Anti-Requiem:
Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place

I recently had the distinct pleasure of screening Sun Ra’s Space Is The Place (1974). Populated with layers and layers of philo-spiritual commentary and black liberation imagination, this film constructs a hyper-intelligent musical experience that makes it worth adding to the must-see-list.

Plot Summary: Sun Ra lands his spaceship in Oakland, having been presumed lost in space for a few years. With Black Power on the rise, Ra disembarks and proclaims himself "the alter-destiny." He holds a myth-vs-reality rap session with black inner-city youth at a rec center, threatening "to chain you up and take you with me, like they did you in Africa" if they resist his plea to go to outer space. He duels at cards with The Overseer, a satanic overlord, with the fate of the Black race at stake. Ra wins the right to a world concert, which features great performance footage of the Arkestra. Agents sent by the Overseer attempt to assassinate Ra, but he vanishes, rescues his people, and departs in his spaceship from the exploding planet Earth (The Internet Movie Database).

But the strength of this film note is better understood in the context of Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. In this text amongst other topics, Kelley explores the value of the Afrofuturist/Interstellar Movement initiated by Sun Ra and his “Arkestra” and later joined by Parliament/Funkadelic and the “Mothership Connection”. Both of which indicate and address the protracted need within the Black community to escape the present society for something better, an alter/destiny. Kelley escorts the importance of redefining freedom and provides further examples of those who desired, “to escape the wretchedness of daily life through music” such as: Lee Scratch Perry(The Black Ark Studios), X Clan(Exodus in a pink Cadillac…), Afrika Bambaataa(“Planet Rock,” Soul Sonic Force) and Arrested Development (“break / outta of the country / and into more country”). I find it fascinating(though not surprising) that Black popular culture occupies the seat of radical imagination and resistance and am thankful for Robin D.G. Kelley’s contribution, but where are my other non-academic contemporaries who are thinking critically about these issues? How can we (re)read more recent expressions that possess similar elements of freedom-seeking? I think Sun Ra has a clue: "Equation wise, the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended. We work on the other side of time. We bring them here, through either isotope teleportation, transmolecularization, or better still, teleport the whole planet here ... through music." Let’s revive Bro. Ra and his imagination. Right on to the real/reel!

**Stay sucka free!

F.Negro