Granted, it is the album’s main fault, but Hendrix’s delivery of these lines also allows for one of the album’s biggest strengths: its use of the voice as a musical instrument. One could interpret the lack of lyrical gravity as detrimental to the album. Moreover, while some of the songs contain anti-Vietnam war messages (“It’s really such a mess… / Every inch of earth is a fighting nest,” he sings in “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”), many others don’t contain a clear message. Still, “Electric Ladyland” does not contain a broad lyrical theme that pervades in every track on the album. Later on the album, “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” uses similar magical imagery. Yet through its psychedelic, almost magical lyrics, the song reverts to the idea of “Electric Ladyland” representing an escape to its listeners. “Voodoo Chile” picks up where “Crosstown Traffic” left off in terms of displaying the tight connection between Hendrix’s and Mitchell’s instrumentation. The lyrics (“I want to show you”) offer a journey reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” but while the “Magical Mystery Tour” took listeners on a psychedelic trip, “Electric Ladyland” is an escape from the messiness of the current time. In the album’s second track, “Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland),” Hendrix plays off of the album’s pre-established paranoia with a song that seems an alternative to the disorder present in its predecessor. This is not to say that “Electric Ladyland” does not have several moments of lyrical depth. Similarly, “Crosstown Traffic,” the third track of the album, uses the synchronization of Hendrix’s guitar licks with drummer Mitch Mitchell’s quick fills to embody a woman that Hendrix is enamored with. Hendrix himself said in an interview that, “We knew this was the track that most people will jump on to criticize, so I put it first to get it over with.” Jokes aside, the opener establishes a sense of paranoia and anxiety in the album, a theme that Hendrix revisits. The album begins in disarray with “And the Gods Made Love,” a track that consists of an assortment of non-musical noises under pitched-down speech. Unlike many other albums of its time, “Electric Ladyland” often tries to establish its meaning through instrumentals, instead of leaning solely on the lyrics to do so. 50 years ago, Hendrix, with the rest of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell), released his only chart-topping album, “Electric Ladyland,” an hour and 15 minute-long work that presented a definition of rock music that in equal parts drew upon rock’s young history and dove into new, experimental realms. No instrument characterized the rock movement of the 1960s more than the guitar did, and while all three of those groups and others made prominent use of the guitar, no musician is, even in the present day, as closely linked to the electric guitar as Jimi Hendrix is. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in their longest album, “The White Album.” The Rolling Stones would release some of their best-known songs, including “Sympathy for the Devil,” in 1968, and Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham formed Led Zeppelin at the end of the year. The Beatles were on a creative high, following a busy 1967 during which they released “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Sgt. In 1968, rock music was at its peak popularity. By Courtesy of The Jimi Hendrix Experience / Reprise
0 kommentar(er)
