Cover Story:

The Genius Electric

The history of black Americans and rock music is a long, strange, twisted, and exhilarating one. The Jimi Hendrix story screams right from the heart of it. Since the 1860s, blacks have been inventing forms of popular entertainment that have transformed the country’s mass-entertainment marketplace. Our folk have also unceremoniously discarded those forms at the drop of a hat when cultural irrelevance set in. Whenever the latest thing starts to look like it’s in need of preservation, we’re out and on to the next. No sentimental remnants of the good old days welcome here. When it comes to our popular music especially, black America tends not to be impressed by the good old days. This is why in our music, as the trumpeter Lester Bowie once noted, the tradition is innovation, not nostalgia.

That observation applies equally to our mid-nineteenth-century marching band scores as to our minstrelsy, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing jazz, bebop, blues, rock ’n’ roll, soul and funk, house music and hip-hop. The upside of this is that black American music remains fluid, dynamic, transformational, and vital to each new generation, rather than static and reactionary. The downside is that, from one generation to the next, African-Americans know less about our tradition of innovative musical geniuses and their contributions to world culture than plenty of other people do elsewhere. Jimi Hendrix looms large among those lapses in our collective consciousness. His absence from a general celebration of African-American cultural heroes is both absurd and symptomatic of a more widespread problem: a vast cultural and political amnesia. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that until recently, black Americans have been a people running from a horrible past toward a more promising future. In the twentieth century our world-renowned music and our nomadic musicians always led the way on these fugitive pilgrimages, opening up spaces, internal and external, where blacks could feel a little bit freer to be themselves and to just be, in public. In this regard, Jimi Hendrix, over his too-brief 27-year life span, proved to be one of our most agile and adept freedom fighters. Sadly, decades after his still rumor-shrouded death, he’s one of our most misunderstood.

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