Black Lady Cyborgs is what the future sounds like. It’s a mixtape on women-centered Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic formed to interrogate the past and present, particularly surrounding issues of oppressive technology and empire, and to theorize a liberated future for Blackness. In the 70’s, musicians like Sun Ra, Drexciya, and Parliament Funkadelic began to open a space for this aesthetic imaginary within music. In his 1974 film “Space is the Place”, Sun Ra says, “I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as the myth because that’s what black people are: myths.” In the 90’s, Erykah Badu’s Baduizm served to continue the tradition innovated by Sun Ra, reinventing R&B into what is often referred to as “neo-soul” in a women-first, Afrofuturist ethic. In the 1993 article ‘Black to the Future’, Cultural Theorist Mark Dery coined the term ‘Afrofuturism’ in discussion with Brown professor Tricia Rose.
