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consciousness itself, the funk returns to us. We thought we were only
human; P. Funk comes to claim us as “citizens of the universe” if we will
“put a glide in our stride and a dip in our hip/ And come up to the
Mothership.” Remember the beat, follow your desire, dance."^
Like the reggae of Bob Marley, bom of hardship, funk is a music
of love, the things that bring us together. Both Marley and Clinton draw
on Biblical prophecy but neither is content to wait for a better world to
come at some other time, in some other world; both demand realization
through action, though dance, now. Clinton brings some other time, other
place, the alien from the future, from outer space, to us in the impossible
now.^ When we step on the Mothership, we meet the avatar of the
ancient timeless past that shapes us, we meet the hopeful joy of the
future; we move, finally, at last, away from the stasis that binds us, away
from the paradigms of the now, of present culture, present power
stmctures and strictures: “Time to move on,” Star Child urges. “Light
years in time/ ahead of our time.” Only there, in the future, in science
fiction’s promise fulfilled, miraculously, will we find ourselves at last,
free at last.
California State University, Fullerton
David Sandner
Notes
1. This is how Clinton’s one-time co-writer Sidney Barnes remembers Clinton
announcing the science fiction concept behind the upcoming tour to back their
breakthrough (#13 on the charts) 1976 album Mothership Connection.
2. The album M othership Connection, was released February, 1976 (Thompson,
8
).
3. For the connection between sunglasses and science fiction’s cyberpunk, see
the groundbreaking anthology Mirrors hades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1976),
edited by Bmce Sterling, which defined cyberpunk, not least by its title’s direct
reference to the iconographic eyewear of the bluesmen, the jazz artist, the
funkateer.
On this connection between sf and funk via cyberpunk, however, please
also consider the following testimony by the sf great, Samuel Delaney, who is
also African-American, on some of the disturbing meanings of his perceived
relationship by the literary establishment to cyberpunk and to race:
In the days of cyberpunk, I was often cited by both the writers
involved and the critics writing about them as an influence. As
a critic, several times I wrote about the cyberpunk
writers...With all the attention that has come on her in the last
years, [Octavia] Butler has been careful (and accurate) in not
claiming that I am any sort of influence on her. I have never
written specifically about her work...