In
Psychedelic White (2007), his book about
trance music and its primarily white consumers in Goa at the turn of the 21st
century, Arun Saldanha first considers the 1950s subcultures through which
young Anglo Americans expressed their sense of alienation from mainstream
society in the post-war years. It was through the cooptation of black American
music and culture, Saldanha opines, that white youth initiated a “hippie
rebellion,” but in effect continued to be disengaged from black people. This
paradox is further highlighted when Saldanha points to how Jimi Hendrix, “a
messianic hero of psychedelic living and a Negro in Native American, Indian,
and Gypsy garb” was all that white hipsters aspired to be. However, as a “Negro
hipster” playing to largely white audiences, as at the 1969 Woodstock festival,
Saldanha notes that to blacks, “Hendrix and his psychedelic rock [were still]
white...” Even with the inclusion of black culture or musicians, the
countercultural stance of the hippies and rock music did not become any “less
white,” Saldanha rightly argues.
Similarly,
in the Summer of Love, at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival at which Hendrix
performed two years before Woodstock, archival video reveals an awestruck, mostly
white crowd taking in a virtuosic performance by another musician whose hands
flew up and down the sitar like it was an electric guitar. At this very same musical
event at which Hendrix famously set his guitar on fire, Ravi Shankar was introduced
to the United States. If Hendrix was the black rocker who served as the epitome
of racially-charged hipster cool to disenfranchised white American youth, then
Shankar the fast-fingered Eastern string-slayer represented the exotic
otherness that drew so many on the hippie trail to Goa with its alleged promise
of a prelapsarian life in the sixties.
And
while both Shankar and Hendrix marked rock music’s whiteness through their
otherness, they also spoke to and of its margins. “[T]o his continual
embarrassment,” Saldanha indicates, Hendrix’s audiences were generally white. This,
only because so little is said of whom else did listen to his music, even if
they protested its whiteness. But at Monterey, Hendrix was Shankar’s audience,
and Shankar was reportedly horrified that a musician would set fire to his own
instrument. It was a moment in which the two stringed-instrument players shone
so bright and so closely to one another that they contrapuntally darkened the
universe of rock music. Playing as they did at different times at the Monterey
festival, Hendrix and Shankar were still in concert. Their performances bore
witness not just to one another’s difference, but also that of the constitutive
forms of music, cultural legacies, and “other” audiences that make rock music
more than the anthemic rhythm of a narrowly-defined generation. Shankar’s passing
away in California in December last, not too far away from that spot in Monterey
where he and Hendrix played for the world, brings the music back to its first
note even as the refrain echoes on. Rock on, Ravi Shankar.
This article can be seen in its original appearance here.
