When the pan­dem­ic ends and trav­el resumes, you’ll hope­ful­ly find pup­peteers Diana Romero and Andrés Mat­u­rana enter­tain­ing folks, both young and old, on the streets of Madrid. Above, watch them enter­tain passers­by with a mar­i­onette of Fred­die Mer­cury singing the Queen clas­sic, “I Want to Break Free.” Down below, you can see their mar­i­onette take on the Bea­t­les.

Here’s some quick back­sto­ry on their work:

Perip­lo Pup­pets are Diana Romero and Andrés Mat­u­rana: design­ers and mak­ers of pup­pets and sto­ries. We began in 2003 with TitiriBea­t­les at the Ram­blas of Barcelona and study­ing self-taught at Insti­tut del Teatre Library. We trav­eled with our pup­pets through the streets of Europe and Amer­i­ca gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion and expe­ri­ence, until in 2009 we decid­ed to live in Madrid and be a The­atre com­pa­ny. …We focus on audio­vi­su­al per­for­mance mix­ing video map­ping, string pup­pets, and latex pup­pets to make shows that involve the audi­ence.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Make an Adorable Cro­cheted Fred­die Mer­cury; Down­load a Free Cro­chet Pat­tern Online

Meet Fred­die Mer­cury and His Faith­ful Feline Friends

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Fred­die Mercury’s Final Video Per­for­mance

Fred­die Mer­cury Reimag­ined as Com­ic Book Heroes

If you’re a read­er of this site, it’s like­ly you known the name Klaus Nomi, the diminu­tive Ger­man singer who stunned New Wave audi­ences in New York with his angel­ic sopra­no voice and opera cov­ers. If you know of Nomi, you like­ly know of Nina Hagen, who start­ed releas­ing records in her native East Ger­many in the late 70s, mix­ing opera with punk, funk, and reg­gae and cov­er­ing clas­sics from Tina Turn­er to The Tubes “White Punks on Dope.” She became a major star, but her name does not come up often these days. She is long over­due for a revival.

Like Nomi, Hagen was a mas­ter of fright make-up and exag­ger­at­ed, Expres­sion­ist faces. She did not, how­ev­er, have an alien alter-ego or col­lec­tion of space­suits. What she had was a whol­ly orig­i­nal style all her own, full of eccen­tric vocal­iza­tions crit­ic Robert Christ­gau com­pared to The Exor­cist’s Lin­da Blair.

Her stage shows were what Hagen her­self described as “inde­scrib­able.” She applied her “umpteen-octave range,” as Christ­gau wrote, with­out restraint to every imag­in­able kind of mate­r­i­al, from cabaret to Nor­man Greenbaum’s “Spir­it in the Sky.”

Impos­si­ble to clas­si­fy, Hagen was beloved by the likes of the Sex Pis­tols and the Slits. Less than a decade after her 1978 debut with the Nina Hagen Band, she appeared in Tokyo with the Japan­ese Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra in a con­cert broad­cast to 15 coun­tries, per­form­ing the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. (See her that same year, 1985, sing from Car­men in Copen­hagen, Den­mark, just above.) She con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty lat­er in life, fre­quent­ly sings gospel tunes, and released an album called Per­son­al Jesus in 2010 fea­tur­ing a cov­er of the icon­ic Depeche Mode song.

Hagen emerged in 1978 along­side a num­ber of the­atri­cal female singers with preter­nat­u­ral­ly unset­tling voic­es, debut­ing at the same time as Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, and Dia­man­da Galas (who has received her own com­par­isons to Lin­da Blair). But her own jour­ney was par­tic­u­lar­ly unusu­al. “Lis­ten­ing to Hagen chat mat­ter-of-fact­ly about her life,” wrote The Irish Times in a review, “Madon­na seems like Doris Day in com­par­i­son, while your pre­tender Lady Gaga is, in Hagen’s own words, ‘a pop pros­ti­tute who has more to do with biki­ni adver­tis­ing.’”

Put more in more pos­i­tive terms, the singer honed her the­atri­cal “quick-change” per­sona through a “bar­rage of influ­ences,” the New York Times not­ed. Crit­ics were divid­ed over her eclec­ti­cism. Rolling Stone called her 1982 solo, Eng­lish-lan­guage debut the “most unlis­ten­able” album ever made, an unfair­ly harsh assess­ment that did­n’t stop her from exper­i­ment­ing with even more dis­so­nant, dis­ori­ent­ing sounds.

As Hagen her­self tells her sto­ry:

I grew up in East Berlin, in a fam­i­ly of artists. I heard opera all day long. From the time I was 9 years old I was imi­tat­ing the singers; lat­er I stud­ied opera. But we also got West­ern tele­vi­sion and radio, from the Amer­i­cans in West Berlin. When I was 11 years old, I turned into a hip­pie and gave flow­ers to police­men. And when I was 21 and left Berlin for Lon­don, I became a punk.

She became a punk diva, that is. Hagen’s vocal range—which you can hear demon­strat­ed in the thor­ough video analy­sis above—over her band’s prog-like jams (as in “Naturträne), con­jured up both angels and demons. She evokes dread with gut­tur­al growls and wide-eyed stares, she can look “child­like, sweet or ter­ri­fy­ing,” or all three at once, and she nev­er lacks the essen­tial qual­i­ty an opera singer needs to make it in rock and roll: a sense of humor.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Klaus Nomi Per­forms with Kraftwerk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1982)

Watch Klaus Nomi Debut His New Wave Vaude­ville Show: The Birth of the Opera-Singing Space Alien (1978)

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

How to Lis­ten to Music: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“Through the entire­ty of his short life Jimi Hen­drix was an avid fan of sci­ence fic­tion. As a young child Hen­drix and his broth­er Leon would escape their trou­bled upbring­ing by dream­ing up sto­ries of far-off plan­ets and fly­ing saucers.” So begins the Poly­phon­ic video above, an explo­ration of how sci-fi informed the apoc­a­lyp­tic images and spaced-out sounds in Hendrix’s songs. His love of sci­ence fic­tion “only inten­si­fied as an adult,” espe­cial­ly when Hen­drix moved in with Chas Chan­dler, who would become his man­ag­er and pro­duc­er, and who owned a large col­lec­tion of sci-fi nov­els.

The books Hen­drix read at the time pro­vid­ed him with the mate­r­i­al he need­ed for a psy­che­del­ic rev­o­lu­tion. He turned the “pur­plish haze” in Philip Jose Farmer’s Night of Light into “Pur­ple Haze.” The song’s lyrics ref­er­ence the dis­ori­ent­ing state of mind char­ac­ters in Farmer’s sto­ry expe­ri­ence from cos­mic radi­a­tion, while they also allude, of course, to oth­er kinds of altered states. Hen­drix didn’t just weave sci-fi themes and ref­er­ences into his songs. He and Chan­dler com­posed space-rock epics that expand­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the elec­tric gui­tar and the record­ing stu­dio.

“Third Stone from the Sun” is writ­ten “from the per­spec­tive of an alien scout who is observ­ing Earth from afar.” Though he deflects with humor and innu­en­do, the alien char­ac­ter in the song express­es com­plete dis­gust with human­i­ty: “Your peo­ple I do not under­stand / So to you I shall put an end.” In “Up from the Skies,” Hen­drix sings from “the per­spec­tive of one who lived on Earth long ago, and is dis­mayed at the state of the plan­et when he comes back to vis­it.” Call­ing the Earth a “peo­ple farm,” he says to the plan­et as a whole, “I heard some of you got your fam­i­lies / Liv­ing in cages.”

The video links Hendrix’s use of sci­ence fic­tion as social com­men­tary to some of the best-known writ­ers of the genre, includ­ing Aldous Hux­ley, Isaac Asi­mov, Stanis­law Lem, and Ursu­la K. LeGuin. These are wor­thy com­par­isons, to be sure, but there is anoth­er tra­di­tion in which to sit­u­ate him, one that had been at work in pop­u­lar music since Sun Ra first stepped onstage and claimed to be from out­er space. Hendrix’s respons­es to the “apoc­a­lyp­tic” images of the Viet­nam War and the mass protest, civ­il unrest, and racial strife in the U.S. draws on an Afro­fu­tur­ist lex­i­con as much as from pre­dom­i­nate­ly white sci-fi.

Coined in 1995 by crit­ic Mark Dery in con­ver­sa­tion with sci­ence fic­tion giant Samuel R. Delany, crit­ic Greg Tate, and Pro­fes­sor Tri­cia Rose, the term “Afro­fu­tur­ism” describes a hybrid sci-fi aes­thet­ic that ties togeth­er past, present, and future Black expe­ri­ences. “From Sun-Ra to Janelle Monáe, the appro­pri­a­tion of oth­er-world­ly and alien iconog­ra­phy estab­lish­es Afro-futur­ists as out­siders,” writes Mawe­na Yehoues­si. Afro­fu­tur­ism is the cre­ative expres­sion of dou­ble con­scious­ness: C. Bran­don Ogbunu traces the genre back to W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1920 short sto­ry “The Comet” and argues that the abil­i­ty of Black artists to view the cul­ture as both insid­ers and out­siders can “help us to con­sid­er uni­vers­es of bet­ter alter­na­tives.”

Hendrix’s nar­ra­tors describe apoc­a­lyp­tic visions, but they do so from the point-of-view of oth­er, bet­ter worlds, or bet­ter times, or, in “A Mer­man I Should Turn to Be”—perhaps one of Hendrix’s most tren­chant critiques—an under­sea refuge.

Well it’s too bad that our friends, can’t be with us today
Well it’s too bad
‘The machine, that we built,
Would nev­er save us’, that’s what they say
(That’s why they ain’t com­ing with us today)
And they also said it’s impos­si­ble for a man to live and breathe under
Water, for­ev­er,
Was their main com­plaint
And they also threw this in my face, they said:
Any­way, you know good and well it would be beyond the will of God,
And the grace of the King (grace of the King)
(Yeah, yeah)

The per­spec­tive seems to antic­i­pate the pes­simistic, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic visions of Octavia But­ler. It’s a view Afro­fu­tur­ist the­o­rist Kod­wo Eshun links to the expe­ri­ences of peo­ple of the African dias­po­ra gen­er­al­ly, who “live the estrange­ment that sci­ence-fic­tion writ­ers envi­sion. Black expe­ri­ence and sci­ence fic­tion are one and the same.” Afro­fu­tur­ism has “always looked for­ward,” Tay­lor Crump­ton writes at Clever, pro­vid­ing a “blue­print for cul­tur­al growth.” In Hendrix’s songs, we feel the urgent ten­sion between a world on fire and a desire to escape, resolv­ing, Poly­phon­ic con­cludes, with “hope in a new way of liv­ing.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Rare Footage of Jimi Hen­drix Per­form­ing “Voodoo Child” in Maui, Plus a Trail­er for a New Doc­u­men­tary on Jimi Hendrix’s Leg­endary Maui Per­for­mances (1970)

Behold Moe­bius’ Many Psy­che­del­ic Illus­tra­tions of Jimi Hen­drix

Watch a 5‑Part Ani­mat­ed Primer on Afro­fu­tur­ism, the Black Sci-Fi Phe­nom­e­non Inspired by Sun Ra

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness