Star-spangled 'Shamisen'
In search of the Jimi Hendrix of the… [insert instrument here]
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.35760Keywords:
discourse, Jimi Hendrix, music, music industry, music journalism, popular music, social energyAbstract
A brief internet search of the phrase 'the Jimi Hendrix of...' followed by any instrument (for example, the bass guitar) reveals numerous examples of musicians promoting themselves, being marketed or being reviewed as the 'Jimi Hendrix' of that instrument. While some of the comparisons being made are arguably less tenuous-electric sitar, oud, mandolin-other instruments stretch the analogy. These include the 'Jimi Hendrix' of the bagpipe, clarinet, washboard, sampler and the jug. This phrase is not only applied to instrumentalists but sometimes takes on a national, racial or geographic dimension: such is the case with Mikhl Yosef Gusikow, described as the Jewish 'Jimi Hendrix', and Bombino, the 'Jimi Hendrix' of the Desert. This article critically examines the instances in which the phrase 'the Jimi Hendrix of the [insert instrument here]' is used to market and promote contemporary musicians. I explore some of the reasons why the rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix continues to be invoked as musicians position themselves in global markets, drawing attention to different aspects of the Jimi Hendrix myth that are appropriated by musicians and the various discourses around music practice. In order to do this, I employ Greenblatt's theory of social energy to critically frame such statements beyond the limits of political economy, as well as document contemporary cases of this phenomenon.
References
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CD Baby. n.d. ‘New Awlins by Washboard Leo Thomas’. Online at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/washboardlt (accessed 7 January 2016).
Clay, A. 2011. ‘Working Day and Night: Black Masculinity and the King of Pop’. Journal of Popular Music Studies 23/1: 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2010.01261.x
Cooper, B. 2008. Beethoven. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Davies, Helen. 2001. ‘All Rock and Roll is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press’. Popular Music 20/3: 301–319. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143001001519
De Chateleux, R. 1909. West Gippsland Gazette (Warragul, Vic.: 1898–1930), Tuesday 9 February 1909: 5.
Derrida, J. 1977. ‘Signature, Event, Context’. Glyph 1: 172–97.
Draper, 2017. ‘If You Like Joni Mitchell… You’ll Love Laura Marling’. Online at https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/if-you-like-joni-mitchell-youll-love-laura-marling/ (accessed 22 January 2018).
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Maan, R. 2012. ‘Mali’s Bassekou Kouyate is the Jimi Hendrix of the ngoni’. Online at http://music.cbc.ca/#/blogs/2012/3/Malis-Bassekou-Kouyate-is-the-Jimi-Hendrix-of-the-ngoni (accessed 7 January 2016).
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Queenslander. 1920. Saturday, 7 August: 15.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
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Schmutz, V., and A. Faupel. 2010. ‘Gender and Cultural Consecration in Popular Music’. Social Forces 89/2: 685–707. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2010.0098
Strong, C. 2011. ‘Grunge, Riot Grrrl, and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture’. Journal of Popular Culture 44/2: 398–416. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00839.x
This is Africa. 2011. ‘The Jimi Hendrix of the Desert’. Online at https://tinyurl.com/ybeq36xv (accessed 7 January 2016).
Uhlmann, Mark. 1988. The Canberra Times, 10 November: 24.
von Appen, R., and A. Doehring. 2006. ‘Nevermind the Beatles, here’s Exile 61 and Nico: “The top 100 records of all time”—a canon of pop and rock albums from a sociological and an aesthetic perspective’. Popular Music 25/1: 21–39. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143005000693
Vallikanth, C. S. 2006. ‘Prasanna: Electric Ganesha Land’. Online at http://www.allaboutjazz.com/prasanna-electric-ganesha-land-by-csvallikanth.php (accessed 7 January 2016).
Whitmore, L. B., and A. Blumenthal. 2011. ‘Exposed: 10 Female Guitarists You Should Know’. Guitar World, 9 February (online 7 January 2016).
Wolf, S. 2014. ‘Meet the “Jimi Hendrix of the Bagpipe”’. Online at http://www.cpr.org/news/story/meet-jimi-hendrix-bagpipe (accessed 7 January 2016).
World Music Central. 2009. ‘Speed Caravan’s Debut Album Kalashnik Love out on 28 September 2009’. Online at https://tinyurl.com/yd46ydf7 (accessed 7 January 2016).
Armstrong, Meg. 1993. ‘“A Jumble of Foreignness”: The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions’. Cultural Critique 23: 199–250.
Aubert, Laurent. 2007. The Music of the Other: New Challenges for Ethnomusicology in a Global Age. Translated by Carlo Ribeiro. Hampshire: Ashgate.
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette. 1845. ‘Newmarket, First Spring Meeting’. 8 May: 4.
Berkers, Pauwke, and Merel Eeckelaer. 2014. ‘Rock and Roll or Rock and Fall? Gendered Framing of the Rock and Roll Lifestyles of Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty in British Broadsheets’. Journal of Gender Studies 23/1: 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.754347
Brennan, Matt. 2013. ‘“Nobody Likes Rock and Roll but the Public”: Down Beat, Genre Boundaries and the Dismissal of Rock and Roll by Jazz Critics’. Popular Music and Society 36/5: 559–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2012.718486
Brunt, Shelley. 2015. ‘Performing Beyond the Grave: The Posthumous Duet’. In Death and the Rock Star, ed. Catherine Strong and Barbara Lebrun, 165–76. London: Ashgate/Routledge.
CD Baby. n.d. ‘New Awlins by Washboard Leo Thomas’. Online at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/washboardlt (accessed 7 January 2016).
Clay, A. 2011. ‘Working Day and Night: Black Masculinity and the King of Pop’. Journal of Popular Music Studies 23/1: 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2010.01261.x
Cooper, B. 2008. Beethoven. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Davies, Helen. 2001. ‘All Rock and Roll is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press’. Popular Music 20/3: 301–319. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143001001519
De Chateleux, R. 1909. West Gippsland Gazette (Warragul, Vic.: 1898–1930), Tuesday 9 February 1909: 5.
Derrida, J. 1977. ‘Signature, Event, Context’. Glyph 1: 172–97.
Draper, 2017. ‘If You Like Joni Mitchell… You’ll Love Laura Marling’. Online at https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/if-you-like-joni-mitchell-youll-love-laura-marling/ (accessed 22 January 2018).
Dukes, B. 2012. ‘Jake Shimabukuro, the “Jimi Hendrix of the Ukulele”, Releases Album Produced by Alan Parsons’. Online at http://ultimateclassicrock.com/jake-shimabukuro-the-jimi-hendrix-of-the-ukulele/ (accessed 7 January 2016).
Fang, Zhao-hui, and David R. Schiller. 2002. ‘A Critical Reflection on the Systematics of Traditional Chinese Learning’. Philosophy East and West 52/1: 36–49.
Feld, Steven. 1994. ‘From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: on the Discourses and Practices of “World Music” and “World Beat”’. In The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, 96–126. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Fink, H. 1916. ‘Was Liszt the Paganini of the Piano?’ Étude Magazine, Philadelphia, August 1916.
Guitar Prasanna. n.d. ‘Electric Ganesha Land’. Online at http://www.guitarprasanna.com/EGL/ (accessed 7 January 2016).
Greenblatt, S. 1988. ‘Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England’. In The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 1–20. California: University of California Press.
Hip Harp. n.d. ‘Deborah Henson-Conant—About’. Online at http://www.hipharp.com/about.html (accessed 7 January 2016).
Hobsbawm, E. 1996. The Age of Revolution 1789–1848. New York: Vintage Books.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania. n.d. ‘Deborah Henson-Conant’. Online at https://www.iup.edu/livelyarts/past-seasons/2014-2015/music/deborah-henson-conant/ (accessed 15 November 2018).
Ivers, Eileen. n.d. Eileen Ivers—About. Online at http://www.eileenivers.com/about/ (accessed 7 January 2016).
Jimi Hendrix of Spoons, The. n.d. Facebook page. Online at https://www.facebook.com/jimihendrixofspoons/ (accessed 12 February 2018).
Joburg. 2008. ‘West Africa Meets Jimi Hendrix’. Online at https://tinyurl.com/y9bjch6h (accessed 7 January 2016).
JPlay. n.d. ‘Bela Fleck’. Online at http://www.jplay.com.au/JSite/ViewArtist.aspx?ArtistID=2414 (accessed 7 January 2016).
Kassabian, Anahid. 2010. ‘Have Canons Outlived their Usefulness?’ Journal of Popular Music Studies 22/1: 74–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2010.01222.x
Kefner, Kurt. n.d. ‘All Music Review—Lui Pui-Yuen’. Online at https://www.allmusic.com/album/china-music-of-the-pipa-mw0000674776 (accessed 7 January 2016).
Keogh, Brent. 2015. ‘The Wizard of Oud: A Case Study of Sydney Based Oud Player Joseph Tawadros’. Journal of Music Research Online 6: 1–12.
Levine, Donald N. 1984. ‘The Liberal Arts and the Martial Arts’. Association of American Colleges, Liberal Education 70/3: 235–51.
Maan, R. 2012. ‘Mali’s Bassekou Kouyate is the Jimi Hendrix of the ngoni’. Online at http://music.cbc.ca/#/blogs/2012/3/Malis-Bassekou-Kouyate-is-the-Jimi-Hendrix-of-the-ngoni (accessed 7 January 2016).
McClain, Jordan M. 2016. ‘Framing in Music Journalism: Making Sense of Phish’s “Left-Field” Success Story’. Journal of Popular Culture 49/6: 1206–1223. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12489
Moi, Toril. 1998. Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Routledge.
NiftyNYC. 2012. ‘Thursday, July 19th: Dawoud—“the Jimi Hendrix of the Sitar”’. Online at http://www.niftynyc.com/2012/07/19/thursday-july-19th-dawoud-the-jimi-hendrix-of-the-sitar/ (accessed 7 January 2016).
Perchard, Tom. 2011. ‘Thelonious Monk Meets the French Critics: Art and Entertainment, Improvisation, and its Simulacrum’. Jazz Perspectives 5/1: 61–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2011.590681
Phillips, W. n.d. ‘Ivo Papasov and his Wedding Band’. Online at https://www.womex.com/virtual/messechina_music/ivo_papasov_and_his (accessed 7 February 2018).
Queenslander. 1920. Saturday, 7 August: 15.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Scannell, J. 2011. ‘Working to Design: The Self-Perpetuating Ideology of Rock or … “The New Bob Dylan”’. PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 8/1: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v8i1.1716
Schmutz, V., and A. Faupel. 2010. ‘Gender and Cultural Consecration in Popular Music’. Social Forces 89/2: 685–707. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2010.0098
Strong, C. 2011. ‘Grunge, Riot Grrrl, and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture’. Journal of Popular Culture 44/2: 398–416. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00839.x
This is Africa. 2011. ‘The Jimi Hendrix of the Desert’. Online at https://tinyurl.com/ybeq36xv (accessed 7 January 2016).
Uhlmann, Mark. 1988. The Canberra Times, 10 November: 24.
von Appen, R., and A. Doehring. 2006. ‘Nevermind the Beatles, here’s Exile 61 and Nico: “The top 100 records of all time”—a canon of pop and rock albums from a sociological and an aesthetic perspective’. Popular Music 25/1: 21–39. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143005000693
Vallikanth, C. S. 2006. ‘Prasanna: Electric Ganesha Land’. Online at http://www.allaboutjazz.com/prasanna-electric-ganesha-land-by-csvallikanth.php (accessed 7 January 2016).
Whitmore, L. B., and A. Blumenthal. 2011. ‘Exposed: 10 Female Guitarists You Should Know’. Guitar World, 9 February (online 7 January 2016).
Wolf, S. 2014. ‘Meet the “Jimi Hendrix of the Bagpipe”’. Online at http://www.cpr.org/news/story/meet-jimi-hendrix-bagpipe (accessed 7 January 2016).
World Music Central. 2009. ‘Speed Caravan’s Debut Album Kalashnik Love out on 28 September 2009’. Online at https://tinyurl.com/yd46ydf7 (accessed 7 January 2016).
Published
2018-12-29
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Keogh, B. (2018). Star-spangled ’Shamisen’: In search of the Jimi Hendrix of the… [insert instrument here]. Perfect Beat, 19(1), 68-85. https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.35760
