Mark Cooper
Star-Angled Banter
Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-war Pop
By Charles Shaar Murray
Faber & Faber 238pp £6.99
Nostalgia is a means of gagging the past so that it will tell us only what we want to hear. Charles Shaar Murray cannot bear what ‘nostalgia’ has done to the ’60s in general and Jimi Hendrix in particular. No matter that the ’60s are currently around us, that The Rolling Stones’ latest tour is considered a matter of vast cultural significance and that we live in the era of the remake and the rerun, Murray argues that the ’80s fascination with the ’60s only provides us with a playground of the past, stripped of all the tensions that made the era so vital. In the terminology of the period which these linked essays explore, Crosstown Traffic is an attempt to ‘liberate’ Jimi Hendrix.
As Murray argues at the start of his book, the ‘authorized version’ of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (sic) is that Hendrix was a crazy black man who did funny things with a guitar, had thousands of women and eventually died of drugs, which was a shame because he was a really good guitarist, and he could play with his teeth, too. The Hendrix that Murray would like us to recognise was a great black instrumentalist who drew deeply on blues, jazz and soul traditions to create a terrifyingly modern guitar style whose finest hour was his deconstruction of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock.
This Hendrix also died of drugs, loved lots of women and did all manner of things to his guitar but Murray is rather less keen on these activities and his revisionism occasionally strays towards a clean-up campaign. Thus, in the book’s weakest paragraphs, Murray plumbs Hendrix’s lyrics to prove that
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
It is a triumph @arthistorynews and my review @Lit_Review is here!
In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his success?
John Adamson investigates.
John Adamson - Love Island with Ruffs
John Adamson: Love Island with Ruffs - The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
literaryreview.co.uk
During the 1930s, Winston Churchill retired to Chartwell, his Tudor-style country house in Kent, where he plotted a return to power.
Richard Vinen asks whether it’s time to rename the decade long regarded as Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’.
Richard Vinen - Croquet & Conspiracy
Richard Vinen: Croquet & Conspiracy - Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm by Katherine Carter
literaryreview.co.uk