Manic Depression

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Jimi Hendrix, "Manic Depression," (download until 1/8/09) from Are You Experienced?

Jimi Hendrix is one of a small number of hyped musicians who really are worth the hype. Prince is another, so too the Beatles. Looking at that list I seem disturbingly conventional but I would rush to say that there's a long list of musicians I could type out who are worth the hype but don't get it. So I retain my underground hipster credentials--underground hipster, because I am much hipper than anyone I deal with on a daily basis will acknowledge.

Having made that claim for Jimi, I have to say that while he was and continues to be worth the hype, the hype Jimi got when I was a kid--this is in the 1970's and 1980's--was the wrong hype. Jimi took a place in the Pantheon of Rock to allow white taste-makers a response to any discussion of the inherent racism of rock 'n' roll as a business. And be sure that it's the business end of it that matters to the people involved. "Can I make it on my royalty cheques?": any discussion of racism needs to begin with the economic and not with a glance of who one's friends are.

Now, if you're a white Jimi fan like I am, I just want to go out of my way to be disarming (and this is what we call "modeling," folks, a demonstration in this case of what white people who want to make this a more sensible society need to do when they talk to their fellow white people about how racism functions). Your memories of the guitar god Jimi, stoked by Rolling Stone magazine et. al., do not make you a filthy racist swine. If you're a filthy racist swine, it's likely because of how you deal with your co-workers or something like that. Digging Jimi is perfectly acceptable, and is indeed, as the inclusion of the links above should indicate, encouraged at this blog. But we want to see things as they are.

So foisted upon us as children was the image of Jimi lighting his axe at Monterey Pop, primal, physical, something of a savage. In reality he was likely a bit high like everyone else at the festival, or motivated by the very sensible commercial need to one-up the Who, who merely smashed their instruments. If you take Jimi in this sense, he's less the savage than a very clear-thinking businessman (though we are all aware of the neat correlation of business and savagery under capitalism, to be sure--witness "Monsieur Verdoux" for an illustration). And his marketing plan worked. We don't really talk a whole lot about the Who's Monterey Pop performance in hindsight, at least relative to Jimi.

So what we kids should have learned about Jimi were two things, the second being his music. But the first is this: Jimi Hendrix, guitarist, singer, songwriter, recording artist, was one of the shrewedest businessmen of the Golden Age of Rock. All too aware from the experiences of his colleague Arthur Lee of Love and others of the commercial hurdles he faced in the Jim Crow United States--remember, Brown v. Board only provided the legal precedent which led to the dismantling of legal segregation, the Civil Rights Act, which provided a legal justification for the Federal Government to take action to protect civil rights in individual cases, was only passed in 1964, and it was only in 1965, a year before Hendrix went to England, that the United States suggested, in a statutory sense, that citizens should have the right to vote whether they were white or not--all too aware of this, the author repeats, Jimi got the hell out of Dodge and went to England where he might, as a black American, find a greater measure of commercial success on his own terms, rather than on the terms allotted him by the United States' music industry--Chitlin' Circuit, etc. He got out of Dodge, formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and made both his name and his fortune. It will be noted that his estate, rather than any record company, retains control of recorded legacy and continues, as well the ought to, to profit from it.

Jimi the sharp businessman who would sell but not be sold. No place for that black man in America. No savage he, he returned and conquered the market, and like Duke Ellington made sure that he retained his rights as a creator.

And the music. I could say it speaks for itself but a couple things stand out. It's a sign of the total degeneration of Rock 'n' Roll as a social process that nobody could get away with Mitch Mitchell's drumming on a recording these days. He's playing jazz. Listen to the ride cymbal--it's top-notch. And should anyone question how thoroughly original Jimi actually was (and I often get in arguments with people on the other side of things, pointing out that Jimi actually came from a musical and social context, not, as many of the white cognoscenti of the time thought, from another planet, take a listen to the overdubbed guitars. I don't think anyone after him really dealt with the implications of this playing until My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields more than 20 years later. "Loveless" is right there if you listen for it.