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Hendrix receives accolades
By Marquita Brown
Daily Mississippian (U. Mississippi)
(U-WIRE)
OXFORD, Miss. - A legend has finally received recognition that
was long overdue.
Jimi Hendrix was named the "Greatest
Guitarist of All Time" in the Sept. 18 issue of Rolling
Stone magazine--something his fans have always known and will
always know.
Although I only recently became
addicted to Jimi, there was something about him; something about
the way people revered him that gnawed at me.
I constantly heard existing fans
talk about how great he is, but it took a while before my curiosity
took me over.
The only songs I had heard at
the time were "Purple Haze," of course, and "Fire."
I had to know whether or not the
hype was well-deserved, so I sampled his music the slightly
illegal way--I downloaded "Hear My Train A Comin'"
and "Angel."
That's all it took for me to get
hooked.
There's something about the music
that's indescribable.
It seems to take hold of you,
and if you only close your eyes and listen, the music seems
to seep into you. It grabs you, but you don't want it to let
go.
Pete Townshend, the author of
the Rolling Stone article, hit on this point by saying he "made
the guitar beautiful. ... Jimi made it beautiful and made it
OK to make it beautiful."
He wasn't like the typical rocker,
jumping around strangely, making the same noise a monkey could
make if you gave it a guitar.
In Jimi's hand, the guitar was
more like a sorcerer's wand, and the Voodoo Child only had to
sing a note or strum a chord before he had you under his spell.
The inspiration for other legends
and legends in the making such as Prince, Lenny Kravitz and
Andre from Outkast, Jimi was ahead of his time.
He couldn't be touched then and
hasn't been touched since.
"Evil men make me kill you
/ Evil men make you kill me ... Even though we're family, Lord."
You can't listen to "Machine
Gun" or "Hear My Train A Comin'" and not feel
the punch of each guitar note and Jimi's voice.
You can't listen to "Red
House" as Jimi fuses the blues and rock without feeling
his heartbreak.
You can't deny the poetry in "The
Wind Cries Mary," when Jimi sings, "The traffic lights
they turn blue tomorrow / And shine their emptiness down on
my bed / The tiny island sags downstream / 'Cause the life that
they lived is dead."
And not only his music, but Jimi
himself was beautiful, young, gifted and black.
Despite all of that, there are
those who try to discount Jimi's music and focus only on his
shortcomings.
Yes, Jimi was an LSD addict. Yes,
that addiction eventually killed him. Does that make his music
less great?
Absolutely not.
In Jimi's own words, "You
probably call him a trap, but it goes a little deeper than that!"
Was Bob Marley any less of a legend
because he smoked weed as a part of his religion?
Does that detract from all he
did and all he meant to people around the globe?
Did Kurt Cobain's music become
less haunting, less brilliant after his death?
No.
Jimi's music is genuine and timeless.
With Jimi, "there was a sense
of wanting to possess him and wanting to be a part of him, to
know how he did what he did because he was so powerfully affecting,"
Townshend said.
That's why people will continue
to discover him, and people will continue to fall under his
spell.
That's why he is, and will remain,
the greatest guitarist of all time.
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