Space jams

Nona Hendryx's star power

by Josh Kun

In his classic creation-myth manifesto on Funkadelic's 1974 album Standing on the Verge of Gettin' It On (Westbound), resident P-Funk visual artist Pedro Bell lists Sun Ra, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and George Clinton as the four "apostles" of "funkacidal vibrations" sent by Mother Nature to preserve the funk on the "Third Planet." It was an Afro-futurist fantasy that constructed funk and its offshoots as a male universe, a characterization that still tarnishes black audio sci-fi (listen to Sir Menelik and Kool Keith's "Space Cadillac") and funk history, as if women like June Tyson, Betty Davis, Lyn Collins, Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott, and (most notably) LaBelle were all earth-bound realists.

I wonder what Bell made of "Space Children," the Nona Hendryx-penned song on Nightbirds (Epic) that LaBelle released the same year as Standing on the Verge of Gettin' It On and two years before the mothership landed on P-Funk's landmark "Earth Tour." Or how it struck him that at the same time P-Funk were throwing a "Black Hole" party and creating the universe, Hendryx was busy dreaming the same galaxial abysses into her own shining stars of escape on LaBelle's 1975 tune "Black Holes in the Sky."

"A Man in a Trenchcoat (Voodoo)," a song Hendryx wrote for LaBelle's 1976 Chameleon (Epic), is the only LaBelle track included on Transformation, Razor & Tie's new compilation of Hendryx's solo work. It's filed last but should come first: the final act of her reign as LaBelle's wordspinner of sexual come-ons, declarations of independence, and otherworldly wild-side walks, and the beginning of her more chequered '80s solo career as a transracial experimentalist who dabbled in rock, metal, new-wave soul, and Bill Laswell-helmed electro-funk and earned a Best Female Vocalist Grammy nomination for the 1985 song "Rock This House" -- a coup for a black woman with aspirations outside of R&B divahood.

In "A Man in a Trenchcoat (Voodoo)," Hendryx looks to Haiti for her sci-fi cosmology and meets a magic being who guides her "into another land" of voodoo where time stops and she can walk on raindrops. People tell her she has a "disorder," but Hendryx has only done what so many black women artists before and after her have: imagined a new world as a strategy for living in this one. "It's just an all-girl band," LaBelle frontwoman Patti LaBelle had already explained, "dealing with the facts and the pain."

Indeed, Hendryx was a sci-fi vodoun priestess, a "magical melanin gyn" (to borrow poet Tracie Morris's phrase) way before penning "Trenchcoat." Ever since 1971, when she and Patti LaBelle and Sarah Dash parachuted out of the sky as LaBelle on their first album -- released the same year that an Afro'd and gun-toting Rosalind Cash helped Charlton Heston crucify himself in The Omega Man -- Hendryx has been writing and singing songs of speculative fiction. Take the 1975 LaBelle album Phoenix (Epic), where Hendryx gave us both the story of a "Cosmic Dancer" and the title track, subtitled "The Amazing Flight of a Lone Star," a mythical micro-epic of a blues singer who morphs herself into a shooting star headed for another galaxy.

Her solo compilation is appropriately named after "Transformations," her 1983 celebration of changeling identity. "Change your sex/change your skin," she demanded, "we're just transformations, variations, alterations, deviations." Nona the futuristic fencer who growls, "I'm bustin' out" over Material digi-funk. Nona praising "B-Boys" while dressed as a Tron soul cyborg with metallic face paint and a dorsal-finned skull cap.

In fact, when LaBelle made space the place and left white glam rockers to languish in the excesses of earth, it was Nona who always looked the most convincing, as if her studded breast plates, plumed headdresses, and winged astronaut bikinis weren't simply costumes (outfits that Whoopi could just slip in and out of at the Oscars) but something closer to alternate, altered selves -- "deviations" that only multiplied the possibilities of her present.

On the radar

* Phoenix Orion, the MC as Bible-quoting black cyborg, blade-running through an apocalypse wow of virtual locusts, bar codes, and downloadable beat dust on Zimulated Experiencez (Celestial). Play while reading William Gibson's Idoru.

* Unreconstructed folkie Tom Russell searching for his Irish and Norwegian roots on The Man from God Knows Where (Hightone) and coming up with the latest notch on the belt of the "American Primitive" movement.

* Computer freaknik Bogdan Raczynski proving you don't have to be a Digital Hardcore bore to make electronic music that splits your head open with his Boku Mo Wakaran (Rephlex).

* Music journalism RIP (again): Rolling Stone giving us Britney Spears's "honeyed thigh" on a tricycle -- as Jon Stewart put it on The Daily Show: "How creepy is that?"