I was reading an article from a 1986 issue of BigO which described Jimi Hendrix as a rock musician. My first instinct was to google “Is Hendrix rock or blues” and found this article.
To many guitarists today, I think it’s fair to say that Hendrix is remembered as a blues guitarist. (Or is it just me?) There is heavy overlap between the two, especially during the heyday of rock in the late 60s. But the article highlights the racial struggles that Hendrix experienced; to the black people during that time, Hendrix was thought to be playing white man’s music — rock! And if you think about it — the way he dresses, who his band mates were, and the music he writes — safe to say, a good chunk of it is actually closer to psychedelic rock than blues.
This never occurred to me until today, and is a great example on how the white-dominated music industry tends to ghetto-ize certain musics and the musicians involved in it. And that influence bleeds into popular culture, shaping the way we think about someone’s music. To Hendrix, maybe it didn’t matter so much, he just wanted to play, sound different, and be amazing. But when genre, marketing, and power (inequality) came into play, Hendrix became canonized as a blues guitarist for most of contemporary culture simply because he’s black.
Full disclosure — I don’t claim to be an expert on African-American pop culture and race relations in the US so what I’ve just said might sound completely ignorant. Suffice to say, some of that has influenced my understanding of rock and blues as an outsider, geographically and historically removed from the contexts of its production.
With that in mind though, I’m inclined to think about our own popular culture here in Singapore. What can be said about the stereotypes and “cultural baggage” surrounding Malay pop singers and idol-style reality shows? What about the Chinese minority in our heavy metal and hardcore communities? How have we allowed our understanding of ethnic relations colour the way we listen and consume certain musics?
