Word: hendrix
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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THREE YOUNG MEN, their faces painted with geometrical designs, were lying in the rubble of what was to be a life-size papier-mache cow, wailing loudly, "La vaca es muerta!," while two policemen attempted to pull them to their feet. People were spinning around ecstatically to a Jimi Hendrix guitar riff. A girl stops short: "I'm tripping," she says, her eyes dilated and staring at an image of a dragon overhead...
...Dead is Hendrix is God. Hendrix is God. Nietzsche was right...
...getting back to rock stars, we all know that Jimi Hendrix is the greatest guitarist who ever lived (and died), that Janis Joplin cornered the market on blues, and we dare not challenge their legends. Weren't we all taught not to speak badly of the dead, since they're not around to defend themselves? Instead, we let their sancrosant memories be grappled with and protected by biographers, former lovers and marketing geniuses of all types. And the faces of the long gone past gain the mystique of the unknown--what if they had lived on? --and the privilege...
...protest against it, shook loose forces in American life and gave them a style and prestige they might not otherwise have had. Suddenly, politics came dancing with a loony phosphorescence. There was a certain giddy proximity of death in the time--rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix went tumbling down from drug overdoses, as if to dramatize the war's theme of meaninglessly, profligately blasted youth...
...seems to be the height of a coffee table. He has the faintly demented courtly charm of Dwight Frye swallowing flies in Dracula, but his sexual charisma is at low tide in the dramatic scenes. All this changes in performance, where part Prince really comes out wailing, part Hendrix, part Screamin' Jay Hawkins. If music alone could make a movie masterpiece, then Purple Rain might have a shot. Its score is ecumenical rock, echoing everyone from Hendrix and Sly Stone to Brian Wilson and Earth, Wind and Fire, yet remaining entirely original overall. It may have the best original...