That's a one-dimensional interpretation of a complicated musical gesture. I hear a highly ambivalent mixture of emotions--anger and grief, yes, but Hendrix served in 26th Airborne, and though he was a fuck-up, he was not dishonorably discharged, as many believe, but discharged on the grounds of "unsuitability — under honorable conditions" (in 1962). He never lost a certain affection for the military, if only for his fellow soldiers, many of whom would go on to die in a war I and eventually more than 1/2 of Americans disapproved of--to say the least. I hear anguish at an America gone wrong with a misguided policy that killed almost 60,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese--and accomplished less than nothing.
(SOME HELPFUL BACKGROUND: I love my country, and I say fuck you to anyone who says I don't just because I believe we made a tragic mistake getting involved in a civil war in a minor third-world country based on a policy-wonk theory. Did the dominoes fall, did the Chinese take over Vietnam? No, war broke out between the two countries in 1979, and the war involved three Communist nations (add Cambodia). Our leaders fought the war in total ignorance of the historical geopolitics of the region--a history of constant rivalries between and among China and the small nations of Indochina. These rivalries long predated the Vietnam War, played a part in it, and also figured in the intra-Communist war that followed. McNamara was a shallow technocrat who coldly used the draft to send thousands of hapless 18-year-olds to their deaths in what he KNEW was an unwinnable war (so did Johnson).
Tens of thousands of Vets came home maimed and traumatized and stuck with sub-par VA medical care; spat on by fellow Americans for fighting for America, many of them because they were forced to; ending up homeless on the streets in droves (maybe some of them are out there to this day); and some of them so embittered that they joined the anti-war movement. McNamara was a soulless bastard who deserved to be pushed into the river by an enraged Vet. Compared with Johnson and this spreadsheet bureaucrat, Bush and Cheney's reckless interventionism in the Middle East looks pretty mild. To anyone who accuses me of America-bashing, I say America's greatness consists partly in its sense of fair play and its willingness to recognize and correct its shortcomings--e.g., the Civil War and "a new birth of freedom." (Sadly, going from Vietnam quagmire to Middle East sand-trap doesn't suggest any lessons were learned.)
Hendrix was beyond dispute a genius who was a fucked-up individual and anything but a role model in his personal life, yes; but his musical theme (besides drugs and sex and extra-terrestrials) was Love. He was a typical Hippie in that sense. "Peace and Love" are facile sentimental slogans, certainly, but as far as you can get from today's Leftist hate-mongering.
Most Hippies were self-indulgent, drugged-out, affluent pseudo-anarchists, but only a few poisonous individuals like Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground advocated and practiced violence. Sadly, that's what the Hippie movement evolved into--today's Alinsky-ized Far Left Chicago-style machine politicians destroying every city they control, cynical exploitation of racial grievance, blatant anti-Americanism, crypto-Communism culminating in a traitor named Obama.
Hendrix was no fan of Communism, and in his last years the Black Panthers were already criticizing him for not being (as we now say) "woke" and on board with anti-white identity politics. Unlike them and their modern-day descendants, he was not a hater.
With all this in mind, that Anthem performance makes a lot of sense in its surreal way. I'll quote this Quora comment: "Hendrix evoked the majesty of America while also summoning the howling undercurrents of dissonance and violence echoing the Vietnam war and the nation's racial struggles.” At the right historical moment at a now-historic event Hendrix turned in a performance that was also a dramatic piece of performance art, iconoclastic and yet, to this day, an icon standing for that entire period, creative and destructive, peace-and-love on the one hand, massively violent on the other. But in retrospect, tragic at the time and tragic in its consequences.
One hallmark of the Left is being offended by complexity. Ideology-driven people are allergic to truth, and the truth is rarely simple. That goes for Hendrix, his version of the Anthem and his attitude to America. If anyone's offended by the fact that I don't see this issue in "black and white," I don't give a fuck. I'm voting for the same man you are.
One glaring difference to me is that back then there was an and game. End the war and bring the troops home and there is not further need to protest the war. Since Occupy WS there had been no goal. Nothing you can do will end these riots. The insanity that has gripped the minds of young folks is just an endless churn of disjointed thinking that has no real goals. Systemic racism is fake and therefore you can never end it.
Alvin Lee ...I saw him play years after Woodstock when the group was named Ten Years Later (they were Ten Years After for a bit too). A power trio. I saw them play at a venue indoors ...a huge old movie theater that had been a regular theater at one time. Stacks of Marshall amps across the back of the stage. They had to halt the show temporarily when during a bass solo (that was de rigeure back then, every player took his ten minute solo) plaster started falling from the ceiling ...hehehe. But as things were, after a few custodial flashlights performed a perfunctory examination of the ceiling, the show went on. I was just a kid at the time, couldn't even drive yet. But that's how things were, no helmets, no seatbelts, you could even make it across a parking lot on a summer's day without bottled water, and a little thing like the possible collapse of a roof was not going to deter a promoter or the band. Glory days. I'm Going Home... to See my Baby, I'd lLove to Change the World, etc.
Hell, back in the day tiles full of asbestos falling on your head in your 2nd grade classroom didn't mean shit. If nobody got hit, you laughed. If someone got hit they headed to the nurse's office. Lucky ducks.
Yep, there were asbestos covered pipes in the boys lockerroom, one door exited into the gym, and the other to a small weight room area then through to the athletic fields. Over that doorway, a pipe. Every now and again, someone would reach/jump up and smack it showering the guy behind him with white powder... asbestos.
Hi there, -1. Obviously there WERE too many words, because you ran out of attention span and forgot (assuming you noticed) what I said at the beginning. "Complicated musical GESTURE"--is the distinction too subtle for you? It doesn't mean a Bach fugue, it means the drama he made out of the Anthem, with among other things the use of brutal feedback to spook the melody, which he stretched and distorted beyond recognition and back again--with unpredictable tempo and rhythm to further disorient things. Shocking, unprecedented and unforgettable.
I’ll quote another description: “Hendrix evoked the majesty of America while also summoning the howling undercurrents of dissonance and violence echoing the Vietnam war and the nation's racial struggles.” But you have such penetrating musical insight that you see through the hype: it was all just “blues with hints of progressive notes.” Brilliant!
lol He wasn't playing upside down so much as being left handed. Hendrix does have some complicated music but getting fucked up and just making noise is not it. Because of the high level of distortion and tones bleeding into each other a lot of non-players find it complicated. Some people say math is complicated but if you understand it you see how elegant it really is. I don't know who JFC is but music critics are pretty much useless. Someone once said, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Things is with the insanity on the left we see these days I would not be surprised to find plenty of people who think dancing about architecture actually makes sense.
That's a one-dimensional interpretation of a complicated musical gesture. I hear a highly ambivalent mixture of emotions--anger and grief, yes, but Hendrix served in 26th Airborne, and though he was a fuck-up, he was not dishonorably discharged, as many believe, but discharged on the grounds of "unsuitability — under honorable conditions" (in 1962). He never lost a certain affection for the military, if only for his fellow soldiers, many of whom would go on to die in a war I and eventually more than 1/2 of Americans disapproved of--to say the least. I hear anguish at an America gone wrong with a misguided policy that killed almost 60,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese--and accomplished less than nothing.
(SOME HELPFUL BACKGROUND: I love my country, and I say fuck you to anyone who says I don't just because I believe we made a tragic mistake getting involved in a civil war in a minor third-world country based on a policy-wonk theory. Did the dominoes fall, did the Chinese take over Vietnam? No, war broke out between the two countries in 1979, and the war involved three Communist nations (add Cambodia). Our leaders fought the war in total ignorance of the historical geopolitics of the region--a history of constant rivalries between and among China and the small nations of Indochina. These rivalries long predated the Vietnam War, played a part in it, and also figured in the intra-Communist war that followed. McNamara was a shallow technocrat who coldly used the draft to send thousands of hapless 18-year-olds to their deaths in what he KNEW was an unwinnable war (so did Johnson).
Tens of thousands of Vets came home maimed and traumatized and stuck with sub-par VA medical care; spat on by fellow Americans for fighting for America, many of them because they were forced to; ending up homeless on the streets in droves (maybe some of them are out there to this day); and some of them so embittered that they joined the anti-war movement. McNamara was a soulless bastard who deserved to be pushed into the river by an enraged Vet. Compared with Johnson and this spreadsheet bureaucrat, Bush and Cheney's reckless interventionism in the Middle East looks pretty mild. To anyone who accuses me of America-bashing, I say America's greatness consists partly in its sense of fair play and its willingness to recognize and correct its shortcomings--e.g., the Civil War and "a new birth of freedom." (Sadly, going from Vietnam quagmire to Middle East sand-trap doesn't suggest any lessons were learned.)
Hendrix was beyond dispute a genius who was a fucked-up individual and anything but a role model in his personal life, yes; but his musical theme (besides drugs and sex and extra-terrestrials) was Love. He was a typical Hippie in that sense. "Peace and Love" are facile sentimental slogans, certainly, but as far as you can get from today's Leftist hate-mongering.
Most Hippies were self-indulgent, drugged-out, affluent pseudo-anarchists, but only a few poisonous individuals like Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground advocated and practiced violence. Sadly, that's what the Hippie movement evolved into--today's Alinsky-ized Far Left Chicago-style machine politicians destroying every city they control, cynical exploitation of racial grievance, blatant anti-Americanism, crypto-Communism culminating in a traitor named Obama.
Hendrix was no fan of Communism, and in his last years the Black Panthers were already criticizing him for not being (as we now say) "woke" and on board with anti-white identity politics. Unlike them and their modern-day descendants, he was not a hater.
With all this in mind, that Anthem performance makes a lot of sense in its surreal way. I'll quote this Quora comment: "Hendrix evoked the majesty of America while also summoning the howling undercurrents of dissonance and violence echoing the Vietnam war and the nation's racial struggles.” At the right historical moment at a now-historic event Hendrix turned in a performance that was also a dramatic piece of performance art, iconoclastic and yet, to this day, an icon standing for that entire period, creative and destructive, peace-and-love on the one hand, massively violent on the other. But in retrospect, tragic at the time and tragic in its consequences.
One hallmark of the Left is being offended by complexity. Ideology-driven people are allergic to truth, and the truth is rarely simple. That goes for Hendrix, his version of the Anthem and his attitude to America. If anyone's offended by the fact that I don't see this issue in "black and white," I don't give a fuck. I'm voting for the same man you are.
Couldn't agree with you more, Pede!
Thanks, didn't know that. Where was Fauci when we needed him?
Of course these pandemics happen pretty regularly, some minor, some major. This is the first one I know of that's been so disgustingly politicized.
One glaring difference to me is that back then there was an and game. End the war and bring the troops home and there is not further need to protest the war. Since Occupy WS there had been no goal. Nothing you can do will end these riots. The insanity that has gripped the minds of young folks is just an endless churn of disjointed thinking that has no real goals. Systemic racism is fake and therefore you can never end it.
Most people dosnt see the bullshit initially
This guy guitars..
If you ever watch the Woodstock footage, Albert Lee smoked him.
Alvin Lee ...I saw him play years after Woodstock when the group was named Ten Years Later (they were Ten Years After for a bit too). A power trio. I saw them play at a venue indoors ...a huge old movie theater that had been a regular theater at one time. Stacks of Marshall amps across the back of the stage. They had to halt the show temporarily when during a bass solo (that was de rigeure back then, every player took his ten minute solo) plaster started falling from the ceiling ...hehehe. But as things were, after a few custodial flashlights performed a perfunctory examination of the ceiling, the show went on. I was just a kid at the time, couldn't even drive yet. But that's how things were, no helmets, no seatbelts, you could even make it across a parking lot on a summer's day without bottled water, and a little thing like the possible collapse of a roof was not going to deter a promoter or the band. Glory days. I'm Going Home... to See my Baby, I'd lLove to Change the World, etc.
Hell, back in the day tiles full of asbestos falling on your head in your 2nd grade classroom didn't mean shit. If nobody got hit, you laughed. If someone got hit they headed to the nurse's office. Lucky ducks.
Yep, there were asbestos covered pipes in the boys lockerroom, one door exited into the gym, and the other to a small weight room area then through to the athletic fields. Over that doorway, a pipe. Every now and again, someone would reach/jump up and smack it showering the guy behind him with white powder... asbestos.
If anyone says this shit's too long, buddy, it ain't long at all.
I've read short stories longer then what this guy just wrote.
Appreciated, GFF!
That's the best post I have ever read here. Thank you.
Thank you kindly, sir! You'll quite turn my head with these compliments, I do declare.
Hi there, -1. Obviously there WERE too many words, because you ran out of attention span and forgot (assuming you noticed) what I said at the beginning. "Complicated musical GESTURE"--is the distinction too subtle for you? It doesn't mean a Bach fugue, it means the drama he made out of the Anthem, with among other things the use of brutal feedback to spook the melody, which he stretched and distorted beyond recognition and back again--with unpredictable tempo and rhythm to further disorient things. Shocking, unprecedented and unforgettable.
I’ll quote another description: “Hendrix evoked the majesty of America while also summoning the howling undercurrents of dissonance and violence echoing the Vietnam war and the nation's racial struggles.” But you have such penetrating musical insight that you see through the hype: it was all just “blues with hints of progressive notes.” Brilliant!
lol He wasn't playing upside down so much as being left handed. Hendrix does have some complicated music but getting fucked up and just making noise is not it. Because of the high level of distortion and tones bleeding into each other a lot of non-players find it complicated. Some people say math is complicated but if you understand it you see how elegant it really is. I don't know who JFC is but music critics are pretty much useless. Someone once said, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Things is with the insanity on the left we see these days I would not be surprised to find plenty of people who think dancing about architecture actually makes sense.