1Vo

lume ! n° 9-2

Sur les contre-cultures II

not es de lecture

Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968-1981, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011. Par Tom PercharD

Ian Peddie (ed.), The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest, Aldershot & Burlington, Ashgate, 2006. Par Dave Laing

Olivier Julien (ed.), Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It was forty years ago, Aldershot & Burlington, Ashgate, 2008. Par Sarah Etlinger

Russell Reising (ed.), Every Sound there is: The Beatles’ Revolver & the Transformation of Rock, Aldershot & Burlington, Ashgate, 2002. Par Sarah Etlinger

Chris Potash (ed.), The Jimi Hendrix Companion: Three Decades of Commentary, Schirmer Books, 2000. Par Thomas attah

2Vo

lum

e !

n° 9

-2Notes de lecture - Dossier « contre-cultures » II

Whether in culture-industry product or news-reel-mediated memory, the Anglo-American 1968 is always soundtracked (usually with Hendrix’s House Burning Down, or the Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil). But the story of Paris in May is all visuals: the beautiful model borne aloft and waving a Vietnamese flag, the blocky, power-ful posters and wall-scrawled slogans. So it’s only recently that scholars have paid extended attention to the role played by music during the événements. That’s not to say that the moment has been ignored entirely. Pierre-Albert Castanet’s early-1990s pieces, though sincere, were rhapso-dies of untested (counter)cultural commonplace; works like Ludovic Tournès’ New Orleans sur Seine (1999) and Jedediah Sklower’s Free jazz, la catastrophe feconde (2006) gave much more nuanced readings within their broader examina-tions of musical culture. In English language work, French events – when not drowned out by experi-ences closer to home – have often been treated in the same way, though Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton’s edited volume, Music and Protest in 1968, published by Cambridge in 2013, incorpo-rates the French 1968 into its global perspective. Responsible for that contribution is Eric Drott, whose own 2011 book, Music and the Elusive Revolution, is by far the fullest treatment of May’s musical dimension.

And a dimension it was – but a problem, too. Drott begins by describing an RTL news broadcast from the night of May 13, when the occupation of the Sorbonne was in full swing. One of those swing-ing was a stride pianist, playing, perhaps, on the

grand piano that the book’s cover photo shows sitting in the university’s open courtyard. But his jazz, Drott writes, can be heard being barracked by others in the crowd of militants and protesters: “Go and talk instead of playing this shit music!” (p. 2). Anxieties around the status and potential of music – either an accompanist to and agent of change, or else a sideshow detracting from the real political business at hand – run through the debates that Drott so skilfully narrates and inter-prets throughout. The differences of opinion were between those who imagined the moment as totally refiguring the relationship between cultural and political life, and those more traditional, more moderate politicos. Such has been mirrored in the moment’s historical interpretations: the contrast exists in the French literature too, but in English these competing trends are perhaps best repre-sented by Kristin Ross’s work, which pays tribute to and imaginatively reinhabits the radicals’ theoret-ical creativity, or else writing by Michael Seidman, which emphasises cultural continuities before and after the supposed rupture of May.1 For his part, Drott would rather show the extent to which the radical and the indulgent, the performative and the procedural, the sincere and the opportunist coexisted in the Paris streets. His study represents the words and actions of privileged interpret-ers – critics and intellectuals – but also listeners, activists, musicians; the overflowing of aims and vocabularies gives the book an enjoyably appro-priate noisiness.

An introductory chapter lays out the musical history of May and June, giving detailed read-

Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968-1981, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011, 347 p.

3Vo

lume ! n° 9-2

ings of the actions and aims of groupuscules that represented and aided striking musicians, and occupiers of state institutions like the Odéon and the Conservatoire. A more theo-retical strand explores the crowd mobilizations of L’Internationale and, often in conservative response, La Marseillaise, this a revealing study of musical semiotics in massive action. At the centre of the book are studies in three musical discourses – free jazz, pop/rock, and contemporary art music – though as a chapter on musical genre makes explicit, this was not a moment in which such boundaries were allowed to remain unchallenged, the social divisions that stylistic distinctions were seen to enact being put under attack from all

sides. Here, Drott examines the difficult nego-tiations of political ideology, lyric language and musical style that were led by chansonniers like Léo Ferré and Dominique Grange in the attempt to find a truly “popular” political voice.

Not the least of the book’s strengths lies in its res-cuing of figures like Grange, or the pianist-com-poser François Tusques, musicians now almost unknown outside France (and hardly more famous inside). Tusques is a key player in a chapter on free jazz, but this section centres on a discussion of the Tiers-mondisme that became so important to the music’s French critical reception. Along with the work of African American writers like LeRoi Jones, it was writing by Fanon and other anti-colonialist figureheads that led to the wide-spread (if contested) critical framing of American fire music as part of a global struggle against imperialism – a struggle that many of the French critics and musicians concerned had witnessed first hand while on national service in Algeria. A chapter on pop and rock examines the ways in which the music was put, or subjected, to polit-ical use. Gauchistes stormed ticketed festivals to undermine (they said) the capitalist foundations of rock, while others attempted to formulate a kind of “politics of pleasure” that would recognize the revolutionary charge of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. A final study of art music wanders amid the vaga-ries of French cultural policy, charting the devel-opment away from the high-art paternalism of the Malrauvian 1960s and through the more diverse and inclusive politics of 1970s animation.

Drott follows the implications of 1968 through to the election of François Mitterrand in 1981. Perhaps it would have been useful to take a longer look at what the Socialist govern-ment sometimes advertised as the enaction

Music and the Elusive Revolution

4Vo

lum

e !

n° 9

-2Notes de lecture - Dossier « contre-cultures » II

of 1968 ideals: early on, the soixante-huitard culture minister Jacques Lang claimed that those events had “prefigured the changes that we in the government are currently entrusted with inscribing in everyday life”, but however inclusive, however decentralized, the state’s recuperation of a politics so centred on auto-gestion – and which had demanded the refigur-

ing rather than the reform of political and cul-tural relations – was extremely conflicted.2 But that’s for another book. In its rich, contrapuntal reading of musical, social and intellectual his-tory, Music and the Elusive Revolution is a great achievement.

Tom Perchard

References

castanet P.a. (1990), “Impacts des événements de 1968 dans la musique populaire et la musique savante”, Les cahiers du CIREM, 14-15, p. 225-258.

castanet P.a. (1993), “Les années 1968 : Les mouvances d’une révolution socio-culturelle populaire”, In: Antoine Hennion, ed. 1789-1989 : musique, histoire, democratie. Colloque inter-national, Vol. 1. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, p. 145-152.

christofferson, t.r. (1991), The French Socialists in Power, 1981-1986: From Autogestion to Cohabitation. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991.

ross, Kristin (2002), May ’68 And Its Afterlives. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

seidman, m. (2004), The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

sklower, Jedediah (2006), Free Jazz, La Catastrophe féconde. Paris: L’Harmattan.

tournès, Ludovic (1999), New OrleaNs sur seiNe. Paris: fayard.

Endnotes

1.  Further to the right are those many conservatives who have argued that the events ushered in a period of consumerist hedonism and irresponsibil-ity, a position straightfacedly maintained by Nicolas Sarkozy during his 2007 Presidential campaign.

2.  Christofferson, The French Socialists in Power, 90.

5Vo

lume ! n° 9-2

The terms ‘resistance’ and ‘protest’ – combined in the title of this collection of essays – have their respective origins in the discourses of war-fare and politics. The paradigmatic instance of resistance in 20th century history is that of the maquis – the French guerrilla fighters against German occupation during World War II. From this comes the primary meaning of the idea, a national or nationalist movement offering total opposition to an invading foreign force, from the Vietnamese resistance to first France and then the US in the 1950 and 1960s, to Palestinian attempts to thwart Israeli occupation.

If resistance signifies a gen-eral intransigence, protest as a form of political action may be seen as more lim-ited and pragmatic. A pro-test is aimed at specific

policies or practices, but crucially protest’s own meth-ods are generally taken from outside the political system, be that so-called representative democracy of Western capitalism, or the bastardised demo-cratic centralism of China, Vietnam and some of the former republics of the USSR. Protests can oppose such things as armament regimes (nuclear weapons), ethnic, gender or sexual oppression, and the censor-

ship of artistic, religious or political expression.

A reader of The Resisting Muse looking for edito-rial guidance on how music linked to protest and resistance is likely to be disappointed. In his brief and brisk general introduction, Ian Peddie dis-misses what he calls ‘the all-too familiar reduction-ism of the music-as-representative-of-youth-cul-ture ideology’. He does not offer any clue to his alternative definitions of musical resistance and protest, except in a cryptic conclusion to his own chapter, which refers to ‘a passing of the torch from modern to postmodern, from orthodoxy to ambiguity’.

The introduction (and the back cover text) also refers in passing to the ‘post-1975’ focus of the book, but gives no clue as to the reason for this cut-off point. Is it because Peddie believes that protest music prior to that date has been exhaus-tively covered, or because he feels that in the final quarter of the 20th cen-tury social protest in music took a qualitatively different direction?

Perhaps it is a world-histor-ical issue. It is true that the years around 1975 saw the end of what is sometimes called the trente glorieuses – the three decades or so of almost uninterrupted eco-

The Resisting Muse : Popular Music and Social Protest

Ian Peddie (ed), The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest, Farnham and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2006.

6Vo

lum

e !

n° 9

-2Notes de lecture - Dossier « contre-cultures » II

nomic growth following the Second World War, at least in the capitalist world of North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australasia. But such speculations are probably unnecessary, since most contributors ignore the ban on discussion of pre-1975 music.

One way to classify the modes of music as protest or resistance is to borrow from linguistics the con-cepts of metonym and metaphor. Metonymically, the protest song can be articulated with a pre-ex-isting protest movement or campaign, reproduc-ing its slogans or themes. On the other hand, metaphorical protest music expresses its opposi-tional stance through aesthetic and/or subcultural politics.

In 33 Revolutions Per Minute (2011), the British critic Dorian Lynskey provides a neat, if banal, definition of metonymic protest music, stating that it is ‘a song which deals with political issues that aligns itself with the underdog’. In the United States, the classic examples have been the align-ment of folk song with trade union and anti-war struggles and the elision of gospel, hip-hop and soul music with the civil rights and black power movements. In The Resisting Muse, these dimen-sions of protest song are explored in chapters on the fate of ‘folk-protest’ in by Jerry Rodnitsky, on the singer songwriters Michelle Shocked and Billy Bragg by Mark Willhardt, on ‘women in rap’ by Gail Hilson Woldu and on ‘hip-hop in the after-math of (post)modernity’ by the redoubtable Russell A. Potter.

Deena Weinstein’s thought-provoking essay on ‘rock protest songs’ addresses an important issue for the late 20th century – the relative paucity of such songs when there was so much to protest about. Weinstein attributes this situation to both the power of conservative media institutions in

the United States and to formal generic features that act as a barrier to effective communication, especially mondegreens (mishearings of lyrics).

Outside the US, two essays examine forms of musi-cal resistance to postcolonial systems and regimes in Jamaica and Australia. Peter Dunbar-Hall pro-vides analysis of ‘popular music as a representation of Australian Aboriginal cultural loss and reclama-tion’. This is valuable but unexceptional. The same cannot be said for Stephen A King’s chapter on reggae and Rastafari in Jamaica. Its title, ‘Protest Music as “ego-enhancement”’, indicates its frankly impudent argument, that the motivation for rebel-lion is not resistance to oppression but the narcis-sism of individual musicians.

The political practice of musicians as activists, is the subject of a chapter by John Street, who is even-handed in his critique of such figures as Bono and Harry Belafonte. James Smethurst con-siders the representation of social class in pop-ular song, focusing particularly on the music of Eminem, which inserts white lumpen proletarian experience into pop. Smethurst does not men-tion country music, even though it is the primary locus for the representation of white working-class consciousness.

Country music is one of several genres that should have been included in a book seeking to deal with oppositional music in the final quarter of the last century. Where, apart from in an epigraph from The Clash, is punk? And disco? Or, beyond the Anglophone emphasis of the book, the massive upsurge of defiant music across Latin America, and the Asian rock music associated with such figures as Cui Jian (the ‘Chinese Bob Dylan’)?

What I earlier called metaphorical protest music is featured in the final section of the book, which

7Vo

lume ! n° 9-2

Peddie titles ‘The Paradox of Anti-Social Protest’. It is difficult to see why these topics should be ‘paradoxical’ since each essay portrays a scene or subculture that consciously or not brackets itself off from various versions of mainstream (or hege-monic) society or music. They could reasonably be defined as cultural equivalents of the ‘tempo-rary autonomous zones’, a concept introduced into radical political thought by Hakim Bey.

Kathleen McConnell focuses on an industrial subculture, the indie scene of the Pacific North-West; Kimberley Jackson introduces a classic, anachronistic subculture, that of Goth; and Steven Hamelman introduces a plangent

autobiographical note in his elegy for the protest dimension of ‘straight edge’ post-punk music. Sean K. Kelly adds a different take on heavy metal, reading its texts as models of ‘a future democratic community’ where resistance and universality are compatible .

In sum, like many such edited collections, The Resisting Muse is a mixed blessing. It suffers from an incoherent editorial concept but is redeemed by several chapters that deserve to outlive the book itself, particularly those by Weinstein, Potter and Street.

Dave laing

Olivier Julien’s tribute to the Beatles’ ground-breaking Sgt. Pepper stands, at heart, a retro-spective that attempts to place the album both within its historical context and further understand its cultural merit. Acknowledging that “this mas-terpiece of British psychedelia” has an “absolutely unique position in the history of recorded popu-lar music” (xvii), Julien and the book’s contribu-tors aim to contextualize the album’s uniqueness from a variety of perspectives. Noted Beatles and music scholars such as Ian Inglis, Russell Reising, and Sheila Whiteley, to name just a few, contrib-ute provocative insight into the album that help us understand how the forty years that have passed

since its debut offer new insights into the cultural uniqueness and merit of the album.

The collection begins predictably with Julien’s brief overview of the circumstances leading up to the creation of Sgt.Pepper. Julien cites the Beatles’ wariness of touring and the members’ respective time apart as major contributing fac-tors to the creation of Pepper; notable, too, in this brief introduction is the changes in studio space and equipment (a fact that Hannan’s arti-cle explores in much more detail). Julien’s other contribution to the collection, “A Lucky Man Who Made the Grade,” places the album as a defin-ing moment in the history of “the phonographic

The Resisting Muse : Popular Music and Social Protest

“The Performance is the Record”: Julien’s It was Forty Years Ago Today.

Olivier Julien (ed.), Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today, Aldershot & Burlington, Ashgate, 2008.

8Vo

lum

e !

n° 9

-2Notes de lecture - Dossier « contre-cultures » II

tradition,” in which culturally-accepted norms were re-defined forever. With these two articles as bookends, the message of this collection is that Sgt. Pepper is indeed a product of its time, yet a unique one at that: while Sgt. Pepper certainly arose out of the 1960s’ zeitgeist, most of the con-tributors to this collection also see it as a particu-larly unique product of the times.

Only one article disputes Sgt. Pepper’s place as the ultimate product of its age; Thomas MacFarlane’s contribution to the collection, “Sgt. Pepper’s Quest for Extended Form” suggests that Pepper was in fact one step in a “two-year process of experimentation that culminates with the extended form of the Abbey Road Medley” (33). MacFarlane’s thesis is that Sgt. Pepper is not,

in fact, a bona fide “concept album” because its extended form simply isn’t carried through. Considering musical elements and historical anal-ysis, MacFarlane effectively complicates the pre-vailing narratives about Pepper’s ultimate iconic status. Such a perspective, I think, adds freshness to a collection that ultimately upholds the status quo’s opinions of Pepper. This is not to say that these perspectives are not useful and insightful. It is only to mention that perhaps with the influence of 40 years’ time, we might have a more rounded and diverse collection.

That said, I do think the collection offers diverse perspectives and readings of the album cer-tainly worth reading. For instance, Allan Moore’s re-reading of his ideas about interpretation, and Whiteley’s revisiting of her initial understanding of the record, stand as the strongest points in this collection. In addition, Inglis’ analysis of the cover—only one such analysis in the collection—fully acknowledges the participation in mythology that both the cover and its consumers engage in. While Moore claims that the album’s “great strength…is that it manages to capture, more viv-idly than almost anything contemporaneous, its own time and place” (140), he also suggests that the search for “unity,” or essentializing, remains “problematic” at best: “putting into words, inter-preting, is not the same as reducing the song to a form of unsung words, as declaring what it is about” (145). For Moore, a tension between want-ing to understand the album as the representation of 1960s psychedelia and the resistance to essen-tialize drives not only his revisitation of the album, but also, significantly, the range of responses to it.

Whiteley’s article also takes up the thread of revis-itation in her “Tangerine trees and marmalade skies” that opens the collection. She explores,

9Vo

lume ! n° 9-2

quite insightfully, whether the album constitutes “optimistic escapism” or sets an “agenda for cul-tural and political change” (11). Using historical, biographical, and musical evidence for her exam-ination, Whiteley demonstrates that Sgt. Pepper “highlight[s] the need for cultural change and setting an agenda based on love” (22). Though it is well argued and convincing, this perspective resonates with many of the others in the collec-tion, and does not seem to do much more than confirm Sgt. Pepper’s status as a groundbreaking album.

Inglis’s sophisticated analysis of the cover pro-vides further evidence that Sgt. Pepper did rev-olutionize album cover art, and though the cover engages in several levels of mythmaking (in which we have willingly participated), Inglis convinces us that the Beatles were able to change the face of album covers (literally). Coupled with Julien’s insightful discussion of Pepper’s place in the pho-nographic tradition, I think Inglis’ analysis makes a great deal of sense, as it is not merely drawn from more sentimental readings of the album. Even those articles that do engage in quite sophis-ticated musical or cultural analysis (e.g. Reck; Wagner; Hannan; Reising and LeBlanc), all seem to agree about Sgt. Pepper’s merit as the ultimate in rock albums.

We do gain interesting insight into the behind-the-scenes creation of the album throughout the collection, and the musical analyses are quite interesting even if they do not move us too far

beyond the mythos of Sgt. Pepper. Particularly, Hannan’s discussion of Sgt. Pepper’s sound design is a welcome exploration into the more technical aspects of the album that many ordinary listeners and fans might not completely under-stand. In addition, Reising and LeBlanc’s discus-sion of the relationship between the band, the album, and “psychedelic insight” helps those of us born much later than the Summer of Love better understand the culture that gave birth to this musical and cultural masterpiece. For a wide readership, then, this collection succeeds because it confirms what we expect to read about our cul-ture’s favorite album. The title of this review, I think, is an apt characterization of the collection as a whole: we have come to see the performance of all things Beatle, psychedelic, and love as Sgt. Pepper. And while I admire this insight, and the collection greatly (it is, after all, a welcome addi-tion to my extensive library of Beatles books), at the same time I cannot help but want something a little more in keeping with the breakthroughs the album inaugurated. Perhaps I want to have my cake and eat it, too, in terms of my expectations of a commemorative collection. After all, when we commemorate, we are necessarily participating in mythologizing and romanticizing with all the sen-timentality we desire. And that, I guess, is the final lesson of this collection, especially for those of us who love not only the Beatles, popular music, and Sgt. Pepper as much as we do.

Sarah etlinger

Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles

10Vo

lum

e !

n° 9

-2Notes de lecture - Dossier « contre-cultures » II

Russell Reising declares in the introduction to his excellent collection commemorating Revolver that “Revolver has always been the right answer” (1) to any question concerning the “best” Beatles album of all time. Reising suggests that this album, instead of the more popular and criti-cally acclaimed Sgt. Pepper, is rapidly tightening “its grip on our collective imagination”(1) for it introduces the Beatles as true pioneers of musi-cal experimentation. As a “grandly complex and ambitious statement about the possibilities of popular music” (1, italics original), Revolver has become, at least for Reising and the collaborators in this collection, the original album of “firsts and onlies” (11), whose appeal has not waned, even recently surpassing Sgt. Pepper in terms of inno-vation, acclaim, and magic. This collection suc-ceeds in capturing the magic of Revolver, both through its deeply personal and highly technical explorations.

One feature of the collection that is particularly appreciated is the section titled “ ‘When I’m in the middle of a dream’: the contributors remember Revolver.” The contributors (comprised of noted music and Beatles scholars like Sheila Whitely, Ian Inglis, Walter Everett, and Napthali Wagner, to name a few), offer touching, personal, and inter-esting anecdotes about the staying power of the album. From this brief section, we get a sense of how powerful the album has remained since its 1966 debut, and are reminded that seemingly minor events like hearing an album can shape an entire career. Trite as it is, my own experience with Revolver echoes with many of these contributors,

especially the fact that the album has continued to captivate my attention and admiration even after 20 years since I first heard it. These anec-dotes set the stage for a powerful and meaningful discussion of the record’s more technical merits, which, for the most part, stand as a truly wonder-ful tribute to the magic, innovation, and genius of the album.

That said, for a lay reader, the more technical articles, while useful in their own right, fall a bit short in the overall goal of capturing the magic of the album. Though I appreciate the sophisti-cated analysis that these articles offered, (gath-ered in the middle section entitled “ ‘It is Shining’: Revolver’s Musicality”), their offerings tended to obscure the “magic,” as it were, by introducing musical terms that were not accessible to general audiences. However, the writing and analysis is compelling, to say the least, and for readers more versed in musical theory than I, the articles should promise a welcome and thought-provoking exam-ination of the Beatles’ technical merits. While not a part of this section, Everett’s fascinating compar-ison of the album’s roots in the Detroit Motown/ R&B scene stands as an accessible bright spot in the discussion of the Beatles’ musical innovations. Everett compellingly and effectively situates R&B as a key influence of the album’s innovations, and I can no longer understand the album separately from this comparison.

Other true bright spots of this collection are Warwick’s “I’m Eleanor Rigby: female identity and Revolver,” McDonald and Kaufman’s “ ‘Tomorrow

Russell Reising (ed.), Every Sound there is: The Beatles’ Revolver & the Transformation of Rock, Aldershot & Burlington, Ashgate, 2002.

11Vo

lume ! n° 9-2

Never Knows’”, and the pair of articles on the minor Beatles Ringo and George, respectively Baur’s “Ringo Round Revolver” and Bannister’s “The Beatle who became a man.” These four articles, to me, characterize the spirit of the col-lection, allowing for a greater understanding of not only how the album was composed and pro-duced, but also of the role that the personal plays in the album’s cultural staying power. Warwick’s quest to carve space for herself in “Eleanor Rigby” resonates with me as a woman, espe-cially since it is one of the few Beatles songs in which there is a woman protagonist for whom we have sympathy. McDonald and Kaufman’s article on the influence of George Martin is particularly welcome, because Martin, while knighted due to his remarkable achievements, has often become swept under the rug in terms of how he shaped the records. Finally, the two articles on Ringo and George offer a fresher perspective on these two perhaps underrated and certainly shadowed Beatles, and show how their contributions to the groundbreaking album were indispensable and technically sound as well.

These four articles, for me, capture the magic of the album, and ultimately achieve Reising’s goal of attempting to understand the cultural fascina-tion surrounding Revolver, more than 40 years since its release. Perhaps I am a luddite, but for me the most fascinating aspect of the album is the artists who created it, and on this aspect, the collection doesn’t disappoint. In an age where we are constantly bombarded with media dis-playing the latest celebrity scandal, allowing us

to have a brief window into someone else’s life, the windows into Revolver, still one of the most renowned and appreciated albums of all time, resonate as much more than simple glimpses. The collection as a whole succeeds in trying to understand how our relationships with the album are just as important as the musical and cultural innovations that the artists created, and this is an achievement almost as powerful.

Sarah etlinger

The Beatles’ Revolver & the Transformation of Rock

12Vo

lum

e !

n° 9

-2Notes de lecture - Dossier « contre-cultures » II

Few icons of the 20th century have carved and retain as distinct and influential a presence on the cultural landscape as James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix. As a creative performance musician, he not only made incalculable contributions to defin-ing the voice and presence of the electric guitar in popular styles, but he also defined new pos-sibilities for blues, rock, jazz, soul and folk music during a meteoric rise to prominence at the end of the 1960s. Hendrix is, as Franco Fabbri would indicate, “a musical event” that impacts not only his own time, but resonates forward into the pres-ent day. This event is presented here as refracted through the prism of personal experience, report-age and the scrutiny of the academy.

The Jimi Hendrix Companion profiles the life and career of this seminal musician through original reviews of Hendrix’s music from the British and American press, provides insights into his guitar techniques and recording styles, and invites the reader to construct their own 4-dimensional vision through interviews and scholarly exploration of the Jimi Hendrix phenomenon. Drawing on the work of well-known writers, including Jon Pareles, John Rockwell, Dave Marsh, P.J. O’Rourke, and Lester Bangs, this text provides a perfect intro-duction to Hendrix, his music, and his times.

The 57 pieces collected here are arranged in seven evenly-weighted chapters. As in Henry James’ evocation of the House of Fiction, each writer layers their view through press reports, two sections of criticism, periodical journalism, a breath-taking section of academic scholarship and

a touching final and forward-looking memorial in order to build a panoptic view of their subject.

Potash seeks to “…document and illuminate the phenomenon of Jimi Hendrix as it was and is being played out”, and to “…create a charged pastiche of more and less complex verbal constel-lations that conducts feeling - much like Hendrix’s approach to recording, layering sounds to build a heavy composition - as well as simply to col-lect some essential writings about Jimi into one volume”. Evoked via inspiring, intriguing and multi-layered texts, Hendrix defies reduction to a cipher; as one layer or perspective is revealed, further dimensions unfold.

The strength of the collection is its breadth of scope: each section compliments and contextu-alises the next, allowing not only Jimi Hendrix but his circumstances to be illustrated from multiple viewpoints. Each chapter opens with a quota-tion from Jimi himself and, where appropriate, pieces are followed by a bibliography. The whole is supported by a comprehensive index. There is, however, a near-total absence of illustrations or diagrams - the exception to this being the graphic scores that accompany Sheila Whiteley’s brilliant and evocative essay. The text would benefit from imagery as intimate and intricate as some of the pen-portraits and explorations contained here.

From Dawn James’ tentative flirting with Jimi, to frankly baffling evocations of what might-have-been from Lester Bangs and Tom Gogola, the collection is challenging and informative in equal measure. The limitations of language to describe

Chris Potash, The Jimi Hendrix Companion: Three Decades of Commentary, Schirmer Books, New York, Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1996.

13Vo

lume ! n° 9-2

music are evidenced in Paul Suave’s 1968 work, whilst the heady excitement and regal power of Jimi’s presence is sensitively illustrated by Albert Goldman.

Jimi Hendrix emerges from this room full of mir-rors remarkably fully-formed, and it is a tribute to Potash’s ability as an editor - and to the skill of the contributing writers - that their subject remains

mercurially enigmatic yet engaging throughout. Ultimately, the companion is exactly that: a text which guides and informs the reader and drives them back to the greatest source of primary com-munion and reference; the music itself. Although out of print, the breadth and finesse of this 1996 volume demonstrates the necessity for an updated second edition that takes into account the influence of the Internet and 21st-century modalities on the Jimi Hendrix legacy. Recent years have seen the release of newly edited films, freshly discovered audio material and the mar-keting of innumerable digital tools, instruments, musical effects processors and clothing branded with the Hendrix name. As the Companion indi-cates, Jimi Hendrix is placed in human experience not as a time-locked artefact - but as a nexus of possibilities, and as an axis from which to embark on our own artistic and critical endeavours.

This text is recommended for any scholar or fan with even a passing interest in this remarkable musician and his incalculably influential music. In addition, those researching post-modern notions of intertextuality, identity and the continuing inter-disciplinary and mythological effect of sem-inal performers by way of posthumous perfor-mance and semiological influence will find much to consider and digest within these pages. As with Jimi’s music, this particular collection stands up to repeated reading and extended consulta-tion over time.

Tom attah

The Jimi Hendrix Companion