH. SINNERS. RIGHT. NOW.
peace ✌🏾