Are You Experienced / Axis: Bold As Love

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<b>100 Best Albums</b> Around the time he started working on <i>Are You Experienced</i>, Jimi Hendrix met the songwriter-producer Kim Fowley. This was London, 1966. Fowley thought Hendrix was weird and unfashionable, but people had been talking, so Fowley asked: What’s your thing? “Science-fiction rock ’n’ roll,” Hendrix said. It’s not a bad self-assessment. Like science fiction, Hendrix’s futuristic qualities—his use of feedback and noise, the extraterrestrial imagery of “Purple Haze” and “Third Stone From the Sun”—are offset by a groundedness that makes them feel tied to older forms of human expression; a blues for the computer age. He wasn’t experimenting with modern classical music (like The Beatles) or high-minded pop orchestration (like The Beach Boys); he wasn’t even tapping into the more explicitly far-reaching journeys of psychedelia, like Pink Floyd. Instead, he took the simple, gut-level sounds of the Muddy Waters and Little Richard he grew up on and transfigured them into something new, an innovation that made him a precursor both to Black psychedelia like Prince and Outkast, and the radical ordinariness of punk, not to mention almost everything blues-related that came in his wake. In the consolidation of the cultural narratives of classic rock, it’s easy to let his innovations wash over you: Hear how great and revolutionary something is often enough, and you stop hearing it at all. But of all the endlessly sanctified albums that came out of the late 1960s, <i>Are You Experienced</i> is one of the few that still feels like a dynamic, living thing—at the very least, the concept of hummable, three-and-a-half-minute songs tricked out with sound effects is as good a definition of 21st-century pop as it was of Hendrix’s music 50 years earlier. And that’s the real magic of good science fiction: No matter how foreign it seems, it’s always talking about now.

via Apple Music