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MIDNIGHT LIGHTNING by Greg Tate

MIDNIGHT LIGHTNING

Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience

by Greg Tate

Pub Date: July 1st, 2003
ISBN: 1-55652-469-2

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 and sleeping 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)