Tomorrow Will Be the 22nd Century

From plagues and goblins to the liberation of humans and animals

With my writing time severely curtailed this week, I’m sharing a text that draws on previously published work,¹ but which I believe will still be new to most readers of this newsletter. It’s about ‘22nd Century’, a song written by the Bahamian musician Exuma and recorded by Nina Simone and others. It’s a song that could be heard as dystopian or utopian, as nightmare vision or a glimpse of freedom.

When Nina Simone's previously unreleased 1971 recording ‘22nd Century’ appeared on a compilation in 1998, liner note author and Simone expert David Nathan assumed it was the artist’s own composition. In fact, the song was written by Exuma, the Bahamian singer-songwriter responsible for the tracks ‘Obeah Woman’ and ‘Dambala’ that appeared on Simone's It Is Finished album (1974). The song is remarkable in both Exuma’s and Simone’s versions, imagining a future where a range of issues—from disease to gender division—have been transcended. Both versions of the song feature four long verses full of visionary details: hairless men and women who no longer produce babies; ghosts and goblins walking the land; a plague that strikes the world in 1990; ‘revolution of music, poetry, love and life’; the liberation of animals.

As much as the surprising details, lyrical affect is produced by what appear to be stream-of-consciousness word associations, such as ‘right wing, left wing, middle of the road, sidewinder, backswinger, backlash, whiplash’. This may be what led Nathan to describe Simone’s version of the song as having ‘a spontaneous lyric’, although she only makes minimal changes to Exuma’s original.

Exuma

Exuma had been active as a musician in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s, performing as Tony McKay (a name closer to the one he was given as a child: Macfarlane Gregory Anthony Mackey). His and Simone’s paths probably crossed during this period given her involvement in the Village’s jazz, folk and blues scenes, though it wasn’t until Mackey/McKay had adopted the Exuma persona that he would record and release the three songs that Simone would cover.

His first two albums (Exuma I and Exuma II, both 1970) presented him as a singer-priest known as the ‘Obeah Man’ and established the main template of his performance style: husky vocals over hyper-driven acoustic guitar accompanied by ankle bells, cowbells, sacred foot drums, cabasa, congas, background vocals, shouts and whistles. Lyrically, the songs dealt with Obeah practice, sacred creatures (such as the snake spirit Dambala), rituals and seances, the junkanoo street parade, and other aspects of Afro-Bahamian tradition.

Front and rear sleeve of Exuma's first album (Mercury, 1970).

Inner gatefold sleeve of Exuma.

Front and rear cover of *Exuma II* (Mercury, 1970).

In an interview for Record World from the time of these records’ release, Exuma described the music as ‘all music that has ever been written and all music not yet written. It’s feeling, emotion, the sound of man, the sound of day creatures, night creatures and electrical forces’. His approach inevitably led to comparisons with the New Orleans musician Dr John, yet, as Brenna Ehrlich argues, ‘a cuddly Dr John dabbling in voodoo Mackey was not; Exuma is a parade, a séance, a condemnation of racist evils’.

Front, rear and inner sleeve of Do Wah Nanny (Kama Sutra, 1971).

Do Wah Nanny, the 1971 album on which Exuma's version of ‘22nd Century’ appears, followed the style of its predecessors. While still emphasising percussion, much of the song’s drive comes from Exuma’s increasingly ‘possessed’ delivery of the visionary lyrics, backed at the refrain—‘Tomorrow will be the 22nd century’ chanted three times, then ‘it will be, it will be, it will be’—by slurred and slightly out-of-sync backing vocals that give the song a blurry, hallucinatory quality, enhancing its sense of being a shamanistic vision.

Similar elements can be found throughout Exuma’s work. On his debut album he included a song called ‘The Vision’ and most of the songs explored aspects of religious or ritual enlightenment. The album cover bore a poem by the artist that described Exuma as a character ‘beyond the universe / a star that once lit Mars’ and bore the message ‘the future is freedom, the past a chain / the present anybody's game’. Another poem on the inside jacket of Do Wah Nanny closed with similar visionary polemic: ‘It's later than you realize / Electric spirit in the sky / Show the people how to fly’.

Nina Simone

Accounts differ as to where Nina Simone’s version of ‘22nd Century’ was recorded. I have read online sources claiming that Simone performed the song in the same 1973 concert that provided her versions of ‘Obeah Woman’ and ‘Dambala’ (both adapted from Exuma originals) for the RCA album It Is Finished. But the notes for the reissue of Simone’s 1971 album Here Comes the Sun mark it as a February 1971 studio recording; it appears as a bonus on that album rather than It Is Finished in the 9-disc set The Complete RCA Albums Collection. It was first released on the 1998 collection The Very Best of Nina Simone, 1967-1972: Sugar in My Bowl, where it’s noted as a discovery made by Paul Williams in the RCA tape vaults.

Simone’s version stays close to Exuma’s, driven primarily by guitar, percussion and the visionary lyrics. Like Exuma, Simone allows herself to become increasingly possessed by the material, her voice rising so that it sounds as though she is improvising. Her version is slightly short of the original’s nine minutes but is still a lengthy piece. If Simone’s performance does not re-author Exuma’s song to the extent many of her other covers did, it nevertheless takes on a new meaning merely by being incorporated into Simone’s large repertoire of material.

The piece is remarkable in its counterpoint between the biblical and the posthuman. If we were to read ‘22nd Century’ biblically, we might be tempted to look to the Book of Revelation given the seemingly apocalyptic imagery summoned in the song. Then there is the way in which Simone makes the most of the ‘It will be’ refrain, repeating it loudly at the turn of each verse and again at the close of the song, proclaiming the vision as The Truth.

But the imagery of ‘22nd Century’ is confusing and contradictory: does it really describe an apocalypse or is it instead a utopia, a dream of universalism that might be possible once the identitarian categorizations of the present epoch have been overcome? The liberation of humans and animals that ‘22nd Century’ hymns might be a vision of equality, albeit one that has come about following bloodletting, plague and the ‘revolution of music, poetry, love and life’ (and sex). Yet genetic modification is at work (‘Your heart is a plastic thing that can be bought’), suggesting something beyond the human, something posthuman and beyond theology.

If ‘Man’ (a term used perhaps to translate the vision back to a contemporary human audience) has become, as the song says, ‘his god and … his devil’, if we have gone beyond any form of law, then are we in a fugitive space? Does ‘22nd Century’ visits a place beyond good and evil, a place beyond time, where the unrealized dreams of the present have undergone their tests? In an earthlier sense, echoing Martin Luther King, perhaps it presents ‘an idea whose time has come’. Dr King, famously, had dreamt of a ‘day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing’. In Simone’s voice we may hear a similar hope, but also a sense of the devastation necessary to make it happen.

This is, arguably, to bring to earth, or to the here and now, a song which has ventured beyond. As Jayna Brown argues, the space of Black utopia is one that does not depend on what history has shown as undeliverable. Rather than attaching utopia to the deferred dreams of civil rights, Brown seeks utopia in ‘the moments when those of us untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress here on earth celebrate ourselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium’.

Cover of Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke UNiversity Press, 2021).

Brown is interested in speculation ‘about existence beyond life or death, about the ways we reach into the unknowable, outside the bounds of past, present, and future, of selfhood and other’. This escape from selfhood is the kind of fugitivity that is to be found in Exuma’s and Simone’s ‘22nd Century’, a place of exile that undoes any secure sense of identity and asks what other spaces (and species) are available or can be imagined from within the present.

It’s hard to know when (or where) this present is, or from which time point the lyric is being projected. The verses use a mixture of present and past tenses (‘there is no oxygen in the air’, ‘1990 was the year when the plagues struck the earth / 1988 was the year when men and women struck out for freedom’), while the refrain is future oriented: ‘tomorrow will be the 22nd century’. Chronology gets mixed up, with reportage of the twenty-first century preceding that of the twentieth. The first verse contains the lines ‘When tomorrow becomes yesterday / And tomorrow becomes eternity’, suggesting a folding of time such as those Brown emphasises in Black Utopias. Simone’s singing, meanwhile, is a kind of ‘tun[ing] into an alter-frequency’ (Brown), a display of excess, something that can’t be pinned down.

‘22nd Century’ can easily be heard as a song emanating from the world(s) of black ritual and mysticism, with Exuma and Simone as both recipients and agents, congregants and preachers.

Freedom

Cover of Justin Vivian Bond, Dendrophile (No Label, 2011); cover of Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (2021).

‘22nd Century’ has been covered by other artists and used by various commentators operating mostly, it seems, from knowledge of Simone’s version rather than Exuma’s. A version by Justin Vivian Bond is used by Olivia Laing as the basis for the final chapter in Everybody: A Book about Freedom. In the context of Laing’s book, it is a song about experimentation and the overcoming of rigid boundaries and categories.

The figures whose biographies, social contexts and work Laing follows in the rest of her book emphasise how speculation often gets shut down out of fear and prejudice. Everybody is about the search for liberation in relation to the body: freedom to inhabit a body—any body—without fear of what being in that body—or any body—will bring. This chimes with Simone’s own definition of freedom as having ‘no fear’ and as ‘something to really, really feel … like a new way of seeing’. As Laing reflects,

‘Violence is a fact, and yet whenever I’ve sat in Joe’s Pub watching [Justin Vivian Bond] or listened to Nina Simone sing, I’ve felt the room expand around me. This is what one body can do for another: manifest a freedom that is shared, that slips under the skin. Freedom doesn’t mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time. A free body need not be whole or undamaged or unaugmented. It is always changing, changing, changing, a fluid form after all.’

Bond notes the queer potential of ‘22nd Century’ when introducing the song at Joe’s Pub: ‘I do feel that it speaks to my experience, and the experience of my people; even though [Exuma] wrote if in 1970, it’s got a timeline that I think is very prescient.’

The lyrics of ‘22nd Century’ are all about fluidity and change, presenting a scenario where all that seemed most rigidly defined in the latter part of the twentieth century has been undone. Musically, this is emphasised by the way in which Simone appears to be improvising some of the lines, even though they closely follow Exuma’s original. Indeed, it is a mark of Exuma’s songwriting that he was able to evoke the dynamic between script and improvisation that is central to many ritual practices: processes which rely on defined objects and objects that are always in process. This fluidity marks ‘22nd Century’ in all its versions—and I would add the 2020 recording by Mina Tindle, Kate Stables, Emma Broughton and Melissa Laveaux (below) to the ones already mentioned—as a jazz performance in which speculation sounds like improvisation.

1. This post uses material from my article ‘The Reincarnation of an Egyptian Queen: Dystopian Lateness and Speculation in Nina Simone’s Afrofuturism’, Jazz Research Journal 15, no. 1-2 (2022): 25-50, https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22863.