Electric Ladyland cover

Electric Ladyland

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On Electric Ladyland’s “House Burning Down,” Jimi Hendrix resolves a race riot with the appearance of “a giant boat from space land[ing] with eerie grace” to remove all the casualties. By that point on his 1968 double album, he’d already extolled the virtues of a utopian Electric Ladyland (on “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)”) and abandoned the war-torn surface world for an underwater realm (on “1983…. (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”). Hendrix reimagined the electric guitar in rock forevermore, yes, but his hand in the founding of Afrofuturism also can never be denied.

Miles Marshall Lewis

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