I enjoy ‘em both, but I’m a little bit embarrassed by either. They were the repetition as farce, with Hendrix as the real triumph and tragedy. Through him, racial debts were reconfigured. The alienated white kids saw the music they loved transformed by their own attentions. Whatever we look at is changed by our gaze. Hendrix was like a brief vision at the peak of the trip; he was only possible in response to the white audience, but his blackness was the signature of “authenticity” which made him, even more than the Beatles or the Dead, the epochal figure of Psychedelia. It’s no wonder that the era consumed him. Sly Stone and PFunk were the great black apostles of this music. It’s testament to the import of Psychedelia as a cultural moment that in the early 80’s, after the contraction of the Punk/New Wave period, when it became necessary to recomplicate pop music the frissionary possibilities of the psychedelic era provided a model for artists as seemingly disparate as Prince and the Butthole Surfers.
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- alex 2-10-2002 5:41 pm