Old Money x Writers Block Presents
.::Other Planes of There::.
[83min Continuous Mix]
Tracklist and info after the jump.
Tracklist:
Kesed – “Kemet I”
Outkast – “E.T. (Extraterrestrial)”
Kanye West – “Spaceship”
Earth, Wind & Fire – “After The Love Has Gone”
Norman Connors – “You Are My Starship”
N.E.R.D. – “Love 3om3″
Saul Williams – “The Tao of Now”
Outkast – “Elevators (Me & You)”
Blackstar feat. Common – “Respiration”
Kid Cudi – “Man On The Moon”
Lil’ Wayne – “Phone Home”
Kesed – “Kemet II”
Sun Ra – “Nuclear War”
Jay Electronica – “Extra Extra”
Charles Hamilton – “Krispy Kreme Intentions”
Eddie Griffin Explains The Pyramids
Pharrell/Timbaland/Magoo – “Big White Spaceship”
Outkast – “ATLiens”
Funkadelic – “Red Hot Mama”
Kanye West – “I Wonder”
Outkast – “Synthesizer”
Kesed – “Kemet III”
Bobby Ray a.k.a. B.o.B. – “I’ll Be In The Sky”
Afrika Bambaataa – “Planet Rock”
Common – “Universal Mind Control”
Bobby Ray a.k.a. B.o.B. – “Starship Strobelite”
Jay Electronica – “The Pledge (Eternal Sunshine)”
Kid Cudi – “Day N Nite (Crookers Remix)”
Bobby Ray a.k.a. B.o.B. – “Cyber Heaven”
Outkast – “B.O.B.”
Janelle Monáe – “Many Moons”
Bobby Ray a.k.a. B.o.B. – “Created a Monster”
Janelle Monáe – “Violet Stars Happy Hunting!”
Kesed – “Kemet IV”
About The Mix:
In short, we were bumping Bobby Ray’s “Starship Strobelight” one day on the way from getting a caramel macchiato (with soy, and what?) and something clicked. This isn’t new. This goes beyond a trend. By “this” we mean the tradition of musicians, particularly black musicians, looking to “Other Planes of There” for inspiration and understanding. There’s an actual continuum that’s led us all to this point. We checked out some iiiiill footage of pioneer and suuuper ahead of his time fella Sun Ra, harkened back to this article we came across Summer ‘08, and set about curating an exhibit that has long existed in one form or another, but has been overlooked.
About Writers Block:
Writers Block is a Cultural/Arts Movement based in NYC, whose core objective is to expose the general public to a higher quality of Art and Entertainment. For more info, check out this video (HIGHLY recommended viewing), filmed by The New Pop.
Credits:
Mixed by Old Money
Narrated by Kesed [Writers Block]
Additional art by Quan Luv [A.L.I.E.N.]
Big thanks to everyone involved for being an inspiration. Hotep!
6 Comments
This is GREAT!
This is sooo dope. And it reminds me of Twinkle by Erykah Badu. (which actually has a kemetic chant at the end.)
this is hot, keep up the great work.
thanks for the tip demi, we’ll have to check that track out. and we’re glad you guys r diggin this. biggups!
Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism.
[...] If there is an Afrofuturism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points. We catch a glimpse of it in the opening pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the proto-cyberpunk protagonist—a techno-bricoleur “in the great American tradition of tinkers”—taps illegal juice from a line owned by the rapacious Monopolated Light & Power, gloating, “Oh, they suspect that their power is being drained off, but they don’t know where.” [...]
Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings such as Molasses, which features a pie-eyed, snaggletoothed robot, adequately earn the term “Afrofuturist,” as do movies like John Sayles’s The Brother From Another Planet and Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames. Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland is Afrofuturist; so, too, is the techno-tribal global village music of Miles Davis’s On the Corner and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, as well as the fusion-jazz cyberfunk of Hancock’s Future Shock and Bernie Worrell’s Blacktronic Science, whose liner notes herald “reports and manifestoes from the nether regions of the modern Afrikan American music/speculative fiction universe.”
Afrofuturism manifests itself, too, in early ‘80s electro-boogie releases such as Planet Patrol’s “Play at Your Own Risk,” Warp 9’s “Nunk,” George Clinton’s Computer Games, and of course Afrika Bambaataa’s classic “Planet Rock,” records steeped in “imagery drawn from computer games, video, cartoons, sci-fi and hip-hop’s language,” notes David Toop, who calls them “a soundtrack for vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science-fiction revival courtesy of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).” Techno, whose name was purportedly inspired by a reference to “techno rebels” in Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, is a quintessential example of Afrofuturism.
[...] Afrofuturism bubbles up from the deepest, darkest wellsprings in the intergalactic big band jazz churned out by Sun Ra’s Omniverse Arkestra, in Parliament-Funkadelic’s Dr. Seuss-ian astrofunk, and in dub reggae, especially the bush doctor’s brew cooked up by Lee “Scratch” Perry, which at its eeriest sounds as if it were made out of dark matter and recorded in the crushing gravity field of a black hole (“Angel Gabriel and the Space Boots” is a typical title).
African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart, literalizing [the SF novelist William] Gibson’s cyberpunk axiom, “The street finds its own uses for things.” With trickster elan, it retrofits, refunctions, and willfully misuses the technocommodities and science fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies.
–Mark Dery, Black To The Future (1995)
Great list of some of the older recordings that manifest the “Other Planes of There” over at
http://www.afrofuturism.net/text/music.html
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