Someone asked me what genre my music is. I said Afropop, R&B, a little country. What I wanted to say was: the future.
Afrofuturism gets explained in museum language. Speculative aesthetics. Diasporic imagination. All true, and all a little bloodless. Here is my working definition. Afrofuturism is deciding that people who look like me are present in every future I can picture, then building from that decision without stopping to argue for it.
The arguing is the part I refuse. So much art about Black life is structured as a case being made to somebody. Proof of pain, proof of worth, proof we were here. Afrofuturism skips the courtroom. It starts the story after the verdict, in a world where the question never gets asked.
That decision is all over my work, even where you would not expect it. The Year of the Horse album is nine tarot cards, each one an African woman rendered in gold and flame. The Star, The Chariot, The Emperor. Old European divination system, reimagined with faces the original decks never held. Na Mi Sef I Get carries Krio, the language of Sierra Leone, into a song about self-possession. Nobody translates it for you. The future I am writing from does not footnote itself.
The Human Algorithm goes further. A cyberpunk world, chrome and code and broken systems, and the people navigating it are women of color who build, hack, and redesign the architecture around them. In most cyberpunk I grew up seeing, we were background texture. Street vendors in the neon. In mine, we are the architects. That is not a casting choice. It is the whole premise.
I did not invent any of this. I am standing in a long line. Sun Ra put on the costume of the cosmos decades before I was born. Octavia Butler wrote the futures I am still catching up to. The word itself carries decades of scholarship. I am still reading it. Some days I wonder if I have earned the term or if I am just borrowing its glow. I keep using it anyway. The work fits the definition while I study the history.
When I sit down to write, I start from throne. Rising Phoenix opens the album after the fire. In My Season closes it in arrival. That ordering is Afrofuturist. The pain exists in the story. It just does not get the narrator’s chair.
Imagination is a resource, and it gets distributed as unevenly as everything else. Some people inherit futures ready-made, with their faces already in them. The rest of us learn to draft our own.
If you have ever had to draw yourself into a picture that left you out, you already know this practice. You were doing Afrofuturism before you had the word.