Space Is the Place: Sun Ra, the P-Funk Mothership and Afrofuturism's Aliens

Sun Ra made the alien a way of being Black in America before anyone had a word for it. Born Herman Blount in Birmingham in 1914, he claimed from the 1950s to have been taken to Saturn as a young man and to be a native of that planet, and he lived the claim: he renamed himself for the sun god, dressed his Arkestra in robes and Egyptian headdresses, called his music myth-science, ran his own record label from a house in Philadelphia where the band lived communally, and played, for forty years, a music that ran from big-band swing to free noise with a Moog and a chant about outer space. His argument, made in poems, lectures and the 1974 film Space Is the Place, was that Black people had been aliens on this planet since the ships arrived, that the history offered them was a prison, and that the only free future was somewhere else, which he was prepared to build. The film has him land in Oakland in a spaceship and offer a colony.

The musicians who saw UFOs article covers his Saturn story as an encounter claim, the earliest by any musician; here it is a founding myth. Ra's abduction was not a trauma but a commission, and every artist who followed him took the licence: if the aliens were the ones who took you, you could be the alien who came back.

George Clinton put the spaceship on stage. Parliament's Mothership Connection, released in December 1975, introduced Star Child, an emissary from a funk civilisation in space broadcasting to Earth from the Mothership, and its title track and "Unfunky UFO" set the mythology that the band's next decade of albums elaborated: Dr. Funkenstein, the cloner of funk, on The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein (1976); his enemy Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk, who refuses to dance; the Bop Gun; the Pleasure Principle. For the P-Funk Earth Tour of 1976 and 1977 Clinton had a full-size silver spacecraft built, with lights, smoke and a staircase, and lowered it onto the stage each night to the crowd's chant, at which point he emerged in a fur coat as Star Child; it cost more than the band could afford, toured with a crew of dozens, and was, for a generation of audiences, the first UFO they had seen land.

The original was scrapped. Stored in Maryland when the money ran out, it was sold for parts in the early 1980s, and the ship that the National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired in 2011 and now displays is a replica built for the tours of the 1990s, when Clinton, having been sampled into the foundations of hip-hop by Dr. Dre and everyone after, could afford to land again. The lore has motherships too: the huge cigar-shaped carriers that George Adamski described in the 1950s, from which the scout saucers emerged, and the glossary entry on the mothership gives the reported version. Clinton's carried a funk band.

The term arrived in 1993, when the critic Mark Dery, interviewing Samuel Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose for an essay called "Black to the Future," asked why so few Black writers wrote science fiction when Black American life already contained its themes, abduction, alien status, the engineering of bodies, and proposed Afrofuturism as the name for the art that took them up. The theorist Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) pushed the argument further: the Middle Passage was the alien abduction, the plantation was the experiment, and Sun Ra and Clinton, in claiming to be extraterrestrials, were reporting from inside the history. Octavia Butler's novels, in which humans are bred and altered by aliens, and Delany's, were the literature; the music was everywhere.

The 1990s and 2000s filled the roster. Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" (1982) had built hip-hop's first anthem from Kraftwerk and a Zulu Nation cosmology; Drexciya, a Detroit techno duo, released a decade of records about an underwater civilisation descended from pregnant women thrown from slave ships; Kool Keith's Dr. Octagon (1996) was a gynaecologist from Jupiter; Outkast's ATLiens (1996) made Atlanta an alien nation by declaration; Missy Elliott's videos put her in a spacesuit; Lil Wayne announced that he was a Martian and titled an album I Am Not a Human Being (2010); Janelle Monáe spent a decade, from Metropolis (2007) to Dirty Computer (2018), as Cindi Mayweather, an android messiah from 2719; and Black Panther (2018) made Wakanda, a hidden African technological utopia, the most seen Afrofuturist image ever made. The alien in this tradition is never the invader. It is the survivor, returned.

The tradition has a religious root in an actual saucer. From the 1930s Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, taught that a wheel within a wheel, the Mother Plane, half a mile across and built by Black scientists from the vision of the prophet Ezekiel, circled the Earth carrying fifteen hundred bombing planes, and that it would one day destroy the white world; the doctrine was in print by the 1960s in Message to the Blackman in America, and Louis Farrakhan has described being lifted into the Mother Wheel in a vision on a mountain in Mexico in September 1985 and given the warnings he has preached since. It is the most elaborate UFO teaching of any American religion, and the aliens and religion article and the UFOs in the Bible article cover the Ezekiel passage that Muhammad, and the ancient astronaut writers after him, read as a craft.

The abduction literature is the other point of contact, and Afrofuturism reads it from the far side. The types of alien abduction article catalogues the reports: the taking, the examination, the breeding programme, the return with memories missing. Eshun and Tate's argument is that Black Americans had lived that story as history, and that Sun Ra's Saturn and Clinton's Mothership were the report filed by people who had already been taken and had decided, as the abductees of the 1990s sometimes did, that the experience was theirs to name. The songs about aliens article lists the tradition's hits alongside everyone else's, and the difference in tone, the saucer as a home rather than a threat, is the whole of Afrofuturism in one listening.