Edgework and Excess: Jimi Hendrix, the Phenomenology of Fuzz, and the Rehearsal of Black Liberation

Abstract

Abstract:This essay shows how Jimi Hendrix’s experiments with fuzz anticipated notyet-audible sonic worlds and evinced Blackness in sound. Focusing on the American guitarist’s debut album, Are You Experienced (1967), I describe fuzz as an entryway into the politico-theatrical scene of Black sociality. My analysis pivots on two axes: edgework and excess. I argue that Hendrix’s pursuit of new sonic territory, as well as the mathematical-electrical engineering that brought such sounds into being, can be read as an aesthetic practice of edgework, but also that the resulting music—which early reviewers described as “hellish,” “freaky,” “unimaginable,” and “manic”—acts as a sign of fuzz’s unruly excess. Across my analysis, I am in conversation with Matthew Morrison’s theory of “Blacksound,” which shows how US popular music attempts to essentialize and delimit Black performativity. If Hendrix’s fuzz tone is audible as an enactment of fugitivity born from a tradition of radical Black aesthetics, I argue, then its unruly and anarchistic ethos refutes racial essentialism, insisting on agency, beauty, and life in the face of social death. Through this intervention, I develop a theory of “rehearsal” as a future-oriented Black performance sensibility that creates the conditions in which living otherwise becomes imaginable and achievable.