Your World Wonders Me

Formative-album replay: The Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced.* Sound has a shape, not only literally in its passage through the air in waves, but in its properties of suggestion, of signification, of dimension. A sound can mean something, even create a picture, which is why the portmanteau "soundscape" seems to me more than idle wordsmithery—it names the very real sense of immersive scene painting we can get from a piece of music, and not only from its harmony but from its overall sonic profile.

Few musicians of the rock era have approached sound in this tactile, sculptural way as singularly as Hendrix, whose guitar had its own unique synesthetic visual/aural grammar: It could conjure nouns (animals, aliens, machines) as surely as it could evoke verbs (spray, swirl, scream) and adjectives (pin-sharp, hazy, purple). That famous Stratocaster is not just the leading voice and driving force on this, his hastily assembled first record with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell; it also somehow provides the album's atmosphere and color. When I think of this record in my mind's ear I don't immediately hear the big tentpole songs: the rubbery rumble of "Purple Haze," the swinging punch of "Foxey Lady," the sidelong menace of "Hey Joe." Instead I hear the beehive buzz that opens and runs through "Love or Confusion," or the spindly web of sixth chords that frames the extraterrestrial jazz of "Third Stone From the Sun"—scene-painting touches at the edge of the canvas that are also somehow the album's foundation, its base. It is a sound that is irreducibly electric—you can hear the sparks fly off it—yet somehow also organic, tectonic, earthy, swampy. A kind of nature, even if otherworldly.

Not that his Strat is the only element in this sonic paste: Redding's bass entwines with and underpins his lines with a sinewy throb, Mitch Mitchell's popcorn fills and cymbal splashes decorate as much as delineate, and Hendrix's sweaty, bothered baritone is a formidably expressive instrument in its own right. Apparently recorded on the fly, in bursts of creative energy without great premeditation, let alone rehearsal, Are You Experienced showcases not a tight or cohesive band identity but something closer to the intense shotgun marriage of a jazz jam. But whereas jazz improvisation is anchored by standards, in all senses (both its songbook and its strict harmonic rules, within which players can roam wild and free), the experimental spirit of this record is embodied in forms that feel similarly provisional: a blues here, an Eastern scale there, a few first-rate pop hooks, and a raft of rock clichés made fresh in part because this record was minting them (aggressive left-right panning, feedback played like a theremin, effects pedals as instruments unto themselves). Jazz freedom in a rock/pop context shouldn't work this well—in fact, it very seldom does (hello, jam bands)—but it is key to this record's unique, unbiddable genius.

Not that Are You Experienced is a formless miasma. Indeed, Hendrix was such a sonic innovator that he's consistently sold short as a songwriter, and though this record doesn't have his greatest achievements in that vein (I'd rank "Little Wing" and "Castles Made of Sand" at or near the top if I had to), it is not short on songcraft, from the nervous counterpoint of "Manic Depression" to the spare, sexy come-on of "Fire." I hear the album's two slower tracks, "Hey Joe" and "The Wind Cries Mary," as yin/yang flip sides of each other, both in flavor and content: menace and misogyny vs. ageless, feminized wisdom, threat vs. koan. And while I wouldn't call it his greatest song, I feel like bathing in the undulating pentatonic flow of "May This Be Love" every time I hear it.

The brilliance isn't strictly musical either: The album's title song has a telling lyric turn I only just grokked on a recent listen. He sings, "Are you experienced? And have you ever been experienced? Well, I have." That "I have" has always stuck in my craw; why is it not "I am" instead? Duh: Because he doesn't just mean "experienced" in the sense of knowledgeable or seasoned or having had experiences, he also means it in the transitive sense of, "Have you ever been experienced by someone else?" Another way you could put the title would be, "Are you an experience?" (Shades of Prince's "I'm an adventure.") A similar verb reversal turns up in the witty lyric from "Third Stone," "Your world wonders me," which is at least partly a joke on an alien's unearthly grammar but also contains more than a hint of an Escher-like "who's drawing who" hall of mirrors. Along with such memorable images as "kiss the sky," "stand next to your fire," and "happiness staggering on down the street/Footprints dressed in red," the lyrics on Are You Experienced are equal partners in the record's hypnotic, disorienting force field—the sense not only that it's somehow an artifact from another planet but a planet itself.

Or perhaps a star, with the final stab of guitar—faded up suddenly out of nowhere after the end of the title track that closes the album—a sun flare, a burp of cosmic gas in an Afrofuturist galaxy we've yet to visit but, thanks to Hendrix, we already have.

*As with Rubber Soul, I swear by the U.S. track listing.