Just the other day I heard Hendrix's "Burning of the Midnight Lamp" and flashed back to the feelings I had when I first heard it, aged possibly 14 or 15. Do you remember that age in your life when some music sounded almost overwhelmingly alien, so threatening, liscentious and radical? Sounds that seemed to be the manifestation of unattainable states of mind, of philosophies cryptically obscure? Of course at my age, our age, we're so blase, so unshockable and impermeable, our emotional retinas toasted to a crisp that such a profound response is rare. I still look for sounds which generate the kind of effect that the Hendix tune did but, sighs, they're thinner on the ground and have to work immeasurably harder than they once did.
Hearing "Burning of the Midnight Lamp", it's churning phases and oral fretwork brought back those feelings that the track had originally instilled. This in exactly the same manner that friends can reactivate the e-rush by listening to old rave records. I'll probably pick the Hendrix record up again, it was off that Smash Hits one, I sold it ages ago, and I'll play it over and over again untill (inevitably) it ceases to generate the same psychic reaction. It's power worn away.
I've done the same things before with old poptones, tracks specific to one particular period of my life, usually latched on to in a brief glinting happy chink in my childhood. I'll play them over and over again until I've milked those same vibrations dry and their force dissipates. We all do it don't we.
BTW Hendrix's "Easy Rider" and "Dolly Dagger" choons!
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Looking through my old cassettes and found one from 1998 I'd labelled "Raggage." That's exactly what all the new Grime is like! Versions and Patois ahoy. There's a neologism I can actually dig! And it's mine (or at least I think it is...) Coining genres is something which, as a rule, I make a pig's ear of.
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Derek Walmsley of the Poplife blog has not one, not two but THREE reviews in this month's The Wire. Nice interloping deek!
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Jim Clarke email me or you die.
Posted by Woebot at July 10, 2004 10:51 AM