Jimi Hendrix and the Cultural Politics of Popular Music

This book, on Jimi Hendrixs life, times, visual-cultural prominence, and popular music, with a particular emphasis on Hendrixs relationships to the cultural politics of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nation. Hendrix, an itinerant Gypsy and Voodoo child whose racialized freak visual image continues to internationally circulate, exploited the exoticism of his race, gender, and sexuality and Gypsy and Voodoo transnational political cultures and religion. Aaron E. Lefkovitz argues that Hendrix can be located in a legacy of black-transnational popular musicians, from Chuck Berry to the hip hop duo Outkast, confirming while subverting established white supremacist and hetero-normative codes and conventions. Focusing on Hendrixs transnational biography and centrality to US and international visual cultural and popular music histories, this book links Hendrix to traditions of blackface minstrelsy, international freak show spectacles, black popular musics global circulation, and visual-cultural racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes, while noting Hendrixs place in 1960s countercultural, US-exceptionalist, cultural Cold War, and rock histories.