Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience

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Greg Tate has a racial agenda. A well-known black journalist with a large following, both black and white, he has written widely about literature, music, and popular culture. But here he tackles a subject he has never written about before -- Jimi Hendrix: his social meaning, his sexual mystery, his scientific explorations in the field of sound. And Tate shows us everything through a black prism, as it were. "Jimi Hendrix was a black man from a black world who made extraterrestrial black music," he writes. This ...
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More About This Book

Overview

Greg Tate has a racial agenda. A well-known black journalist with a large following, both black and white, he has written widely about literature, music, and popular culture. But here he tackles a subject he has never written about before -- Jimi Hendrix: his social meaning, his sexual mystery, his scientific explorations in the field of sound. And Tate shows us everything through a black prism, as it were. "Jimi Hendrix was a black man from a black world who made extraterrestrial black music," he writes. This book, which he calls "a kind of Jimi Hendrix Primer for Blackfolk," is an introduction to a man who, despite his universal appeal, has never made it into the pantheon of 20th-century black icons. Incorporating extensive interviews with black Americans who can shed light on Hendrix's complicated racial relationships, Midnight Lightning explores, among other issues, how Hendrix exploded our complacently segregated world to emerge as an icon for white boys; why we never hear his songs on black radio; why black people once viewed him as a hippie Uncle Tom; his connection to the Black Power movement; how he electrified soul music and made the electric guitar supplant the human voice; how he revolutionized the use of technology in popular music; how he redefined rock fashion; his sex appeal, especially for black women; why nobody was mad at him for sleeping with white women; and how he has subverted and destabilized black masculine stereotypes, changing the way we think not only about black music, but about black identity itself.
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Editorial Reviews

Black Beat
Must read for any hardcore Hendrix fan, classic rock enthusiast or budding music listener.
Black Issues Book Review
[Tate's] dead-on logic is intriguing and revealing.
N'Music
A testament to how much the enigmatic guitarist still affects American culture.
Relix
Like no biography that has come before.
St. Petersburg Times
One of the most original and linguistically inventive cultural observers in print . . . marvelously head-whirling phraseology.
The Onion
Few writers are better equipped to tackle such questions than Greg Tate . . . bursts with ideas.
Upscale
An engaging and refreshing read from start to finish.
VIBE
At times Lightning hits like a bolt.
Wilson Quarterly
A remarkably astute examination of Hendrix's protean talents . . . Tate writes with an engaging, highly stylized voice.
Library Journal
"This is not Everyman's Guide to Jimi Hendrix," forewarns Tate, a longtime staff writer for the Village Voice; it's a book with a racial agenda: "A Jimi book with plantation baggage, darkskin biases, and Black Power axes to grind." Tate avoids the tablature and Claptonisms that pervade many of the romantic revisions of Hendrix's brief life as an influential guitar god. Instead, he addresses the demographic paradox of Jimi's public image. Although his musical and social roots were dark black, Hendrix was marketed as white and seemingly could break, with impunity, as many social taboos as he could musical taboos (e.g., dating white girls when similar offenses earned Sammy Davis Jr. death threats). Tate shows how Hendrix's disregard for the race card put him decades ahead in society, as well as in music. The book's extended anecdotes by blacks who knew Jimi are as much sawdust as they are profound, but an astrological analysis of Jimi's life is an excellent variation on the hindsight conjecture found in much of the existing material on Hendrix. Recommended for all libraries.-Eric Hahn, West Des Moines, IA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A jumpy, fast-talking take on Jimi Hendrix—the social meaning, the sexual mystery, and the music of a "musician’s musician." "Race, sex, technology, and Jimi Hendrix—these will position the coordinates on this star map," explains music journalist Tate (Everything But the Burden, not reviewed). Hendrix was super-elevated for the author, "a living embodiment of all our racial fears, romantic fantasies, otherworldly dreams, and radical desires," and the writer’s spellbound pyrotechnics can tend at once toward hagiography and hyperbole. Did Hendrix, asks Tate, embody our racial fears, or was he a shape-shifter who could shred racial shibboleths, receiving exceptional "treatment from whites because he was not perceived as a political threat . . . traveled in white company, drew a white crowd, kept a white band, and, oh yeah, bedazzled the Hostiles in a field considered a white man’s province"? Was the inventive life force he found in the Fender Strat based in rhythm and blues, soul, and jazz, or was it a fiery marriage of storefront gospel singer, barwalking saxophonist, and Delta blues? Tate makes Hendrix into a fascinating lawbreaker and Rosetta stone, liquid and languid, "a supersignifier of Post-Liberate Black Consciousness," possibly "what life as a Black Man without fear of a white planet might look like, feel like, taste like." Erotic, destructive, chaotic, yet a gentleman too, sartorially definitive, and, oh boy, a musician who could play a loud bolthole to the cosmic, "except [that] the ecumenical Hendrix wanted to pursue a path to cosmos that would be accessible to the average American Pop fan." Tate is smart and playful, speculating on what might have been if the wine andsleeping pills hadn’t done their work, crafting "some Borgesian fluff for this occasion, confections turned fictions." Tate wanders over the Hendrix landscape everywhere and in awe, offering a cerebral and gingery reminder of his subject’s social and musical revolution. (4 b&w photos)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781556524691
  • Publisher: Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
  • Publication date: 6/28/2003
  • Edition description: 1ST
  • Pages: 176
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.64 (d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
1 Meditations 1
2 (Talkin' About) My Racial Agenda 7
3 Race, Rama, and the Great African American Roll Call 11
4 Playing the Race Game 17
5 Invisibility Blues 23
6 Black Guitar Science 33
7 A Brief Life 41
8 The Black Woman's Guide to Jimi Hendrix 53
Three Hendrix Poems by Krista Franklin 60
9 (Talkin' About) My Jimi Hendrix Experience 63
10 Can I Get a Witness? 75
The Twins 75
Ronnie Drayton 95
Xenobia Bailey 106
Craig Street 118
11 Slight Return 129
Appendix A The Alternative and Prognosticative Histories of James Marshall Hendrix 139
Electric Ladyland (novella excerpt from The Jimi Hendrix Omnibus) 141
New York Times film review, September 18, 1970 (Band of Gypsys, a film by Jimi Hendrix) 147
Appendix B In which Stefanie Kelly Interprets What the Stars and the Planets Reveal about Jimi Hendrix 151
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