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δι
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JIMI HENDRIX: 
Creolization and the  

Re-Imagined Black Authentic

ROBERT ENGELMAN

While Jimi Hendrix understood himself as a person of both Native American 
and African-American heritage, he was well aware of his being perceived as 

a black person and a black artist, both in England and in the United States. This 
tension seems to have been formative in his understanding of race, his relationship to 
blackness, and, consequently, the formation of his own identity. In accordance with 
his refusal to treat race as consisting of fixed singularities with respective essences, 
Hendrix, I argue, styled himself not as a crossover artist, but rather as a hybrid, 
creolized artist.1 Towards this end, I analyze two opposed models of cultural and 
ethnic “Relation”2 proposed by Édouard Glissant, the baroque and the métissage, 
and argue that Hendrix thought and acted in a manner closer to the latter.3 Then, I 
will analyze Hendrix’s relationship with race (blackness in particular), which shifted 
dramatically towards the end of his life, and I will explore how this relationship 
should be evaluated. Finally, I will examine his song, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” 
as a demonstration of his reflexive stylization as a creolized musician.4 

1 That is to say, Hendrix did not style himself to be a successful black artist in a white musical scene, but rather to 
be an artist who rejects such a divide altogether.

2 Relation, to clarify, is Glissant’s term for the interaction and change that occurs in cultural contact.
3 Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 

pp. 26-27.
4 The terms ‘creole’ and ‘creolized’ appear throughout the paper and should be understood as analogous to ‘hybrid’ 

and ‘hybridized,’ where two or more ethnicities or cultures come into contact and yield something distinctive, 
rather than as a reference to Creole culture specifically.



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THE BAROQUE AND THE MÉTISSAGE
Glissant introduces the baroque as an ideological model that regards ethnicity and 
culture as existing in a network of coming together and scattering, which entails 
that cultural contact can be untangled and that the respective cultures can thus be 
‘restored’ to whatever state they were in prior to the contact. Beneath this treatment 
is an assumption that cultures have essences that can remain pure or become tainted 
and diluted through cultural contact, and that because cultural contact compromises 
a culture’s essence, “no culture [is] rightfully impeded in the baroque; none [rightfully] 
imposes its tradition, even if there are some that export their generalizing products 
everywhere.”5 Glissant claims that this ideology is a “derangement,” or a violent 
delusion, though a key confounding issue with eradicating such a derangement is 
that it has become concealed through its naturalization.6 Thus, the baroque should 
be regarded as both a conceptually and ethically problematic ideological framework. 

Conceptually, the baroque presumes cultural stability and continuity through an 
essence, which disregards the vast histories of cultural exchange and contact that have 
formed what we recognize as definite and unique cultures. Moreover, this essentialist 
claim of fixedness depends on regarding culture ontologically, as some metaphysical 
entity that individuals participate in—perhaps in a Platonic fashion wherein the 
‘Form’ of the culture never changes, but its instantiations may become ‘corrupted’—
or as something natural within individuals that becomes corrupted through ‘mixing.’ 
The metaphysical, Platonist model is ahistorical and lacks the explanatory power 
for the ways in which culture operates at both individual and group levels, while 
the natural model does not account for cultural learning and serves as a slippery 
slope towards racial tropes that justify oppression and violence. Whichever model we 
may find more appropriately describes the presuppositions of the baroque (which, 
if we follow Glissant, appears to be the second), it is clear that a model of cultural 
and ethnic Relation, centered on essentializing and abstracting cultural identities 
from the lives of people who frequently exist at cultural crossroads, leads to either 
“intolerant exclusions” or “the manifest and integrating violence of contaminations,” 
both of which involve the relegation of individuals, groups, and cultures.7 

This is to say that the baroque is not merely an abstracted, ideological model of ethnic 
and cultural interaction, but an ideology of said interaction that interpellates subjects 
into living in a manner that is consistent with much of the ideology’s principles 
and presuppositions. As a concept, interpellation refers to the phenomenon that, in 
receiving labels and legitimating them through response, we find ourselves implicated 
in, and governed by, the ideological frameworks that accompany these labels; to use 
a quotidian example, if a restaurant employee is treated by a patron as a waitress, and 
responds in a manner that demonstrates such a treatment to be appropriate (such 
5 Ibid., p. 92.
6 Ibid., p. 91.
7 Ibid.



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as asking what the patron would like to drink), the employee is interpellated into a 
framework that governs how she ought to behave and how she will be treated by both 
the patron and those around her—namely, in accordance with her identification as 
a waitress. If we follow Fanon, who discusses interpellation with particular attention 
towards blackness (which is, of course, pertinent towards the analysis of Hendrix), 
we see that being designated as black is especially troubling insofar as it “connotes… 
a certain manner of not-being, [and] of being defective,” rather than being a proper 
subject who simply happens to be black.8 Thus, through interpellation, the baroque 
enters into daily life by subjugating the labeled through the labeler, such that the black 
subject in particular becomes sub-subject in the interaction. Because the baroque has 
exercised, and continues to exercise, much oppression in a manner through which 
its very ‘being an ideology’ or framework gets hidden, we should understand how 
crucial Glissant’s project is in exposing the baroque as ideology, while offering a new 
ideology—more firmly grounded in historical realities—that combats the ethical and 
theoretical pitfalls of the baroque. 

Glissant offers the métissage as a more truthful and more ethical ideology of cultural 
and ethnic interaction. Rather than treating cultures as essential singularities, 
entailing that cultural contact is either inconsequential or ‘tainting’ to all cultures 
involved, the métissage treats cultures as fluid and worldly phenomena. Accordingly, 
Glissant regards the structure of Relation as a “turbulent confluence” that is “neither 
fusion nor confusion… neither the uniform blend—a ravenous integration—nor 
muddled nothingness.”9 That is, cultures are fluid and worldly phenomena, which 
continually interact with one another in a number of ways, including, but not 
limited to, the exchange of goods and encounters between people. The hybridization 
that results from these forms of Relation is not indiscriminate muddiness—as the 
baroque may characterize it—but is actually the formative process by which distinctive 
cultures come to be. By placing hybridity, diversification, and fluidity at the center of 
this process, the métissage inverts the baroque idea that cultural interaction taints 
and homogenizes cultures. Rather than treating cultural contact as a phenomenon 
by which distinctive cultures become uniform, the métissage treats hybridization or 
creolization as a generative process by which cultures develop and emerge; this process 
of Relation “senses, assumes, opens, gathers, scatters, continues, and transforms the 
thought of these elements, these forms, and this motion.”10 What is important to 
note in Glissant’s view is that he humanizes Relation between cultures by placing 
these imaginative and creative processes as central to it. Thus, if we follow Glissant, 
it is the case that, as cultures collide and take from one another, they become more 
complex and diversified, prompting and resulting from imaginative development.

The ethical dimension of the métissage is, of course, made possible by its consistency 
with history and with living culture, but for our purposes, it is crucial to note how 
8 Pierre Macherey, “Figures of Interpellation in Althusser and Fanon,” Radical Philosophy, 173.9 (2012): p. 16.
9 Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, p. 94.
10 Ibid., pp. 94-95.



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it challenges the tenability and the ethics of using the notion of authenticity qua 
legitimacy, which signifies something’s really having a particular identity, to describe 
cultures and individuals.11 By revising the understanding of cultures and individuals, 
the métissage model makes this sort of authenticity a given for all cultures and 
individuals, rendering it as a superfluous notion in this universe of discourse. As 
Glissant describes this revision:

The aesthetics of the chaos-monde… embraces all the elements and forms 
of expression of this totality within us; it is totality’s act and its fluidity, 
totality’s reflection and agent in motion… Destructure these facts, declare 
them void, replace them, reinvent their music: totality’s imagination is 
inexhaustible and always, in every form, wholly legitimate—that is, free 
of all legitimacy.12 

At least two points emerge from this passage. First, by treating the totality of a 
person’s identity as creative and imaginative in-itself, Glissant’s model makes wholly 
compatible—if not necessarily entangled—imaginative stylization and authenticity, 
in both senses of the latter term. Thus, for Glissant, to be authentic does not entail 
that one need search for some deep-rooted essence that has become obscured or limit 
oneself to a supposedly fixed ‘essence,’ but instead allows for the freedom to explore 
and imagine what she could be. The imaginative totality of the self, for Glissant, is 
constantly developing, and this development is always legitimate or ‘real’; this is to 
say that the legitimate components of one’s identity are not limited to one’s inherited 
identity, but include our decisions to involve ourselves in projects or to take on roles. 
To use a simple example, one is not born a doctor, but if one decides to become a 
doctor and goes through the process, then she becomes a legitimate doctor, as well as 
a legitimate member of whatever ethnicity and culture that she is born into. Second, 
because Glissant understands the individual as a creative agent and cultures as 
creolized and interacting, he readily accepts that there are innumerable permutations 
and idiosyncrasies of cultural possibilities. These manifold developing forms are 
inadequately, and all-too-often oppressively, generalized into categories that serve 
as the standards for authenticity in the baroque ideology. Such categories cannot, 
however, be realistic guides for applying authenticity, as they deny the hybridity 
and imagination of cultures and agents while mischaracterizing the cultures they 
purport to encapsulate. That is, if we maintain authenticity as signifying legitimacy 
or ‘realness,’ then the notion becomes superfluous, and perhaps senseless, for judging 
cultures and cultural agents, because both are essentially condemned to this form of 
authenticity. If, however, authenticity signifies a way of relating to oneself and the 

11 I acknowledge that content of the term ‘authenticity qua legitimacy’ is often expressed simply with the term, 
‘authenticity’; however, the distinction that I am developing here is between using authenticity to denote 
membership in a certain type or identity (i.e., being a ‘real American’ as opposed being to an immigrant living 
in America), and to denote an honest or responsible relation to a certain type or identity (i.e., being an engaged 
American as opposed to being an apathetic American).

12 Ibid.



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components of one’s identity, it can be used to examine and evaluate cultures and 
individuals in a more pluralistic manner.

Pragmatist philosopher Paul Taylor has recently written an insightful book on the 
notion of black aesthetics, which I have found to complement Glissant’s discussion of 
cultural hybridity and his rejection of authenticity qua legitimacy as a relevant notion 
for describing people as members of given races, ethnicities, or cultures. Of course, 
authenticity qua legitimacy has appropriate and valid uses (i.e., is this an authentic 
bank note, or a fake?), but to use this notion to describe individuals’ identities is 
superfluous under the métissage framework, and, under the baroque framework, it 
designates individuals who are at cultural or ethnic crossroads as ‘fake’ or illegitimate 
members of a given race, ethnicity, or culture of which they are in fact a part. So, after 
discarding four permutations of this notion of authenticity, which are all quite similar 
to the notion that Glissant seeks to discard, Taylor offers a somewhat new notion 
that he calls, following the existential and phenomenological traditions, “experiential 
authenticity.”13 This form of authenticity complements Glissant’s account in a manner 
similar to that of Fanon’s, namely by emphasizing the contingency and context under 
which individual agents, such as Jimi Hendrix, undertake commitments and creative 
projects. For Taylor, experiential authenticity is primarily “a heuristic device for 
action-guidance… to seek the right balance between facticity and transcendence.”14 
He thus emphasizes the importance of responsibly engaging with one’s factical 
commitments in light of the possibility of moving beyond them through “creativity 
and choice,” which is to say that we are bound to both our chosen and non-chosen 
commitments.15 Experiential authenticity ultimately deals with the ethical issues that 
become prevalent in light of cultural and ethnic hybridity. Because we live “in a 
world of ceaseless cultural exchange,” where our roots often appear more nonexistent 
than rhizomatic, we need, for ethics, a notion of authenticity that allows us to take 
the facticity of our non-chosen roots seriously as we relate to and enmesh ourselves 
with others.16 While Glissant demonstrates that cultural hybridity undermines many 
applications of authenticity qua legitimacy, Taylor’s experiential authenticity helps 
us to ethically evaluate chosen entanglements in light of those non-chosen, while 
maintaining the hybridity of cultures.

13 Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 
2016), p. 147.

14 Ibid., p. 148.
15 Ibid., p. 147.
16 Ibid., p. 152. In describing our roots as rhizomatic, I mean that Glissant, borrowing from the work of Deleuze 

and Guattari, understands that our ‘roots’ are multifarious, constantly developing, intertwined, and resistant 
to teleological readings, rather than as singular, mono-rooted or, otherwise, arborescent in nature. The main 
point here is that the force of cultural exchange today certainly exposes our constant development and our 
entanglement with others, but it often obscures the fact that we are rooted to anything at all (Not sure what 
that means). Rhizomatic roots thus accord with Glissant’s insistence that one’s identity is hybridized, that is, 
not stemming from or being predicated by, a single root, which is inevitably entangled among the cultures and 
commitments with which one becomes involved. Cf. Darbinski, John E., Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, 
Nation, Other (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburg, U.K., 2011), pp. 170-178.



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What Glissant and Taylor make clear is that we should not judge whether Jimi 
Hendrix, who had clearly made commitments far beyond those into which he was 
thrown, was legitimately or illegitimately black, but whether or not he responsibly 
engaged with his commitments, which include his own blackness. Together with 
Glissant’s notion of the métissage, this Taylorian notion of authenticity allows us to 
embrace and judge creativity, not as a spirited-away, Romantic ideal, but rather as a 
very real activity that entangles one in real, consequential commitments. 

JIMI HENDRIX’S PHILOSOPHY OF RACE
I argue that interpreting Hendrix’s shifting negotiations between 1), a coldness 
towards his blackness, and 2), an embrace of it as simply a shift between not wanting 
and wanting to be black, does not go far enough in considering Hendrix’s own 
view of what race is, among other factors. By coldness, I refer to Hendrix’s ‘turning 
away’ from his blackness and his commitment to it, which I will demonstrate in 
the examples that follow. In light of Taylor’s experiential authenticity, moreover, this 
coldness should be considered inauthentic, because Hendrix did not responsibly 
engage with his own blackness, precisely by treating it as something to which he was 
not bound. Hendrix’s philosophy of race, what Paul Gilroy somewhat misleadingly 
terms “the nomadic ideology of the gypsy,” could be understood as a way for him to 
rationalize his cold turning away from blackness, especially in the way that Gilroy 
represents Hendrix’s view17 As will be demonstrated, however, Hendrix’s view of race 
should also be understood as allowing him to authentically embrace his blackness 
without reducing himself to it or ignoring his other commitments. Thus, before 
proposing what Hendrix’s view was and how it should be considered, it is necessary 
to substantiate the biographical claim that Hendrix did in fact shift between avoidant 
rejection and authentic embrace of his blackness.

To begin, Hendrix has been quoted on multiple occasions making remarks that indicate 
his avoidance of blackness and his dismissal of the plights of African Americans in the 
United States. Hendrix once supposedly told a producer: “Negros think they really 
have it bad, but Indians [(Native Americans)] have it just as bad if not worse.”18 This 
remark touches on both indications noted above; Hendrix identified with both his 
Native American heritage and his African-American heritage, which set the grounds 
for him to distance himself from blackness and the ethical causes undertaken by 
African-Americans. Hendrix’s understanding of himself as multi-ethnic seems 
to have made him confused over his ethnic identity, a proposition supported by 
the testimony of Linda Keith, a girlfriend of Keith Richards and a close friend of 

17 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard 
University Press, 1993), p. 94. What is misleading about Gilroy’s terminology is that it suggests rootlessness 
rather than rhizomatic roots. Such a misunderstanding, however, may have been precisely what led Hendrix to 
turn away from his blackness (though I make no claim that this is necessarily what happened).

18 Charles Gower Price, “Got My Own World to Look Through: Jimi Hendrix and the Blues Aesthetic,” Journal of 
American & Comparative Cultures, 25.3-4 (2002): p. 442.



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Hendrix.19 That is to say, Hendrix’s self-understanding was incompatible with “[the 
law of ] the excluded middle of the American racial imagination,” not to mention 
that Hendrix’s identity drew from outside the black-white binary altogether.20 Thus, 
it is plausible that his distancing himself from blackness early in his career had more 
to do with do with the contrariety between the dominant structure of racial and 
ethnic interpellation (the baroque framework), which was ‘naturalized’ within the 
public sphere, and Hendrix’s own understanding of race and ethnicity, which was 
informed by his experience of the contrariety of his double-consciousness.

What I argue for here is that Hendrix’s multi-ethnic self-conception and, consequently, 
the contrariety of his double-consciousness (seeing-himself-being-seen-as-black 
involving blackness as an over-simplified mislabel and an oppressive label) made it 
rather difficult, but not impossible, for him to develop a philosophy of race through 
which he could embrace his blackness without reducing himself to it. Contrary to, 
and perhaps in explicit opposition to, the interpellating baroque essentialism that 
was diffuse in both white society and the Black Aesthetic movement, Hendrix refused 
to “describe his music in race-specific terms.”21 That is, Hendrix did not essentialize 
musical style to race, did not assert race-based ownership of style, nor did he see as 
valid the application of racial standards to music. Case in point: as opposed to critics 
like Amiri Baraka who located the blues specifically in blackness, Hendrix said that 
“everybody has some kind of blues to offer,” and heard ‘funkiness’ in both Irish and 
African-American folk music alike.22 Terms such as ‘funk’ and ‘blues’ have historically 
been associated so closely with African-American music-making that these remarks 
cannot but reveal Hendrix’s refusal to valorize an ideology of race that seemed to limit 
his artistic endeavors, oppress his subjecthood, and misrepresent his identity. 

Later in his career, there is evidence that Hendrix came to more closely identify with 
his blackness and embrace the related responsibility that he had been avoiding, though 
the topic of race still appears to have been uncomfortable for him to talk about. Three 
biographical facts elucidate this point. First, during a trip to Morocco, Hendrix was 
comforted by the fact that his race was not causing him to be interpellated as sub-
subject, and that his fame did not subsume how others perceived him: he immersed 
himself in the music and mysticism of the Moroccan culture around him without the 
active presence of double-consciousness that had been infringing on his identity.23 

Second, shortly after the Woodstock Festival, Hendrix had agreed to perform a 
benefit concert in Harlem for the United Block Association (UBA). He was nervous 

19 Ibid., p. 443; Charles R. Cross, Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix. (New York: Hyperion, 2005).
20 Christopher Waterman, “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, “Corrine Corrina,” and the Excluded Middle,” Music and 

the Racial Imagination, Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 
2000), p. 198.

21 Steve Waksman, “Black Sound, Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Guitar, and the Meanings of Blackness,” 
Popular Music and Society, 23.1 (1999): p. 86.

22 Ibid., 87.
23 Charles R. Cross, Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, pp. 264-265.



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about recognizing that his fan-base was largely white and that he had minimal, if any, 
presence on black radio stations, but, nevertheless, was rather optimistic about the 
event: he was moved by “the nonviolent nature of Woodstock and hoped the UBA 
show would bring that same sense of unity to Harlem.”24 Even though Hendrix was 
shying away from talking about race in a follow-up interview, there is a clear sense 
that he wanted to responsibly engage with the African-American community, typified 
by his emphasis on: non-violence, providing opportunities for the underprivileged, 
and his avoidance of reducing musical forms to essentialized race-music; here his 
remarks on musical style are basically consistent with his earlier remarks on both the 
blues and funk.25 

Lastly, although Hendrix’s strong advocacy for non-violence had led him to distance 
himself from the Black Panthers throughout his career, by 1970 he had gone so far 
as to call “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” “our anthem,” which he then dedicated to 
“the People’s Park and especially the Black Panthers [second emphasis added].”26 Thus, 
despite his refusal to speak of music in racial terms, it appears that he felt obligated 
to reach out to the African-American community; although he had knowingly 
alienated himself from this community, his commitment to the ideals of the Rainbow 
movement—such as peace, open-mindedness, and diversity—would be a sham—a 
mere act of posturing—had he not seriously engaged with the African-American 
community, at the very least because the Rainbow movement was heavily implicated 
in the Civil Rights movement. Accordingly, Hendrix’s view of himself as ‘black-but-
not-only-black’ along with his Rainbow ethics should be understood as critical for 
his turn towards positively engaging with the African-American community. Further, 
by 1970, racial politics had reached a point at which one could not be flippant about 
one’s identity; accordingly, Hendrix was berated by many members of the African-
American community for his history of turning-away from his blackness and his 
responsibility to it. However, it is clear that Hendrix had, by this time and for a 
manifold of reasons, come to recognize that he had an ethical responsibly engage 
with his blackness. In light of experiential authenticity, one might say that Hendrix 
came to realize that he had a commitment to the African-American community that 
no amount of branching out could eliminate. Although he was far from an exemplary 
representative of the African-American community and an activist for their causes, he 
came to face and take seriously his responsibility to the African-American community, 
in addition to his other, chosen responsibilities, both related and unrelated.

My argument thus builds upon Steve Waksman’s argument that “musical and racial 
boundaries (which intersect in the division, say, between “real” blues and “white” blues, 
or between blues and rock) appeared to Hendrix to be similarly artificial constructs” 
by emphasizing the boundaries as illegitimate, and the standard modes of judging 

24 Ibid., p. 274.
25 Ibid., p. 274-75. In an interview with the New York Times before the event, Hendrix said that he “want[ed] to 

show them that music is universal—that there is no white rock or black rock.”
26 Ibid., p. 296.



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authenticity—and of using authenticity qua legitimacy as an evaluative tool—as 
antagonistic towards his artistic proclivities.27 Through his ethnic identification and 
imaginative stylization, Jimi Hendrix reveals himself as something of a Glissantian, 
whose identity and authenticity-grounds are ill-suited for, and misrepresented by, 
the essentialist presuppositions of the baroque ideology. Accordingly, Hendrix—the 
person and the artist—should be studied through the métissage framework.

JIMI’S CREOLE IMAGINATION AND  
EXPERIENTIAL AUTHENTICITY
By adopting the métissage framework of cultural Relation to analyze Jimi Hendrix 
as a reflexively hybrid artist rather than a ‘crossover’ artist, we can better understand 
his creative development and evaluate his cultural agency. The métissage holds that 
cultures and cultural agents have rhizomatic roots, such that they are hybrid and 
multi-rooted rather than rootless; further, cultures and cultural agents can expand 
their roots be relating to others. This process of Relation is generative and imaginative 
whilst also being contingent to prior roots, both chosen and non-chosen. Thus, 
when Glissant treats imagination as “inexhaustible,” he is referring to the fact that 
relation is something of an extropy, wherein cultures and cultural agents become 
more diverse and more complex, along with their imaginative potentials.28 I hold 
that this cultural extropy increases the contingencies of a given imagination as well 
as its possibilities. In light of the cultural extropy and rhizomatic contingencies that 
are revealed through the métissage, the phenomenon of Jimi Hendrix—as both man 
and artist—becomes much more coherent. Here we have a black musician with a 
multi-ethnic heritage who took an active role in his subject formation. Although he 
was interpellated as black in manners that were at times advantageous (in London) 
and at times disadvantageous (in the U.S.), his active subject formation was fueled 
and conditioned by the interaction between the multifarious experimentation of the 
Rainbow movement and his self-understanding as culturally and ethnically hybrid.

Hendrix’s ‘creole imagination’, as I have termed it, should thus not be understood as 
“free play of the imagination,” as Waksman puts it, à la Kant, which implies that the 
imagination is an autonomous, non-contingent form of freedom.29 Here I strongly 
disagree with Waksman, and instead suggest an understanding of creole imagination 
as a contingent form of imagination that increases its contingencies and expands its 
possibilities as it entangles itself with the manifold set of possibilities that it discovers 
and engages with. To apply Waksman’s notion to Hendrix, we see that Hendrix began 
his musical development with the blues tradition, which is entangled with African-

27 Waksman, “Black Sound, Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Guitar, and the Meanings of Blackness,” p. 88. 
I have omitted Waksman’s appeal to the “free play of the imagination,” which I reject as an antiquated appeal to 
the arts and imagination as autonomous and non-contingent. I briefly argue against it and offer my alternative 
understanding of imagination in the following section.

28 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 95.
29 Waksman, “Black Sound, Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Guitar, and the Meanings of Blackness,” p. 88.



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American culture, but throughout his career, he engaged with a number of other 
musical styles and cultural movements, which, in turn, expanded his imaginative 
horizon while entangling him in further commitments and contingencies. For 
example, once Hendrix aligned himself with the Rainbow movement and the hippie 
counterculture, his subsequent actions became entangled with these commitments, 
and could then be evaluated on this basis. Nevertheless, both his ethnic hybridity and 
his blackness were contingencies for him both prior to and after these commitments, 
and should thus be understood as conditions in which he engaged in his reflexive 
stylization. From the aforementioned biographical points, it is clear that Hendrix 
did not responsibly consider his blackness as a contingent commitment until the 
near-end of his life, though the responsibility was there to be considered and acted 
upon all along. When he did responsibly engage with his blackness, however, he 
did so in a way that was simultaneously both responsible for and considerate of his 
Rainbow commitments; when he was in Harlem to help the UBA, he championed 
nonviolence and also refused to essentialize music as race-music, all while working 
to positively influence the local youth, who were systematically impoverished and 
racially-targeted. At this point, by coherently and responsibly negotiating with his 
commitments, Hendrix had come to exhibit an experiential authenticity that he 
had not demonstrated beforehand. Perhaps a sort of crowning-jewel with which we 
can conclude this analysis of Jimi Hendrix’s relationship to blackness is a separate 
analysis of his song, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” in light of his dedication of a 
performance of the song to the Black Panthers, which marks a consummation of his 
hybrid, reflexive stylization with his turn towards experiential authenticity.

“Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” demonstrates how Hendrix’s style has its basis in 
the blues, but stretches far beyond this basis. Even before Hendrix began to relate 
authentically to his blackness, he used the term ‘Voodoo’ as homage to a spiritual 
tradition found in a number of African and Afro-Diasporic cultures. Additionally, 
the lyrics of the song follow the traditional blues, AAB form. Following the song’s 
lyrics, Hendrix proclaims himself a ‘voodoo child’ with masculine, spiritual power 
that extends from this world to ‘the next’; the voodoo child chops down mountains 
with his hand, reassembles these mountains to create an island, and erects sand 
from beneath the ocean (though this last line could also be read as expressing a 
sort of ‘shaking things up’). After lyrically expressing his power, Hendrix “plays a 
searing solo on the upper registers of his instrument” that wails with pitch bends and 
disorientingly swells with ‘wah’ sounds and automated panning30 In the following 
verse, Hendrix’s lyrics come quite closer to those of a traditional blues, where he 
apologizes for taking up somebody’s time (perhaps a woman’s), and promises to 
make it up to this person; his manner of reparation, however, returns to the spiritual 
and the mystical by evoking an otherworldly meeting. In professing his intention to 
return the time in the ‘next’ world, Hendrix makes it an imperative to not be late, 

30 Ibid., p. 91.



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which may be to signify his persuasive power as a voodoo child, though the reason for 
the imperative admittedly remains unclear. On a number of grounds, however, the 
song captures the multiplicity of Hendrix’s hybrid style. It is bluesy, but not only so. 
It exploits both the material and the ephemeral possibilities afforded by the electric 
guitar. It incorporates both chaotic noise and articulate musical phrasing. Ultimately, 
by non-reductively fusing these elements without attention to false contradictions, 
misattributed incoherencies, and the law of the excluded racial-middle that had 
linked race and music by essentializing black and white cultural production, Hendrix 
demonstrates his commitment to exposing boundaries as altogether illegitimate 
and as oppressive to those at the crossroads. Only after re-aligning himself with 
the African-American cause, however, does he demonstrate an understanding that 
the essentialism and boundary-forging of the baroque are oppressive to those on 
the ‘wrong side’ of the boundary as well. Ultimately, it is at this point, and not 
beforehand, that Hendrix could be considered experientially authentic.

CONCLUSION
By dedicating a hybrid, experimental blues song to the Black Panthers, Hendrix 
shows us that his commitment to and identification with creolization could be 
compatible with a commitment to the African-American community, and that 
hybridity and blackness need not be mutually exclusive. The cultural and political 
climate of the early-1960’s allowed Hendrix to experiment while downplaying his 
identity, but there were clear changes on a number of fronts as the decade came to a 
close. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were both assassinated, Nixon had set 
his sights on the Black Panthers in his ‘law and order’ campaign, and there were riots, 
by both blacks and whites, over race relations across the country. Racial identification 
had become a much more serious matter that could no longer be ‘escaped’. Hendrix 
clearly had to face this reality and, consequently, had come to the side of black 
America. Following Taylor, I hold that Hendrix had come to relate authentically to 
his blackness at this point, which he did not seem to do in the early 1960’s. The rapid 
cultural change during the Rainbow movement had covered up the contingency of 
one’s roots, however rhizomatic they may be. Knowing that Hendrix was, for most 
of his life, far from a moral exemplar in his engagement with blackness, it is critical 
that we consider his philosophy of race not to justify his irresponsibility, but to 
understand it as deeply woven between his worldview and the historical situation in 
which he was thrown. I do not believe there can be a moral justification for Hendrix’s 
cold neglect of his responsibilities as an African-American, but by probing into his 
views on race, his involvement in the Rainbow movement, and his turn towards 
authentically engaging with his commitment to blackness, we can begin to see why 
his relation to blackness was as enigmatic, complex, and shifting as it was. F



101Issue IV F Spring 2017

Jimi Hendrix

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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