Intro

If been a bit busy working on the Big Bang Poetry side of things (since publishing the big Cher Beauty Book). But over the last few weeks I’ve been having some big music blog brainstorms.

If you had told me a week ago that there was a line that went from Jimi Hendrix through Cher around issues of sci-fi ideology, I would have thought this was a crazy idea.

Cher did sing “Hey Joe” on her 1967 album With Love, Cher.  Here’s a Japanese single cover. By the way, this summer when my sister-in-law Kumi was in my Cher She-Shed, she seemed excited about the Japanese album versions of Cher music.

But anyway, I didn’t have the With Love album until I was in high school but I did have several compilation albums that included the song, including Superpak Vol II and The Golden Hits of Cher, an orange-covered comp strangely half-full of songs that were not hits (including this song, which only made it to 94 on Billboard’s Hot 100).

This was the first single for the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966. There was also a Byrds version that year, a version possibly closer to the consciousness of Sonny at the time.

I had brothers in my house who were tortured by these Cher covers (and only knew the Hendrix version) and they each, in their own ways, tried to rectify this dreadful situation by forcing me to listen to the originals.

This reminds me of a Boston concert I attended a few years ago with my ex-sister-in-law Maureen  and while we were waiting for the show to start we both had the same memory at the same time. Whenever we were driving around in the car with my brother he would always play 1960s/70s rock stations and he would test you on the first few notes of every song. If you didn’t guess the song correctly you would get a punch in the arm. It sounds aggro but we an older-brother punch in the arm was sometimes quite funny. His own daughter even confirmed he carried on the same tradition with her. It surely caused me to identify songs quicker but I never missed the Jimi Hendrix songs, especially “Hey Joe” because I already knew it.

Cher’s version was kind of funky and dangerous…for Cher anyway. I liked the way her voice wavered and faltered in the song. By 1967 Cher was singing better too. And Sonny did a good job making that bass sound menacing in the production.

Anyway, a few weeks ago my friend Jen recommended I watch Questlove’s Earth, Wind & Fire documentary on HBO (Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World). I was late to enjoying Earth Wind & Fire myself (another ampersand act), only getting into their Greatest Hits in college, and was surprised to learn about Maurice White’s whole layer of space-quest spirituality. (Although those album covers should have been a clue. Journey covers had  silly space covers too and it just seemed like a ridiculous turn-of-the-decade thing bands did as a nod to modernity and I never gave it another thought.)

But the documentary immediately reminded me of the Wayne Shorter documentary Jen also suggested I watch years ago (Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity) and that documentary was also “spacy” and full of his fairy figurine collection and multiverses. This all then coincided with an Ann Powers book I was reading about the history of pop music through the lens of America’s evolving sexual customs and values (Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music). Among other things, Powers explained Hendrix’s interest in sci-fi interest and “alien” experiments with studio technology.

I told Jen about all these things floating around in my head and because she is a legit music person she said: “Afrofuturism.”

And with that word my head exploded. Because also at the end of the Ann Powers book was about three pages on AutoTune (correct spelling according to its manufacturer) and its use in Rap and Hip Hop. And I thought what is auto-tune if not the sound of a cyborg machine-man? (Power’s last chapter was even called “Hungry Cyborg.”)

But let’s start with Afrofuturism in general. The term was coined in 1992 by Mark Dery to retrospectively describe writers like Octavia E. Butler, Samuel Delany and Ishmael Reed and musicians like Sun Ra, Parliament-Funkadelic, Grace Jones, OutKast, Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae. Alondra Nelson was also a pioneering scholar.

Sun Ra

I learned about Afrofuturism from this Carnegie Hall history written by Tony Bolden from The University of Kansas. Bolden explains Afrofuturism as basically about flight and freedom, the oppressed class using technology to escape earthly historical traumas and systemic racism, ideas which go back all the way to the African American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Which is pretty amazing. And that song also highlights the important spiritual thread in Afrofuturism. It’s about “cosmic literation” and the possibilities of another world, technologies and “a prosthetically enhanced future.”  The futuristic impulse itself is liberating. But there’s another angle in Afrofuturism which is alienation (the lost traveler, the expelled extraterrestrial).

Musically, this consistently involved electronic sounds like synthesizers and lyrically conceptual ideas around life beyond this flawed Earth. So there are futuristic sounds (electronics), lyrics and imagery (those Earth Wind & Fire album covers).

The holy spirit angle often involved the angelic (Ann Powers even describes the use of AutoTune in the song “Believe” as turning Cher into an angelic cyborg), but also as in the fact that music itself is  a powerful spiritual force, often trance-inducing.

Bolden starts of in the 1940s with artist Sun Ra who called musicians “musical astronauts.” Like Earth Wind & Fire (named after Maurice White’s astrology chart, by the way), Sun Ra looks both back to Egypt and forward to space travel and he was considered a pioneer with electronic instruments like the electronic piano, synthesizer, clavioline [electric keyboard] and celeste [a keyboard percussion instrument]. Sun Ra’s song and album titles are also full of terms having to do with flight and space.

My friend Jen recommended “Love in Outer Space” as a place to start.

Ann Powers on Joplin, Morrison and Hendrix

As a quick but interesting aside: in her book Good Booty (2017) Ann Powers talks about how Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were all disappointed when they died…which is not necessarily why they died…but because their individual intellectual-music projects had failed. (By the way, this artwork is available on Etsy.)

Powers says “like the classic blues queens she emulated, [Janis] Joplin demanded that her audience recognize the costs of the libertine stance she took….Joplin’s [allure] was tied up in appetite…was central to her eroticism, which was a categorically transcendent as was Hendrix’s but aggressive and enveloping where his was elusive and ego-dissolving…She…screamed away the social hierarchies that demanded women be deferential and self-contained using not only noise but ribald humor and an embrace of ugliness that employed nuance to make it seductive, even beautiful.” Powers then describes the compromised and conflicted identity of a female musician becoming “one of the guys.”

“Eventually Joplin’s pep became a trap very similar to the one Hendrix felt stifling him.” [pg 181-187]

Jim Morrison, Powers says, “wanted to be love’s terrorist, but he looked, moved and sounded like a teen idol.” Powers mentions his lifelong desire to be seen as a serious writer but that ultimately his writing and pontifications were considered clownish by the popular press, even the rock press critic Ellen Sander calling Morrison the “Mickey Mouse de Sade.” But perhaps even more sadly Powers says Morrison began to see his own attempts at sexual revolution as failed (especially after being arrested in Miami for a somewhat performative lewdness). “Morrison himself seemed to have realized that the sloppiness of his action rendered it ineffective.” [pg 187-196]

Jimi Hendrix saw racism at both ends: “accused of being a ‘psychedelic Uncle Tom’ by a black audience that (at the time and from his point of view) refused to support him and then suffering integration issues and being called “Super Spade” and other “minstrelsy-level nicknames” by white fans.

Powers quotes historian Lauren Onkey in saying “he had come to realize that the hybridity of his act wasn’t communicating what he wanted it to either to counterculture or mainstream audiences…Near the end of his life Hendrix’s performances became strangely lackluster. Realizing that his audience was having trouble identifying with his polymorphous vision of lust and satiation as an aspect of a larger spiritual evolution—a very science-fiction scenario reflecting Hendrix’s immersion in that genre—he retreated more and more into his Electric Lady Studios.” [pg 172-181]

Ann Powers calls these three 1960s icons “the ultimate threesome…generational spokespeople…united by an aura of erotic challenge that few of their peers could match. They incarnated both the promise and the oppressive disappointments of the time.”

She says, “their performances…made clear how the confines of the sexual convention persisted and pushed countercultural adventurers back into positions not that different from the ones they’d run from or rebelled against.”

Their revolutions remained incomplete. “The arcs of their musical careers were tragedies not defined by the chemical misadventures that took their lives, but by the rage each was expressing by their final months, a frustration reflective of the darkening realizations among many Americans that the promise of a sensual utopia was being smothered in the quagmires of racial and gender inequality….that fury each [artist] expressed at being pushed back into the confines of conventional self-expression…Hendrix’s awareness that in order to even begin to communicate eroticism in a new way, he had to still offer up the old ones, which were ultimately degrading. Joplin expressed this conundrum, too.” [pg 169-172]

More Jimi Hendrix

According to Tony Bolden, Hendrix was “a pivotal figure in the history of Afrofuturism in music” and that he was both influenced by and (eventually) influenced other jazz, rap and hip-hop artists. His “affinity for science fiction dovetailed with jazz giants’ themes and techniques.”

He highlights the song “Third Stone from the Sun” about an extraterrestrial astronaut…using “feedback to improvise a plausible, sonic representation of an alien’s voice in the midst of traveling through space” and how the extraterrestrial eventually “questions whether humans are truly an intelligent lifeform. “Jimi Hendrix also, Bolden says, “demonstrated that it was possible to foreground Afrofuturist sensibilities with imaginative lyrics.”

According to Google’s A.I. research, Hendrix was an early pioneer of Afrofuturism and he blended black traditions with futuristic imagery (“planets and celestial travel”) and advanced studio technology (“otherworldly guitar effects…distortion pedals and multi-track recording”) to explore the Black identity with “outer space and alternate dimensions,” claiming science fiction and futurism for black artists.

Apparently his contributions to Afrofuturism are recognized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture and he is understood to be an Afrofuturist and a studio technology innovator.

Google’s backup articles on Jimi Hendrix include:

Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity

Jazz artist Wayne Shorter is never included (as far as I can see) in the Afrofuturist lists or timelines but his documentary was full of fairies, multiverses and extra-human superheroes and according to Google A.I. research, he too had a fascination with multiverses and “cosmic philosophy.”

His speculative narratives “of transcendence and liberation from human limitations is a foundational pillar of Afrofuturist thought….The ultimate expression of Shorter’s Afrofuturism arrived in his 2018 triple album, Emanon” and the “physical box set includes a 120-page sci-fi graphic novel penned by Shorter and Monica Sly, with art by Randy DuBurke. It follows a rogue, multi-dimensional superhero named Emanon who travels across the multiverse to fight oppression and stagnation with the power of sound.”

“During the 1970s, Shorter co-founded the pioneering fusion band Weather Report [which] used newly invented synthesizers and electronic soundscapes to project Black music into a high-tech, cosmic future. This era of jazz fusion is widely studied as a golden age of Afrofuturist sonic experimentation.”

Google’s backup articles on Wayne Shorter include:

Earth Wind & Fire, To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World

So there’s those futuristic ideas behind the lyrics, their live outfits and the album covers.

From Google A.I. Research:

“Earth, Wind & Fire pioneered Afrofuturism by fusing ancient African and Egyptian mysticism with cosmic, futuristic imagery. Led by Maurice White, the band used otherworldly stage shows, spiritual jazz, and iconic sci-fi artwork to project a powerful, liberated vision of Black identity and universal harmony.”

 

Tony Bolden (in his Carnegie Hall history) goes on to trace Afrofuturism through artists like Betty Davis, Chaka Khan, George Clinton (all who “expressed admiration for Jimi Hendrix”), Nona Hendryx’s writing for LaBelle, and Earth Wind and Fire.

Bolden says these funk artists “paved new ground in American musical history” with “theatrical elements” and visuals like P-Funk’s big mothership prop and Earth Wind & Fire theatrics, [as big, if not bigger than modern day diva shows], and “glam-rock outfits with space-travel imagery” in order to suggest taking “marginalized people…[and] fly them to outer space.”  Clinton was Dr. Funkenstein with a “space bass” and shows included characters like the Star Child and concepts like the Holy Funk.

Bolden continues the Neo-Funk Afrofuturists like Erykah Badu (and her “wombiverse”), OutKast, Janelle Monae…all who explore ideas of alienation and diaspora with electronic sounds. Janelle Monae says, “we believe songs are spaceships.” Bolden talks about Clinton’s use of Star Trek, Monae’s use of the movie Metropolis, her use of uniforms and androids, her album titles, including The Electric Lady, her prescient A.I. predictions (that have come to pass, by the way), her liner-note sci-fi short stories, her forward and backward-looking dance moves (her version of the moonwalk) and the idea of cybersoul.

The Intersection of Cher and her African American Audience

So now we get back to Cher. By the way, while researching this I learned more about Barry Manilow’s African American fanbase. He does have one; just search “FaniBro.”

Anyway, Cher has developed a powerful and unequivocal African American fanbase that has grown since her use of AutoTune and I just can’t help but think this is not just about AutoTune. I mean let’s be honest: so what that a white woman uses a studio tool. Someone invented record sampling too (French composer  Pierre Schaeffer) but do we see black artists calling him out for respect?

Even before dating record producer Alexander Edwards, Cher has had friendships in the black community, supporting artists like director Ava DuVernay, appearing in ads with music artists like Future and Saweetie and supporting fashion designers Stephen Burrows (from the 1970s) to Olivier Rousteing (2023). She’s had a long recording history with Harold Battiste and Sonny and Cher had working relationships and friendships with Sam Cooke and Little Richard. She’s was also a big fan of Stevie Wonder (at a crucial time when she was finding personal emancipation through music after leaving Sonny) and her friendship and admiration for Diana Ross. Sonny & Cher also included many black artists on their television shows back in the 1970s. She has also recorded credibly in the genres of gospel, funk, soul and R&B without sounding either performatively black or making her covers sound cartoonishly white.

However, she’s made plenty of her own mistakes with visual appropriation (the afro wigs come to mind), her big Grammy gaffe in 2026 and her controversial George Floyd tweet of 2021 when she was accused of having a “white savior complex.”

What is interesting to me about those incidents is how often her African American friends and fans will either defend her or refrain from piling on to criticize her. More on that later.

AutoTune by Ann Powers

In her book Good Booty Powers spends about 4 pages talking about AutoTune not in regards to Cher but in explaining its use in Rap and Hip Hop. But she never once uses the term Afrofuturism.

She begins her last chapter, “Hungry Cyborgs,” talking about the perils of Internet life: “the insecurity of online information, which could make people victims of crimes, ranging from online stalking to identity theft…the risk-inducing pressure …[of] online personas.”  Powers quotes Andy Clark’s ideas of “the soft self” or “collaborated selves,” a mix of online and offline identities which seem both unstable and insecure, ever more fragile and vulnerable.

She only references Cher in only one sentence. As if to say, “yeah Cher started all this.”

This is indicative of white critical responses to Cher (even among feminists like Powers who fail to see how empowerment tools in use for marginalized black artists might also track to marginalized female artists).

And it’s remarkably different to see how black musicians respond to Cher since Kayne West walked up to her at the Met Gala in 2015 to give her those first AutoTune kudos. But those kudos have continued right up to the 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction when Chuck D. of Public Enemy stated, “I know a lotta rappers gotta thank Cher, right? We gotta thank Cher”.

There’s much more reverence and respect. Like 100% to none, I would say. And it reflects the cultural differences and respective points of view. The black music world is inclusive of Cher in ways the white music world is not. And this hasn’t always been the case.

I have a few ideas about this but one is that AutoTune is another effective tool in Afrofuturism.

Ann Powers, in any case, starts her exploration of AutoTune with artist T-Pain and his “creation of giddy confusion between the flesh and mechanics, calculation and emotion… he was the soft self, celebrating.”

She mentions other artists who have effectively used the tool: Lil Wayne, Snoop Dog and Kayne West. Powers says some artists “employed auto-tune to communicate vulnerability.” She says Kayne West used it to talk about the death of his mother (who died during plastic surgery, actually) and that West could achieve “emotional nakedness…only wearing the costume of auto-tune.”

Powers talks about how the rise of AutoTune in Rap and Hip Hop also coincided with the rise of raunch culture (the pornification of female artists intended to be read as empowerment)…and the idea that romance itself was “just a form or artifice.” And that both raunch and AutoTune “presupposed that a certain basic inauthenticity was at the heart of human self-expression. Everything was a performance, even within our most intimate experiences with voice and flesh and the human heart.”

I find it fascinating that marginalized artists (in all kinds of art) seem to gravitate to tools of inauthenticity and primarily white/male artists gravitate to ideas of authenticity.  And I think it’s always a good exercise to think about why this might be the case.

Powers notes that T-Pain’s voice “twisted by machines, yet somehow wrung out more thoroughly by the manipulation—the computerized elements reshape and heighten emotion in these sounds, rather than deadening it.” And this is the big irony of the tool.

And she compares the blended identities as described earlier in her chapter as being also true for music, which [let’s face it, from the beginning of recorded time] has always been a blend of human and electronic elements. AutoTune, Powers says, challenges “old ideas about pure experience.”  [pg 316, 329-333]

Last week I also read an essay by Simone White on the Trap and Drill forms of Rap (from the book This Woman’s Work, edited by Sinead Gleeson and Kim Gordon (pg 216). I still don’t fully understand the definitions but White talks about the use made by the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer drum machine and how many dance artists didn’t like it because it sounded fake. White talks about the “sonic accident combined with a typical capitalist reversal wherein a cheap product is repurposed in an unanticipated (black) market.” And she notes its use by Future, Drake and Rhianna.

So mis-using studio tools isn’t limited to AutoTune and they both can be considered a capitalist reversal of a product repurposed against the intentions of a capitalist market.

Anyway, it was then that I searched Google A.I. for “Afrofuturism and autotune.”

The intersection of Afrofuturism and Auto-Tune

“Black artists repurpose digital technology to explore liberation, alienation, and post-human identities. Afrofuturist musicians exploit its extreme settings to intentionally sound robotic, metallic, and “alien,” turning a studio utility into a transformative creative instrument. Afrofuturism merges science fiction, technology, and African diasporic histories to imagine liberated futures. Auto-Tune fits perfectly into this framework…”

(Even A.I. is misspelling it.)

Concepts that overlap according to Google A.I.: the black cyborg (which taps into slavery histories of forced labor, being treated as biological machines, having bodies coded as less than human or less than white), robotic sounds re-envision the old narrative from exploited people into “self-engineered cyborgs.”

“The “zero-onset” retune speed of Auto-Tune detaches the human voice from a fixed geographic or racial category, evoking an extraterrestrial displacement.”

And “just as early hip-hop pioneers repurposed vinyl turntables and analog samplers to create entirely new genres, modern Black vocalists take Auto-Tune and push it past its intended limits to invent a new vocal architecture.”

There was even a table A.I. provided of the Afrofuturist/Technology Evolution that explored the Era, the Pioneers, the “Creative Use of Technology,” and the “Afrofuturist Themes:”

The Proto-Futurists (1970s–1980s)
Where Sun Ra, George Clinton (P-Funk), Zapp & Roger used talkboxes, vocoders, and synthesizers to explore “leaving Earth on the Mothership and  transcending the limits of the human body.”

The Blueprint Era (2000s)
Where T-Pain, Kanye West used “hard-tuned digital melismas; raw emotional tracking through a digital filter (808s & Heartbreak)” to explore “digital alienation, masking trauma and vulnerability behind a flawless, glossy technological armor.”

The Trap & Sci-Fi Wave (2010s–Present)
Where Future, Travis Scott, Janelle Monáe, Lil Uzi Vert used “heavy vocal layering, codeine-slurred distortion, and cybernetic textures” to explore “hyper-futurism, android consciousness, existential isolation, and psychedelic space travel.”

The A.I. essay ended with “critics frequently dismiss Auto-Tune as a ’crutch’ that masks a lack of raw talent. However, within the realm of Afrofuturism, this critique is subverted…the goal is to celebrate the artificial. By intentionally showing the seams of the digital processor, artists challenge the Western ideal of a ‘pure’ or ‘soulful’ acoustic voice, proving that technology can feel deeply human, vulnerable, and liberatory.”

Google’s references lists of articles:

For Afrofuturism:

For AutoTune:

But here’s the interesting (and eerie) thing: none of the Afrofuturism articles above mention AutoTune and none of the AutoTune articles above mention Afrofuturism. This is all AI synthesis of who knows what.

*Shudder*

I actually could not find an article online that referenced both Afrofuturism and AutoTune. But I did find these interesting articles:

The Inherent Afrofuturism of Sampling

13 Innovative Uses of Auto-Tune Among Hip Hop Acts

I sometimes wonder wonder if Cher’s fan-base exists in the black community not just because she started autotune officially but because she didn’t back down from it once the mostly-white/male rock community disparaged its existence and continued usage, focusing their ire primarily on Cher when they did.

 

It’s time to point out that some complicated things are going on in the very Earthly Cher world, unresolved situations with her son Elijah (and his seemingly very opportunistic ex-wife) that involve his continued confinement in a mental health facility and the rumor of his alleged teen daughter (the step-granddaughter of singer/actress Julie Andrews no less) that it seems perfectly understandable that her memoir (part 2) has been postponed multiple times now and a new album has not yet come to be. These may be new things Cher may decide she no longer has the time or energy to finish.

But if she ever does return to music, there are futuristic possibilities, concepts and music collaborations that would very naturally interact with her current plastic, cyborg, larger-than-life persona.

Full-disclosure: I am not a sci-fi fan. I have always preferred the very earthy world of fantasy, with its map-land creatures seeing two breakfasts and traveling along endless dirt roads and then camping in forests or some quaintly dangerous roadside Inn.

But if there were ever to be a sci-fi/cyborg Cher album, I would enthusiastically buy that.