Review: Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism, edited by Roy Christopher

Echoing its sci-fi inspirations, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is a comprehensive worldbuilding project. This collection of essays, curated by Roy Christopher, weaves a vibrant assemblage from many emergent threads of hip-hop discourse during the first quarter of this century. Christopher does not linearly advance a single ideology. Boogie Down Predictions does not defend East Coast, West Coast, or Dirty South stylings. It does not offer a unified vision of Black posthumanism. Instead, my strongest impression was of the cosmic reach and visceral excess that hip-hop culture feeds into the contemporary American imagination. Just in Ytasha Womack’s six-page introduction, I casually counted the names of forty-four different artists, a density that many of the twenty subsequent entries maintain. To stay afloat on this sea of shoutouts, keep a search window close at hand. Rewatch Childish Gambino’s much-discussed video for “This is America” and find ritual footage to fathom the Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ. Sit with DJ Screw’s codeine-enhanced time stretching. Witness sonic-literary fusions of Gabriel Teodros and Nnedi Okorafor. But inevitably you won’t catch every citation, just as you won’t track down each sample on Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet. Overload makes the book compelling. The hip-hop world these authors envision is multifaceted, with internal conflicts, literary, visual, and sonic components, and scholarly engagement from such varied disciplines as film studies, communication, musicology, law, literature, poetry, Black studies, and computer science, to name a few.

Writing on African diasporic music has often emulated the aesthetics of the music it describes. Fred Moten’s prose on Anthony Braxton is so concentrated with meaning that reading becomes free improvisation. Jeff Noon remixes text in the style of the dub B-side remixes he recounts. Kodwo Eshun’s manifesto More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction wields sci-fi neologisms so mellifluously that words become a music technology, a hybrid between sampler, saxophone, singer, and spaceship. Boogie Down Predictions is situated firmly in this tradition, not least of all because it features Eshun’s writing. Additionally, the editor presents the book as a mixtape. Each entry is timestamped like a CD track, and contributors’ titles reference hip-hop mixing techniques or styles, such as Netrice Gaskins’s “Glitched: Spacetime, Repetition & the Cut,” Kevin Coval’s “Breakbeat Poems,” and Aram Sinnreich and Samantha Dols’s “Chopping Neoliberalism, Screwing the Industry.” Saturated with the musical substrate of hip-hop language, the reader plunges into the body of the text.

Part 1 examines what Georgina Born might call “the multiplicity of time in cultural production.”¹ Here, time is a fluid term that may refer to musical time and meter, but just as easily slips into discussions of artists’ pasts and futures and offers an entry point for that ancient sci-fi trope, time travel. Temporal nonlinearity and simultaneity have long been central to Afrofuturist discourse. Ishmael Reed, whom Alondra Nelson upholds as a key voice in African diasporic technoculture, put it concisely with his term “synchronizing,” which he defines as “putting disparate elements into the same time, making them run in the same time, together.”²

Throughout Boogie Down Predictions, authors emphasize hip-hop’s nonlinear time, both in the way histories are told, and within the sound itself. Part 1 models nonlinearity by presenting subjects out of chronological order. Jeff Heinzel describes the way Childish Gambino stretches time via looping, sampling, and “extended takes” in his music videos, which make us sit with uncomfortable subject matter for a long time. Heinzel attributes this slow temporality to DJ Screw, known for his “screwtapes,” which slow down samples, reproducing the time lag you might feel while high on codeine. However, Sinnreich and Dols’s more in-depth introduction to DJ Screw appears a whole five essays later. Another nonlinear choice is the placement of Omar Akbar’s history of the birth of hip-hop in the Bronx, seemingly a point of origin for this book, seventy-six pages in. Such anti-chronological organization is undoubtedly intentional. It makes the past, present, and future feel simultaneous, each sampled by and sampling the others. As editor, Christopher shows that we only hear the past through echoes of our emergent present from his contributors.

Furthermore, this section reveals the book is not just about music. Tiffany E. Barber’s “Two Dope Boyz (In a Visual World),” a discussion of OutKast’s music videos, immediately follows Heinzel’s analysis of extended-take shots in music videos. By encountering such ocular subject matter near the outset of an anthology on music and Afrofuturism, we get a sense early on of the complete sensory discussion necessary for the worldbuilding project of this book. A believable world, these authors imply, can not only be described and heard, but must also be seen. Such claims recall Afrika Bambaataa’s pillars of hip-hop, which place just as much significance upon graffiti and breakdance as DJing and MCing.

Part 1 is also where Christopher stuck some essays that don’t quite fit in the anthology’s sections on technology and the future, even if they have a looser relation to the theme of time. For example, Steven Shaviro’s entry is mostly concerned with painting Ghostface Killah as an expressionist whose vocal grain reveals a more nuanced attitude toward gender roles than previous criticism has acknowledged. Another outlier is Kevin Coval’s “Breakbeat Poems,” in which he uses verse form to reflect on his own complex engagement with hip-hop culture as a white man from Chicago.

Part 1’s slippery hermeneutics of linking hip-hop to science fiction and time are set aside at the outset of Part 2. This section includes a detailed chronology of mixing technology and a fascinating interview with members of Public Enemy regarding copyright law and sampling. It also delves into Afrofuturism with Erik Steinskog’s “Preprogramming the Present: The Musical Time Machines of Gabriel Teodros.” This may be the first time we encounter clear definitions of Afrofuturism, mostly attributed to Ytasha Womack. The placement of Steinskog’s essay within this anthology provides another instance of nonlinearity in discourse. He frequently refers to Eshun’s essay “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” which is reprinted later in this volume. There is something intriguing about reading about the past, knowing it is also in your future.

Though forward looking, Part 3 begins with Eshun’s reprinted essay as the oldest piece in this collection. While it felt meaningful to arrive at this ancestor of all the articles I had read up to this point, I’d have liked its critiques to shade my previous reading. Eshun articulates most clearly the complex dynamics of science fiction, explaining that it does not carry an inherently positive ethical weight. He identifies sinister entanglements of science fiction with capitalism and historicity. When you pick up this book, perhaps start here and then glitch back to the beginning.

Boogie Down Predictions has small imperfections. It prods an uncomfortable synergy between neoliberal flavors of techno-optimism and Afrofuturists’ affinity for music technology. Gaskins’s entry, for example, valorizes music technology with little acknowledgement of the relationship between capitalism and music production. She argues that improvisation is algorithmic in nature, thus making AI a fruitful tool for propounding cultures of the African diaspora. Yet the AI synths she cites are made by Google, an incongruity with the DIY aesthetics of artists like Sun Ra or RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ. At least the authors here are somewhat conscious of this tension. As Womack writes, “We are the capital, the capitalist, and the rebel rolled into one” (18).

Another quirk is that Christopher has not provided dates for any entries. You must scour the text and beyond for hints as to the original publication dates. Eshun’s essay, for example, was written in 2003, but you will only catch this if you are already embroiled in Afrofuturist literature or if you notice Womack’s brief mention of it. Likewise, there is no indication that Kembrew Mcleod’s transcribed interview with Public Enemy was conducted back in 2010. Perhaps the choice to leave entries dateless points to the true purpose of this anthology. Womack explains that “this book…is a moment” (22). This notion is reinforced by the temporal simultaneity implied in the anti-chronological presentation of these essays. This densifies the moment, as though all these discourses from the last two decades transpired at once.

Just as sci-fi has fought to operate in academic spheres, so too does this volume fight on hip-hop’s behalf. It uses speculative fiction as a framework to portray a world with visceral density and complexity. It presents a hip-hop reality enriched by differing schools of thought, strata, technologies, many pasts, and many possible futures.