> --And on this "Hendrix as hiphop" conceit: by that logic,
> Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker are "hiphop".
The blues traditions are part of the jazz modernist era, i.e. mass-cultural forms based on an international division of labor. But the greatest works of Hendrix and, to a lesser extent, the Velvet Underground mark something new: the qualitative transformation of music from an instrumental sound-palette to electronic sampling and studio production. Hendrix borrows freely from blues, rock, R & B, and jazz forms, but he moves beyond these forms on "Electric Ladyland". The same thing happened a bit earlier in the text-world, when William S. Burroughs transformed the Cold War broadcasts, Beat lyric and drug narratives of the 1950s into the multinational science fiction of "Nova Express".
-- DRR