Black to the Future  

"If all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."--George Orwell

"There is nothing more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past."--Alain Locke

Yo, bust this, Black
To the Future
Back to the past
History is a mystery 'cause it has
All the info
You need to know
Where you're from
Why'dyou come and
That'll tell you where you're going.
--Def Jef

"If there is an Afrofuturism […] glimpses of it can be caught in Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings such as Molasses, which features a pie-eyed, snaggletoothed robot; in movies like John Sayles's The Brother From Another Planet and Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames; in records such as Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, George Clinton's Computer Games, Herbie Hancock's Future Shock, and Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science; and in the intergalactic big-band jazz churned out by Sun Ra's Omniverse Arkestra, Parliament-Funkadelic's Dr. Seussian astrofunk, and Lee "Scratch" Perry's dub reggae, which at its eeriest sounds as if it were made of dark matter and recorded in the crushing gravity field of a black hole ("Angel Gabriel and the Space Boots" is a typical title)."--"Black to the Future" (1994) by Mark Dery