what it is!
Luce Potter as Martian "Intelligence" Maggot Brain cover art
The Mothership Connection is also a link between
Mother African culture and its particularly American hybrid music.
My essay’s title—replete with Black English Vernacular, the Ebonical
“What It Is!—comes from Parliament’s 1975 Sci-Fi Hi-Fi LP recorded during
the ascendancy of disco, another triumph for George Clinton and black “rock
and rollers” in general. This triumph began with colonial slave songs, but specifically
for our purposes, began when yet one more African musical synthesis with
Protestant churches coincided brilliantly with: Atom Bomb testing in New Mexico,
UFO sightings at Roswell, the routine emission from Earth of radio and
television signals, and the “birth” of that other-worldly, mutant gospel
music known as Doo-Wop. Seemingly secular, with its theremin–like falsettos
and ultra-electric production, this other-worldly sounding music of the mid-50s
caused a widespread panic when it first appeared on our shared airwaves.
While critics (like me) pride themselves with detailed and logical rock
and roll origins, there remains something undeniably sui-generis,
something untraceably “new” about rock which continues to this day—it is
the music of youth and it is its youth-cult status and other-worldly element
which links it to ufology. Because it requires a “youthful” mind to
seriously entertain UFO probability. Now
I ask you, What’s more engaging and engrossing--Speculating on the existence
of exotic UFOs or debunking them as sleep paralysis, false memory, swamp gas?
These “debunkers” are the same pundits who feared and condemned rock and
roll. These (usually) politically
conservative doubters have consistently dubbed rock and roll one or more of the
following:
1)
music
from outer space,
2)
music
named for and complicit with all types of sexual activity,
3)
music of
the devil delivered by the black man,
4)
music
pipelined in from the communists.
This
sexualized alien black commie core explains much of the UFO phenomena and many
of the reactions to it: the feminine shape of the saucer, the
psycho-gynecological trauma (thousands of Virgin Martian Marys recount their
annunciations and assumptions under regressive hypnosis), the apocalyptic gospel
musical aspiration for heaven or lust for the eternal which allows a consolation
for heartbreaking inter-galatic and universal solitude, the fear toward a
miscegenetic and techno-dystopia. How bizarre it seemed when I was younger that
the extremely creepy Martian Leader in Invaders From Mars, that head in the jar who the credits lists as
“The Martian`Intelligence,’” (played by Luce Potter—“Midget” from The
Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957) and who in the film is referred to as
“he,” would look so uncannily, so unmistakably like the disembodied head of
a black female. But then
again who was the most under-represented American figure by 1953 (or 1963 or
1973) Hollywood other than the African-American female?
And when the white male creative intelligence of the time attempts to
conjure up an odd, intimidating, unapproachable other (but also somehow
cryptically desireable a la Joseph Conrad’s “The Intended”) Other, who
better than this Afro-Femalien? Not only “You Are My Starship,” my musical Mothership
Connection, you turn out to be my most repressed because verboten object of desire according to the hypocritical but
absolutely entrenched rules of American sexual politics.
go to rest of essay and notes until I finish formatting and posting