How Rivers Solomon turned award-winning Afrofuturist song The Deep into a book
In 2017, Chicago Public Radio program This American Life aired an episode called “We Are in the Future,” which explored the nature of Afrofuturism, a strain of science fiction that addresses the intersection between the larger African diaspora and technology across mediums. The episode followed producer Neil Drumming as he covered the topic and also commissioned a song called “The Deep” from experimental hip-hop group Clipping. This June, the band’s song will be turned into a book by Better Worlds author Rivers Solomon.
The song is an engrossing one. It opens with a brief introduction about an underwater society built from the offspring of pregnant women who were thrown overboard from their slave ships. When companies exploring for oil…
