Within the distinct worlds of reggae, jazz and funk, Lee Perry, Sun Ra, and George Clinton have constructed worlds of their own, futuristic environs that subtly signify on the marginalization of black culture. These new discursive galaxies utilize a set of tropes and metaphores of space and alienation, linking their common diasporic African history to a notion of extraterrestriality. Ra worked with his free jazz big band, the Intergalactic Jet-Set Arkestra, and asked "Have you heared the latest news from Neptune?". Perry helped invent dub reggae in his own Black Ark Studios and reminds us that "not all aliens come from outer space". In his spectacular mid-seventies live-concerts, funk-godfather Clinton staged an eleborate "mothership connection" and says : "Starchild here ! Citizens of the universe : it ain't nothin' but a party y'all ! " On the margin, all three have taken their production "one step beyond" into a zone in which, as Clinton puts it, "fantasy is reality in the world today". They have all thrown their own identities into question, taking on a multitude of costumes and alter egos ; each of them is a myth-making, alias-taking, self-styled postindustrial shamen. If metaphors basically work by taking something unfamiliar and substituting for it a known object or concept, then what happens when the metaphor chosen is, in itself, defined as the "unknown"? Granted the word space conjures all sorts of associations, but one of its primary attributes is the notion of exploration. One is left to define something by substituting for it the unknown, the unfathomable, terra incognita, 'space' - the (endlessly deferred) final frontier. Outer space then becomes the testing ground for the limits of metaphor, a place where antropomorphized spheres prove that metaphores, in the end, relate to no 'absolute', but are always culturally determined. Ra, Clinton and Perry, build their mythologies on an image of disorientation that becomes a metaphor for social marginalization. Staking their claim on this eccentric margin - a place that simultaneously eludes and frightens the oppressive, centered subjectivity - the three of them reconstitute it as a place of creation. It is a metaphor for being elsewhere, or perhaps of making this elsewhere your own.