Jimi Hendrix

[shemthepenman]

Jimi Hendrix 


Brixton’s a whale 
that swims through London,
only at night,
writing poems for 
the immortal alien 
that hides inside its backbone.

Brixton’s a weapon
that asks what happened,
when, and why.

I tried and said,
what never said, 
what never said.

I wrote the words in coffee, moving.
Whatever said,
a word that’s often. 

I tried to say it.
Some fun, some say it.
Some love, they do it.

Then Jimi said,
—S’cuse me
while I kiss this guy.

[just mercedes]

Bang! Your last line - I can never hear
'kiss the sky' again.

[ellajam]

I heard it twice recently. I will always hear kiss the sky, can't touch this, though I'm always smiling when I hear it so if I think of your line I will already be smiling.

[rowens]

Someone told me last spring that Jimi Hendrix is hard to listen to with a trained ear. That you won't hear many players these days citing Hendrix as an influence. These are the kinds of things that I hear people say. Like a fungus.
But who thinks in terms of influence when they want to listen to something?

---

It's useless to say anything bad about Jimi Hendrix. He had absolutely nothing to do with anything except good music. There's nothing else that you can even think about him but good music. I've heard people lately say they've never really heard Jimi Hendrix before. They never say they've never heard Jimi Hendrix, they say: I've never REALLY heard Jimi Hendrix before. And that's all they can say, like that.

[shemthepenman]

Someone told me last spring that Jimi Hendrix is hard to listen to with a trained ear. That you won't hear many players these days citing Hendrix as an influence. These are the kinds of things that I hear people say. Like a fungus.
But who thinks in terms of influence when they want to listen to something?

---

It's useless to say anything bad about Jimi Hendrix. He had absolutely nothing to do with anything except good music. There's nothing else that you can even think about him but good music. I've heard people lately say they've never really heard Jimi Hendrix before. They never say they've never heard Jimi Hendrix, they say: I've never REALLY heard Jimi Hendrix before. And that's all they can say, like that.

don’t get me started on people that turn their noses up at Jimi Hendrix. i think there is a very clear dividing line down the middle of humanity. 
Hendrix is avant garde, idiosyncratic, unique, and soulful. his playing is stamped all the way through with individuality like a stick of Brighton rock. but, unfortunately, uniformity is king, and if it can’t be easily reproduced into some homogeneous marketable sanitised commodity, then who cares. if it doesn’t look like a good, or even excellent, example of what you’ve already seen and heard, people get confused and don’t quite know what to do with it—at least, that’s what we’re led to believe. 
there are even some videos on youtube, now, titled “why it’s so difficult to play like Jimi Hendrix” as if this was some sort of problem. 
this isn’t a new phenomenon, either, it cuts all the way through art. long periods of perfecting a technique until someone comes along and burns it down... at which point the rebuilding starts again in earnest. Picasso burnt down painting, Joyce burnt down the novel, and hendrix burnt down guitar playing—it is no coincidence he used to actually set light to his guitar on stage. it’s also no coincidence that, today, smashing one’s guitar on stage is a cliché.

[rowens]

Until recently it never occurred to me that so many people didn't like his guitar playing. Somebody back in 1994 told me they thought Eddie Van Halen was a better guitarist, but I thought that was a minority opinion.

---

One time someone said they liked Peter Frampton's guitar style better. But that turned out to be a hoax.

The last time I tried to watch Jimi Hendrix videos, most of them had been taken down.