Happy Birthday Sun Ra (Herman Poole Blount May 22, 1914 - May 30, 1993) Free-jazz & afrofuturism pioneer Sun Ra (the moniker 'Ra' taken from the eponymous Egyptian sun god), declared himself a messianic saviour and whose aesthetic was the first example of a black musician overtly appropriating sci-fi iconography. For him, Sun Ra was an alien abductee – and, through the prism of the African diasporic experience, so was every black American in a literal sense. Meanwhile the Egyptians – an eon-ruling race of beautiful and technologically-advanced African aristocracy – represented supremacy and a recaptured empire.
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