http://www.afrofuturism.net/text/music.html

[...] 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)