“It’s good to be black on the moon,” proclaims Captain Angela Ali in an awkward slip of the tongue on Netflix’s Space Force.
The Nameless Astronaut starring in Alabama Shakes’ “Sound & Color” would likely disagree because as soon as he steps from his hypersleep, he discovers that everything in the waking world has gone wrong.
According to Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard the stories told in the song and video are one and the same. Trying to shake loose from her typical sound, she changed her physical perspective and moved her writing desk to a leftover photoshoot set designed to look like a shuttle. “Sound & Color” was the result of that spatial experiment, and the lead character of the video is black, same as the story’s writer. Guion Bluford was the first African-American in space back in 1983, but entertainment has yet to catch up. Though we’ve seen black characters in space before, the Alabama Shakes’ “Sound & Color” is one of very few cinematic representations of a black person as the main protagonist among the stars.
Unfortunately for him, the stars are the Nameless Astronaut’s only solace here. The cold echoes of the vibraphone opening the song are the perfect soundtrack to the spaceman sleepily opening his eyes. With each of his slow starts, disorienting flashbacks, and horrifying realizations, “the music goes through sorrow and anger and all this grief,” Brittany explains. And then the sun comes up. Her bright voice pierces through a sea of sounds and emotions just enough to leave the track with a perfectly balanced dissonance, gorgeous and jarring, all at once.
That’s exactly what I imagine space feels like.
𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗦 𝗧𝗢 𝗟𝗢𝗩𝗘:
“Ain’t life just awful strange?
I wish I never gave it all away”