Well this thursdays rant is about Jimi Hendrix, the never questioned and
allmighty god to all of us guitarists. Well I'm fed up with it.
You can hardly get up in the morning anymore without hearing how good, great, wonderful, lifechanging he was.
Before I proceed, let me state for the record that I like Jimi's work alot,
I think he was a good guitarist.

Ok so now I'm gonna list the things which made Hendrix so godlike:

1. He was first. Many guitarists does it better, but he did it first.
Just like The Beatles and MC5 or whatever.

2. He died. Face it, if the man were alive today he would never have achieved
nearly as much fame as he has now. He would still probably be considered
one of the best, but not the Best, the God, the Jimi.

3. His guitarplaying. Yes, without a doubt, this man was an awesome guitarplayer,
but I rank this quality third place beacuse the two other are more important.

The fact that you cannot utter a negative word about "the Jimi" just makes me..
..not mad, just sick and tired.
Another thing that bothers me are people who either listens to rock or plays
guitar are supposed to love Jimi Hendrix, and most of 'em do, even though
the intro from Hey Joe might be the only Hendrix they've ever heard.
But that does'nt matter, the man is in-questionable. Gaaaah!

Weeeeell that brings this thursdays rant to an end. Thank god.

feel better?

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To improve technique and of course trying to keep all as clean as possible. I know my own limits and speed limits and so on I never play anything I'm not capable of. That wouldn't make any sense. After three years of playing I tried to play everything as fast as possible and that sounded, I would say, like ****, and I didn't realize that if I'd play bit slower things than I was capable of playing then everything would sound much better.

--Aleksi Laiho - Advice to Play By

I know how you feel man..One bad word about Jimi and its like the people want to cut ur head off...I personally dont care for his music and I dont think he was a guitar god either..From the concert videos that ive seen, he played pretty sloppy..but thats my opinion on things

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In memory of Randy Rhoads

He may have been pretty sloppy, but I get tired of hearing about these guys that can do a billion notes a second and can do all this fancy stuff on their guitar. But I like the sloppy guitarists, Jimmy Page and Greg Keelor are my favs. Both very different, but I like their music,songwriting, and MESSY guitar playing.

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Electric Guitars are the inspiration for cries of "Turn that damn thing down"-Gibson website

Well let's face it....
99% of his talent is in his ability to showcase himself.
Light your guitar on fire, play behind your head, smash your guitar, play with your teeth..etc etc...
As far as talent goes... he was able to play from the heart (which means get into what he was doing without flubbing up cause he knew people were watching)
but he was an adequate player at best.
The appeal was in his showmanship. To guitarplayers he showed a new way of overdriving the guitar. For audience members, he showed that he could trick people into thinking he was better than he was with all his gimmicks.

And yeah... if he hadn't died, he'd be an nobody right now.

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Digit

Yea, I feel ya on this one. I too get tired of the "Jimi was the greatest of all time" axiom. I totally agree with your 3 reasons as well. I think Jimi's greatest ability was in song composition considering that two of my favorite songs, SRV's "Little Wing" and Shawn Lane's "All along the watchtower", were originally written and performed by Jimi. No doubt the man was talented, and without him my favorite artists wouldn't have been inspired to in turn inspire me.

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Yes, thank you for asking!

Woah, I didn't expect anyone to actually agree with me, I thought
I would get my email-account nuked and my fingers smashed with a hammer.