 Hi everyone, before we get started on this video I unfortunately have a bit of a disclaimer for you. This isn't the video that I wanted to show you all. Throughout the video there are a number of song clips that have been muted because the choice was either that or to have the video blocked worldwide. This is despite the fact that my usage of these clips falls well within the bounds of fair use. YouTube's copyright system is broken and it makes life incredibly difficult for music creators like myself. Unfortunately the only options as of right now are muting the clips or not showing the video at all. So if you want to watch the video in full you can watch it over on Nebula where you get free access to watch one video. I'm really sorry about this but I put a lot of work into this video and I'm really proud of it so I hope you can still enjoy it even if some of the song clips are muted. This video is brought to you by Curiosity Stream. If you sign up to Curiosity Stream with the link in the description you'll also get access to Nebula where you can listen to episodes of my podcast Ghost Notes early and ad free. Through the entirety of his short life Jimmy Hendrix was an avid fan of science fiction. As a young child Hendrix and his brother Leon would escape their troubled upbringing by dreaming up stories of far off planets and flying saucers. According to Leon Hendrix's book Jimmy even made his family call him Buster a name he took from Buster Crab who starred in the serials Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. This love only intensified as an adult when Hendrix moved in with fellow musician and sci-fi fan Chaz Chandler. Chandler had a huge collection of sci-fi books that he would happily lend out to Hendrix and Chandler wound up being more than just a friend. He became Hendrix's manager and producer. Together Hendrix and Chandler moved their love of sci-fi from the literary world to the musical. One of the first sci-fi pieces that made it into Jimmy Hendrix's music was a novel by Philip Jose Farmer called Night of Light. That story is about a planet surrounding a binary star. Once every seven years the world is beset with strange radiation coming from the star and it causes reality itself to morph unpredictably. The book describes the sunspots that caused this effect as having a purplish haze. That phrase struck a chord with Hendrix and so he put it into a song, pairing it with lyrics that create a psychedelic confusion not unlike the surreal reality of Farmer's book. The science fiction influences on purple haze might be a little tenuous but the influences on third stone from the sun are plain as day. The lyrics of that song are from the perspective of an alien scout observing earth from afar but Hendrix and Chandler also embodied science fiction in the music. They used emerging studio technology as well as an array of guitar pedals and a whammy bar to create a cosmic sound system. Hendrix must have liked this alien perspective because he started his next album with another song from an alien point of view, Up From The Skies. This time the song is from the perspective of one who lived on earth long ago and is dismayed at the state of the planet when he returns to visit. By using science fiction to comment on the issues he saw in the world, Hendrix followed in the trend of some of the all-time greats of the genre. From Aldous Huxley and Isaac Asimov to Stanislav Lem and Ursula Le Guin, sci-fi has a long history of using futuristic narratives to comment on present circumstance. And the circumstances around Hendrix were pretty bleak. His entire career took place during an era of war and civil strife. There were riots in the streets and bombing campaigns across the seas. Many of the images that Hendrix would have seen coming from the Vietnam War at the time would have looked damn near apocalyptic, and that's not even to mention the imminent threat of nuclear war. Hendrix found parallels between the apocalypse he was witnessing and the apocalypses in some of his favorite fiction. One book that Hendrix was particularly fond of was a 1949 novel by George R. Stewart called Earth Abides. In Ultimate Hendrix, Chandler said that this was the first sci-fi novel he ever lent to Jimmy and that the young guitarist loved it. Hendrix went on to devour other post-apocalyptic stories like Lotte award Moore's story about a nuclear apocalypse. With all of these images of the end of the world playing in his head, Hendrix began to pen his own apocalyptic story. 1983. A Merman Should I Turn To Be? Hendrix's song is about finding escape from a war-torn world, but rather than looking like so much sci-fi does to the stars, 1983 finds its sanctuary in the deep sea. In the first verse, Hendrix's narrator looks at the state of the world around him and decides that he and his love are going to seek refuge so they turn to the ocean. The second verse is a more in-depth description of the carnage that the narrator sees, and it ties this sci-fi future to Hendrix's own reality. By opening the verse with the beginning of the Star-Spangled Banner, Hendrix is drawing a direct line between this destruction and his home nation who are currently embroiled in the Vietnam War. Hendrix recorded the song during the Tet Offensive, a massive series of coordinated attacks on South Vietnam by the Viet Cong. Images of the violence and destruction caused by these attacks brought a new level of rage to the anti-war movement in the US as they realized that their government had been lying to them about the success of the war. For Hendrix, things weren't much better on the home front either. When he went into the studio to record 1983, it was less than three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., an event that had a profound impact on the young guitarist. Even Hendrix's personal life was complicated during this time, as his relationship with Chaz Chandler was falling apart. While both shared a love of sci-fi, Chandler and Hendrix had a number of creative difficulties when it came to making music together. Hendrix wanted to experiment with longer, more drawn-out songs, but Chandler wanted Jimmy to keep things short. In the end this led to a rift, and the two parted ways before Hendrix went into the studio to cut 1983. As a result, he was able to tease out the song and turn it into a true epic, stretching it more than 13 minutes long. Most of this length comes from a seven-minute instrumental break in the middle. This represents the narrator and his love descending into the ocean. They're able to do this because of a machine that Hendrix's narrator built. Hendrix never really explains what the machine is, but it seems to transform the narrator's body and make him able to breathe underwater. This machine represents a kind of salvation, a way to escape a cruel and dark world. Many have read the machine as a metaphor for a different kind of escapism that was popular in Hendrix's day, psychedelic drugs. For Hendrix's generation, psychedelics allowed a brief respite from the tumble to reality and allowed them to gain greater insight into the human mind. But Hendrix didn't want people to escape the world entirely. He said, 1983 is something to keep your mind off what's happening today, but not necessarily completely hiding away from it, like some people do with certain drugs and so forth. To provide that temporary escape, Hendrix turns to music, saying what words never could. In the later stages of his career, Hendrix became a kind of sound painter. On songs like Machine Gun or His Take on the Star Spangled Banner, he would use his electric guitar to depict the horrific sound skips of war. He uses similar techniques in 1983, albeit to completely different ends. The instrumental section starts on a typical Hendrix solo, but it quickly evolves into an open avant-garde jam. Carried by Mitch Mitchell's drumming, this section is open like the deep sea, spanning outwards and downwards to eternity. Mitchell's cymbals sound like the gentle dance of bubbles and Hendrix's guitars squeal in the distance. After an eerie start, a peace begins to come over the song as Hendrix solos, layering guitar over sitar and bass that he also put down in the studio. In this psychedelic breakdown, we understand the calm brought on by water, the place from which all life sprouts. After lingering in this peaceful mood, the song builds momentum and grows into a chaotic solo by Hendrix in anticipation of the last verse. In that final verse, we describe the auditory journey we just took, a descent into the deep ocean. At the end of this journey, Hendrix and his narrator find Atlantis waiting for him. In seeking escape from the horrors of their own world, the narrator and Katharina have discovered a utopia, and with it, hope of a new way of living. With 1983, Hendrix fully realized his science fiction ambition. He created a story that commented on the world he knew, but gave hope of a better existence. And that's the brilliance of science fiction as a medium. It allows you to slip away from the stress of the world and escape into space or into the deep sea. But it also gives you knowledge and perspective to bring with you back to reality. Tragically, Hendrix died before he got a chance to create more science fiction music. But the legacy of Hendrix and the legacy of 1983 still remain to this day as an important part of a long and ongoing tradition of science fiction and music. As you might be able to tell from this video, I'm a big fan of science fiction, and one of my favorite authors is Philip K. Dick. That's why I was really excited to watch The Worlds of Philip K. Dick on CuriosityStream. CuriosityStream is the best place online to stream documentaries. There's thousands of selections on a number of topics. And if you sign up to CuriosityStream with the link in the description, you'll also get access to Nebula, where you can get early access to my podcast, Ghost Notes. Nebula is a streaming platform created by and for creators like myself, and it's allowed me to team up with Corey from 12tone and do what we do best. Talk about music. Like with all of my videos, episodes of my podcast will be dropping early and ad-free on Nebula. So head on over to curiositystream.com slash polyphonic. Following that link will get you an amazing deal. You'll get 26% off an annual subscription to CuriosityStream, and you'll also have full access to Nebula. 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