The Genius of Jimi Hendrix

Kiss the Sky 1

Kiss the Sky:

The Genius of Jimi Hendrix

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The music of Jimi Hendrix has come to be synonymous with the turbulent and iconoclastic late 1960s. Hendrix’s mind-bending lyrics and blazing guitar riffs capture the desperate hedonism of a generation literally devoured by a senseless war. But Hendrix’s music did far more than define a generation. Hendrix’s music not only mirrored the rebellious spirit and technicolor theatricality of the free love era; it transformed American culture, the way we listen to it—and the way we live it.

Jimi Hendrix was born in 1942 in Seattle, Washington. Entirely self-taught, Hendrix could neither read nor write music. Nevertheless, he proved to be a guitar prodigy, receiving his first guitar, a second-hand acoustic guitar, from his father at the age of 16. The same year, Hendrix would join his first band, The Velvetones. By the following year, Hendrix would acquire for the first time the instrument on which he would build his legend: the electric guitar (Biography, 2016).

Hendrix’s prowess on the electric guitar is virtually unmatched; it was certainly unprecedented in his time. As a self-taught savant, Hendrix’s music is raw, unrestrained. He is illustrious for his experimental style, incorporating feedback, static, and acoustic distortion to mesmerize audiences with something never before heard, attempted, or even imagined. Hendrix’s musical inspirations were eclectic and legendary, ranging from the incomparable B.B. King to Muddy Waters and Buddy Holly. These muses may inflect some elements of Hendrix’s style, but his musical voice is entirely, unforgettably, his own. After Hendrix, American music would never be the same. Artists as varied as Lenny Kravitz, George Clinton, OutKast, and Prince cite Hendrix as an inspiration (Kemp, 2016).

By 1968, Hendrix accounted among his biggest admirers the most iconic names on the rock scene, including Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, and the Beatles. But it was Hendrix’s heart-stopping, groundbreaking rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969 that turned his name into a legend. Hendrix’s iconoclastic rendition of the national anthem is a virtuosic performance of soaring peaks and stomach-dropping lows. Hendrix’s guitar shrieks and it wails; it weeps and it murmurs; it exhorts and it lulls. Above all, as Hendrix plays, he appears more sorcerer than songster, more magician than musician. The world’s most illustrious guitarists look at Hendrix with wonder, awe, and not a little envy (Kot, 2014).

One of Hendrix’s most iconic songs is his Purple Haze. Beginning with a captivating strumming hook of that incomparable guitar, the song encapsulates everything that Hendrix, the widely proclaimed “voodoo child” of the era, came to represent: a psychedelic blend of the familiar and the strange, the workaday lamentations of romantic troubles mingled with the horrifying realities of war come too close to home. Hendrix’s “haze” is the confusion of love, assuredly. But Hendrix, a former Army parachutist, also seems here to be commenting on the horrors of war, a war that by the late 1960s had come to be recognized widely for its futility, even as it continued to consume unabated countless of promising young lives. Thus, haze may also suggest the fog of war, or even the literal fog of bombs falling and fires burning. To kiss the sky, in this sense, may be read as death, as warplanes rain terror on young soldiers and the sky turns purple from the haze of smoke and the blood that clouds dying eyes. Another important reading is of purple haze as a reference to drug culture, the psychotropic experimentation with which Hendrix’s generation sought to expand consciousness and, above all, to escape the horrors of the present reality, with its civil unrest, political intrigue and assassinations, and, ever and always, the looming threat of the draft—and the endless military funerals that all too often, all too searingly followed.

Jimi Hendrix, the self-taught guitar prodigy, did more than give voice to a turbulent generation ravaged by war. Rather, Hendrix changed the face of American music forever. In the process, he altered how we live—and listen to—our culture. His iconoclastic lyrics and groundbreaking instrumentality taught musicians and audiences to wail. They taught us to scream and to moan, to rejoice and to blaspheme. Above all, they taught us to invent, to shatter the molds of what should or could be. They taught us to burn bridges as well as guitars, and to never look back at what was or might have been, lest the purple haze get in our eyes and in our mind.

References

Biography. (2016). The Official Jimi Hendrix Website. Retrieved from

Jimi Hendrix. (2013). American Masters. PBS. Retrieved from

Kemp, M. (2016). Jimi Hendrix Biography. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from

Kot, G. (2014). Was Jimi Hendrix born a genius? BBC Culture. Retrieved from