10 Artists Discover Hip-Hop Futurism » PopMatters
Sci-fi and rock music have been intersecting genres for a number of many years now. Not less than since David Bowie emerged with the story of Ziggy, that includes its progressive functions and a few well-placed glitter, the imaginations of audiences have been captivated by the rising sagas and myths which have advanced out of in style tradition. Hip-hop (a minimum of in its earlier conception) has been sensible for many of its life; a easy and earnest retelling of life within the metropolis. Nevertheless, as hip-hop is a music style that depends closely on recycling older concepts and reworking them into newer, culture-defining types, it isn’t too tough to see how artists would possibly search influences outdoors the playbook to regenerate the music.
Arguably, it was Afrika Bambaataa who launched an extraterrestrial dynamic into his hip-hop, espousing sure ideologies that originated from the Zulu Nation, a collective of rappers and poets that performed a big position in shaping city life in the course of the late Seventies. Since then, a bunch of artists have carved out a distinct segment within the interplanetary margins that now relaxation in hip-hop tradition. Some name it an growth on Afrofuturist philosophies that have been developed and expressed almost a century in the past. Others are merely content material to name it a long-time propensity for the science fiction style. What follows are simply ten hip-hop artists whose works have been formed in some kind or one other by the works of science fiction.
Shabazz Palaces – Black Up (2011) and Lese Majesty (2014)
You’ll be able to select from any of the six releases by Shabazz Palaces to get an concept of what their science fiction-inspired hip-hop is all about. However their first two full-length albums, Black Up and Lese Majesty, are prime examples of the sphere. Comprised of lyricist, producer, and songwriter Ishmael Butler, who had already made a reputation for himself with the groundbreaking Digable Planets, and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire, Shabazz Palaces have been exploring the brand new frontier of hip-hop that almost all artists by no means dare to dream of.
Each albums are crammed with cosmic atmospheres that increase inside and across the grooves, in the end overwhelming the listener fully. Butler and Maraire work in tandem to create an alien universe directly terrifying and sensorial; their galactic fixations be certain that the drum patterns growth with astronomical power, whereas Butler’s sphinx-like and eerie rhymes are on an extraterrestrial tip.
Shabazz Palaces have established themselves as leaders in speculative hip-hop, creating a musical language of Afrofuturism with unparalleled mastery. Taking cues from the sci-fi funk and abstractions discovered within the works of Solar Ra and Parliament, Black Up and Lese Majesty are the apogees of this explicit design in hip-hop.
Sci-fi Influences
Ishmael Butler has brazenly acknowledged the affect of science fiction on his work in Shabazz Palaces. Citing works by Isaac Asimov, Andre Norton, and Octavia Butler (her Patternmaster collection appears to have particularly resonated with the rapper) as the first sources of inspiration, Butler has managed to develop an amorphous dream logic in her rhymes that owes to the fanciful worlds present in these writers’ works. “Forerunner Foray” was named after a Norton novel, a specific favorite of the rapper’s, and the accompanying video clip for the one clearly takes its cues from the surreal animated epic La Planète Sauvage (1973), a basic of science fiction.
These seeking to faucet right into a literary supply that evokes a lot of the identical environment and feelings of the Black Up and Lese Majesty albums could need to decide up Roger Zelazny‘s The Dream Grasp (1966), a novel that was expanded from the creator’s shorter, Nebula Award-winning work, “He Who Shapes”. Zelazny’s horror-tinged sci-fi thriller, a few psychotherapist training a harmful type of remedy that offers with dream reconstruction, is stuffed with fantasy and futuristic expertise – themes which can be explored in Shabazz Palaces’ works, each sonically and lyrically.
Azeem – Air Cartoons (2008)
Filled with mystical musings and street-corner prophesies, Air Cartoons is a outstanding effort from one among hip-hop’s most eloquent bards. Azeem has maintained previously that Air Cartoons is extra of a mixtape than an precise album. Nevertheless, his even handed collection of producers (there are 9 of them) and his potential to ascertain a transparent sense of id throughout all these disparate tracks lead to a cohesiveness that leans extra towards an precise document. A number of of the producers work primarily in digital music, so these songs are rife with a tech-noir ambiance that amplifies the sense of futurist dread.
Azeem’s vocals are pure with homeboy preeminence; that’s, solely till that autonomy is usurped by the machines that take over his voice. Opening the album is the bladerunning hip-hop of “Set a Blaze”, during which the rumbling squelch of the skewed groove has the rapper “fantasizing of lovely thunder” on a distant planet. Azeem would comply with up the LP with the equally good No Reality in At this time (2011), an EP he recorded with producer Jay Haze; it expands upon Air Cartoon‘s themes of empirical ascendency, laid naked towards the backdrop of explosive electro-hip-hop.
Sci-Fi Influences
A self-admitted voracious reader, the sci-fi ingredient on the album is all the way down to the MC’s alternative of literary poison: specifically, all works of arcane philosophy and occult literature to be discovered within the dusty backrooms of the world’s finest libraries. Azeem has cited early, turn-of-the-century sci-fi and metaphysical works by Frederick Spencer Oliver (A Dweller on Two Planets) and John Uri Lloyd (Etidorhpa) as influential works. Most of the lyrics reference secret societies, authorities cover-ups (together with issues of UFOs), and visions of the apocalypse, which can counsel that he has already found Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson‘s preposterous however in style collection The Illuminatus! Trilogy, revealed in 1975.
Nevertheless, as a result of Azeem is an exceptionally erudite lyricist, he could have additionally stumbled upon way more refined fare. John Brunner‘s Gamers on the Sport of Folks (1980) is a sci-fi mystery-thriller about an unwitting younger man who turns into entangled in an odd sport of leisure and torment managed by a mysterious alien council. His actions (or his pawn strikes) within the sport are rewarded handsomely, however the rewards come at a worth no human might probably pay.
Brunner’s allegorical story about free will begins as a human drama of kinds earlier than it morphs into an oracular nightmare. Azeem’s labyrinthine rhymes and the bizarre sci-fi electro-beats on Air Cartoons radiate with the very auras present in Brunner’s chilling novel.
Anti-Pop Consortium – Fluorescent Black (2009)
Sovereigns of hip-hop’s left area, M. Sayyid, Beans, Excessive Priest, and Earl Blaize of Anti-Pop Consortium conspired to make a few of the most uncommon hip-hop that sounded, fairly actually, out of this world. They first perplexed audiences with their debut, Tragic Epilogue (2000), earlier than occurring to develop their artistry on ventures like Purchasing Carts Crashing (2001) and Arrhythmia (2002).
Their 2009 effort, Fluorescent Black, ups the sci-fi quotient, projecting their hip-hop right into a nebulous house 3,000 light-years away. The album unfolds like an opiate haze on an alien spacecraft, the angular hip-hop pulsing with the heavy buzz of synthesized basslines. The railroad switching of verses between every rapper additional unsettles the disorienting atmospheres of the machines-gone-haywire sonics; every lyricist has such a particular type of supply, and the fixed buying and selling of rhymes endlessly startles. Eeriness abounds on the album, from the Tron-inspired synth traces and the scientific, robotic beats to the outlandish narratives.
Band member Beans reportedly confessed an curiosity within the sci-fi works of Philip Okay. Dick however denied any sci-fi influences on the album. The quilt artwork, nonetheless, would lead one to imagine in any other case; it options an illustration that appears to be the requisite poster art work for science-fiction movies of the Nineteen Eighties.
Sci-Fi Influences
The bizarre, uncanny synths and infrequently irregular hip-hop rhythms commerce on the unusual and sinister; a lot of those sounds are evocative of the panoramic scores from the sci-fi movies that flooded the early Nineteen Eighties. 1982’s cult basic Tron is an apparent reference level. Every part from the movie’s sound and environment has been seemingly invested into the marching, electrical grooves of Fluorescent Black. Something by author Philip Okay. Dick is an efficient guess, as properly. From chilly, metallic universes to hallucinatory mind-trips, the creator explored themes which can be the essence of Anti-Pop Consortium’s darkish and moody work.
M. Sayyid – Error Tape 1 (2016)
Anti-Pop Consortium member M. Sayyid recorded a solo effort in the course of the Paris assaults in 2015, releasing his album a 12 months later. Fueled by the anxiousness of these instances, Error Tape 1 seems like a disturbing expression of alienation. A lot of the album picks up the place Anti-Pop Consortium left off. Nonetheless, Sayyid delves into deeper and darker waters right here, eschewing a lot of that band’s quirky humour for anxious, typically malefic, drama. The synth work is pushed to uncomfortable extremes, reducing by means of the jittery rhythms like lightsabers. Sayyid’s breathless rhymes run miles a minute, impressively dodging the pitfalls of missed beats whereas making sharp turns on the tightest corners of the rhythms.
It seems that the rapper intends to creep us out, and the warped, screams-for-help synth traces are sufficient to show the blood to ice. In the meantime, the beats skitter, slam, lope, and crash like a once-obliging robotic that has downloaded a malicious virus into its central processing unit.
Sci-Fi Influences
M. Sayyid is integral to Anti-Pop Consortium’s sound, a lot of the identical influences he brings to the band have been funneled into Error Tape 1. The dystopian moods of Philip Okay. Dick’s novels are actually current right here. Nevertheless, within the frenzied rhymes and rhythms, the muted glows of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 sci-fi drama Stalker resonate in spirit. Sayyid’s potential to evoke the eerie, poetic airs of that movie by means of the extreme and gasping supply of his hyperbolic lyricism is a rare feat.
His video clip for the one “Eon” (a Martian throb of malformed electro-hip-hop) captures the fluorescent, shapely imagery of Tarkovsky’s movie. Just like the pathfinders within the movie who roam the abandoned alien zones, Sayyid wanders the premises of a seemingly deserted spacecraft, spitting otherworldly and surreal rhymes. The pulsating beams of digital bass on the album are additionally evocative of the blue rinse of time-travel ideas (synth traces bend, zoom, and streak round within the combine at dizzying speeds), so Asimov’s laborious science-fiction, which frequently explores concepts of photo voltaic dimensions and time-travel, appears an apt level of reference right here.
Mike Ladd – Welcome to the Afterfuture (1999)
It wasn’t till Mike Ladd‘s sophomore launch that heads started to show. A big departure from his debut, Straightforward Listening 4 Armageddon (which favours downtempo grooves of chilled funk), Welcome to the Afterfuture navigates a stark and unforgiving world of sound that favours little or no color, save for the black, white, and gray of a virtually abandoned city metropolis.
Afterfuture‘s beats are chilly and geometric, typically a distorted backdrop for Ladd’s alternating languid and bellowing Dada-speak. If the complicated lyricism of the rapper’s verse is just too dense for listeners to pick the assorted sci-fi references, then the tune titles are useless giveaways: “5000 Miles West of the Future”, “Planet 10”, “Bladerunners”, “To the Moon’s Contractor”, “Crimson Eye to Jupiter”, Wipe Out on the Wave of Armageddon”, and the title-track.
With Afterfuture, Ladd creates a hip-hop panorama of futurist design, with beats that bang with industrial rhythms and atmospheres that drone like some mysterious plane hovering within the sky. The album is heralded as a basic of underground hip-hop and stays Ladd’s most favorite effort from his solo outings.
Sci-Fi Influences
Sound-wise, Welcome to the Afterfuture appears to draw inspiration from the futuristic cityscapes of Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi basic Metropolis. Filled with geometric patterns and shapes, Lang’s movie about an automaton-ruled metropolis most definitely served as inspiration for Ladd’s chilly and steely grooves; Afterfuture‘s beats bang and clank just like the metallic gears of business equipment grinding away.
The rapper’s earlier scholarly pursuits (in English literature and poetry) could have led him to such works like Paul Theroux’s O-Zone (the creator’s lone sci-fi novel), a few walled-in wasteland during which lurk mysterious entities. Different sci-fi references on the album might also be from the works by Spider Robinson, whose novel Evening of Energy is a searing and nerve-jangling story of a futuristic race battle – a theme Ladd explores on Afterfuture‘s closing monitor, “Feb. 4 ’99 (For All These Killed by Cops)”.
Jonzun Crew – Misplaced in House (1983)
Influenced by the getups and stage performances of Parliament, Jonzun Crew replace that group’s cosmic funk with the appreciable help of some computer systems. Their model of galactic funk bridges Kraftwerk-inspired electronica with hip-hop with kitschy aptitude. Not totally refined in type (their robo-hip-hop outfits are unforgivably cheesy), they’re actually practiced in musicianship, tapping into the burgeoning techno scene that will take cities like Detroit by storm within the late Nineteen Eighties.
The themes on their debut, Misplaced in House, draw inspiration from many in style science fiction TV packages, together with Buck Rogers, Star Trek, and, after all, the Nineteen Sixties TV collection that shares the album’s identify. Musically, their sound is clearly a factor of the early Nineteen Eighties, rife with online game references to Pac-Man, which is cleverly punned on their first single, “Pack Jam”. Totally foolish, funky, and, for its time, forward of its time, Misplaced in House is now lamentably simply that – misplaced within the nebula of lengthy out-of-print hip-hop classics.
Sci-Fi Influences
For those who can think about what it is likely to be wish to be trapped in a single day in an arcade the place the video video games by no means shut off, then you’ve gotten an concept of the frenetic power on Misplaced in House. Pong and Pac-Man are each bit as inspiring for the vocodered raps and electro beats as are the futuristic swooshes that accompany the whizzing plane in Star Wars. Jonzun Crew borrowed closely from Fifties kitsch, reframing it by means of a Nineteen Eighties perspective, so your whole favorite sci-fi B-movies, like The Day the Earth Stood Nonetheless and Forbidden Planet, consider properly right here.
Black Milk – Tronic (2008)
Probably the most gifted producers in hip-hop, Black Milk explores a wide range of types in his work. On Tronic, he seems to the digital funk of Mantronix, burnishing his pounding hip-hop grooves with the metallic sheen of a Roland Jupiter-8 synth. Black Milk retains his hip-hop rooted firmly within the streets of his residence metropolis, Detroit, which is believed to be the birthplace of techno. Nevertheless, with the futuristic touches that spherical out the grooves, he turned his work into one thing way more fascinating than a lot of the hip-hop in 2008.
Admittedly, Tronic isn’t particularly pronounced in its sci-fi influences; typically, the beats take priority over the digital noodling, however a more in-depth hear reveals the subtler touches of texture that the producer is famous for. Pay attention for the whirring of UFOs within the background or the blips and bleeps of an Atari online game. Lyrically, Black Milk retains the problems grounded, discussing life usually with objective and advantage, however his barely uncommon rhyme scheme typically feels prefer it was conceived on one other planet.
Sci-Fi Influences
The influences of sci-fi are second to the extra conventional hip-hop themes on Tronic, so Black Milk isn’t particularly all for exploring the cosmos with wild abandon right here. Nevertheless, there’s nonetheless sufficient of an off-kilter environment to counsel a futuristic world during which these tunes are set.
Combining funky futurism with tales of rising up in an city atmosphere, Tronic evokes the moody and nocturnal airs of The Brother from One other Planet, John Sayles’ 1984 sci-fi comedy about an alien from outer house (performed by Joe Morton) who finds himself misplaced among the many gritty streets of Harlem.
Mattic – The Adventures of Physician Outer (2014)
American-born and France-based, Mattic has made fairly an impression with France’s underground hip-hop scene, however stays a digital unknown within the US. The rapper’s beguiling mixture of heavy boom-bap grooves and sci-fi cocktail jazz faucets into hip-hop’s Daisy Age as a lot because it does the style’s up to date types. His sophomore album, The Adventures of Physician Outer, explores sci-fi themes to current a world during which a Dr. Who episode is filmed with Day-Glo filters and soundtracked with acid jazz.
The rapper has beforehand delved into futurist issues. Mattic’s earlier mission, Implausible Planet, with La Positive Equipe, was impressed by the narratives of Fifties sci-fi B-movies and employed darker, Martian funk. On Physician Outer, the sci-fi influences usually are not totally current in sound, however they’re in spirit, and his method to cosmic issues is taken with open-hearted pleasure.
Sci-Fi Influences
The album, based on interviews with Mattic, was conceived when he met a person after a live performance who launched himself as “Physician Outer” and claimed he was from outer house. Incredulous however intrigued, the rapper humored the person, and their conversations that night time turned the lyrical inspirations for these songs.
The place many different hip-hop artists have explored the darker, extra foreboding realms of sci-fi, there’s a vibrant, champagne-classiness to Mattic’s hip-hop right here. Humor is a key ingredient within the quirkiness of The Adventures of Physician Outer, and one can look to Keith Laumer’s 1964 sci-fi novel The Nice Time Machine Hoax for a piece that runs parallel in spirit.
Filled with glowing fantasy and absurdist humour, Laumer’s story of two younger males who uncover a pc that has the power to move them again into time radiates with the identical allure and wonderment to be discovered on Physician Outer‘s sun-juiced hip-hop.
Cannibal Ox – The Chilly Vein (2001)
Their chilly, iron-android hip-hop is the stuff of Asimov novels. With chilly, robotic beats glazed over by the frost of alien synths, Cannibal Ox‘s The Chilly Vein helped usher sci-fi hip-hop into the millennium. There’s by no means a snug second on the album; the futuristic dread closes in from all corners, and duo Vordul Mega and Huge Aire unfurl rhymes with muscular and machine-like power. The eerie, minor-key melodies and mechanical grind of those numbers evoke photos of a large, slowly descending alien spacecraft touchdown amidst the squalor of an city metropolis.
Regardless of the iciness of the general sound, The Chilly Vein stays positively funky (albeit in a cyborg-esque manner) and implores the physique to sway to its aberrant grooves. After capturing their viewers’s imaginations with their debut, Cannibal Ox returned in 2015 with a correct full-length follow-up titled The Blade of Ronin, taking their hip-hop to even additional galactic heights.
Sci-Fi Influences
With tune titles like “Battle for Asgard” (a reference to the Norse mythology that knowledgeable the Thor comics), it’s a no brainer relating to the hip-hop duo’s penchant for sci-fi fantasy graphic novels. The creepier parts on the album, which veer towards horror, dip into the areas of Tales from the Crypt with out ever coming off as schlocky. Cannibal Ox pull from numerous influences, together with Frank Miller’s Ronin collection, Transformers, and Japanese Manga, and switch geek-boy fandom into one thing sharp and artfully modern.
Silver Bullet – Carry Down the Partitions No Restrict Squad Returns (1991)
Liable for the Britcore motion (hardcore British hip-hop) within the early Nineties, Silver Bullet was not but out of his teenagers when he launched his debut. A loud, sonic assault on the senses, Carry Down the Partitions contains a set of brutal breakbeats which can be flung like shrapnel right into a rhythm of coordinated chaos.
His heavy London brogue and the then-burgeoning breakbeat scene squarely place his work on the brand new frontier of club-oriented music that had been beforehand spearheaded by the likes of Soul II Soul. Eschewing that band’s model of silky-smooth hip-hop, Silver Bullet opts for a dystopian aesthetic for his hellbound grooves. His most noteworthy numbers embody the terrifying blitz of “20 Seconds to Comply” and the jazz-flecked stomper “Carry Forth the Guillotine”.
The rapper’s curiosity in sci-fi finds him sampling dialogue from the futuristic action-thriller Robocop (1987) whereas portray apocalyptic visions along with his snarling lyrics. Document label hold-ups and fallouts meant that Silver Bullet by no means managed to formally launch a follow-up album (although he continues to tirelessly document and launch his music independently). Nevertheless, many years later, his blazing debut remains to be firmly lodged within the minds of British hip-hop heads, who nonetheless shout, “Carry within the lawyer, propel paranoia!”
Sci-Fi Influences
The affect of sci-fi motion movies, comparable to Robocop and Terminator, is actually evident. Nevertheless, if Silver Bullet was in any respect a lot up on his studying again within the day, he could have found the works of Steven Barnes, specifically, the creator’s Aubrey Knight novels. Lyrically, Silver Bullet’s songs evoke Barnes’ works, whose sci-fi tales ceaselessly discover the societal points affecting the African-American inhabitants in a dystopian future.
Barnes’ Aubrey Knight novels, which embody Streetlethal (1983) and Gorgon Youngster (1989), seem to have been an affect on Carry Down the Partitions. The tales are about an ex-boxer from Los Angeles who turns into a renegade fugitive after he finds himself entangled within the metropolis’s corrupt politics. The searing adrenaline rush of the album is rhythmically in tune with the novel’s hyper-drama of martial arts, tech anxiousness, and futuristic anarchy.
This text was initially revealed on 23 October 2018.