Must There Always Be These Colors?: Hendrix and His Psychedelic Code

As Martin Mull (and many others) have said, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." The journal Popular Music, then, is this. But it's filled with tons of weird articles. The recent issues have contained articles entitled "'This little ukulele tells the truth': indie pop and kitsch sensibility" and "'How do you know he's not playing Pac-Man while he's supposed to be DJing'?: technology, formats, and the digital future of DJ culture". But this post's article is particularly bizarre. The author argues that Jimi Hendrix's music is (at times) code for different types of psychedelic experience. 

Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work of Jimi Hendrix

Author(s): Sheila Whiteley

Source: Popular Music, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 37-60

Memorable Quotations: When the passage is played at half-speed on a tape-recorder, the word 'haze' in particular vibrates, dips and moves upwards to suggest a sense of fixation, and this particular effect is also present on 'funny' and 'sky' where the dip shapes create a strong feeling of floating around the beat. (45)

While 'Purple Haze' evokes a powerful acid experience, 'Mary' (marijuana) is a much milder drug and as such the gentler pacing of the song elicits a sense of complicity between Hendrix and the audience. (47)

The Wind Cries Mary' encodes the effect of marijuana through the gentleness and inner-directedness of its style. The timing is subtle, with the inflections in the melody line meandering just off-the-beat. In conjunction with the gentle drift of the key link motif :C:Bb:F the effect is one of easy well-being. The wind can blow anywhere, and the marijuana experience is universal. (49)

The author actually labels the part that is the 'trip'.

Hendrix's use of a conventional guitar, similar to that of Hank Marvin, but played upside down, can be read as a turning upside down the conventional world of such groups as The Shadows. (52)

In particular, the repetitive blues-like delivery of the coda in conjunction with the strongly bent-up chords moves towards an assertion of dominance and self-gratification which, in live performance, would have been intensified by the explicit masturbatory connotations of Hendrix's guitar style. (54)

'Foxy Lady' again focuses on a repetitive rhythmic motif: preceded by the highly charged 'give us some', the repeated 'foxy' symbolically moves to an expression of the rhythm of the sexual act itself. (58)

Strange Findings: Nothing you didn’t know already. Unless you didn’t know that Hendrix was the trippiest guitar player ever. 

You can get the full article here.