Music Mondays: "How Can I Be Ruling The Rock World 40 Years After My Death?"

A nice interview with Jimi Hendrix's sister Janie on the Bravewords.com site. It's talking about the latest collection of unreleased Hendrix material to hit the stores, Valleys Of Neptune.

Janie Hendrix: "He's probably laughing."

BraveWords.com: Yeah, he must be laughing, going, "how can I be ruling the rock world..."

Janie Hendrix: "40 years after my death. 'Yes, all right!' Well, it's interesting because, yes, he did have the talent and it seems like he kind of knew in some ways that he didn't have a whole lot of time left here to create what he needed to create, so here we have decades of music that he created in four years. And it is kind of interesting because when he was alive it really hurt him that people didn't get him, that they didn't understand his music. People would say, 'oh he plays rock.' And he's like, 'please don't label my music. You'll just frustrate you and you'll frustrate me, because it's not a label.' And I think that here we are forty years later and I think people now are more accepting of that. Before it was like, where do you fit in? Do you fit in on the hard rock station, do you fit in on the blues station, do you fit in on the R&B/soul station? Where do you fit in these six little boxes, where now we have Sirius Radio. We have channels and channels and blue collar comedy. Who would have thought that there'd be so many different choices of things that you listen to. BOB DYLAN has his own station, so I think that it's just a different generation that accepts, 'okay, if you don't want to be titled, fine, it's Jimi and we love it.' So I think that's a great evolution we've landed to."

*snip*

BraveWords.com: Can you elaborate on what else we can expect with this catalog project with Legacy?

Janie Hendrix: "You can expect two projects a year. You can expect to see concert footage that you've never seen before, that we've been able to acquire. And you can expect different forms of Jimi's music. We have an anthology project, Jimi's own words, that will be in CD and DVD form, also it will be on A&E and the BBC. We have, gosh, so many projects coming your way, and then of course our tribute concert (Experience Hendrix Tribute Tour) that we bring Jimi's music to people, inspired by other artists. But definitely more CDs, more DVDs, more documentaries and within this next eight years, the bio, the movie. We have Guitar Hero out already and now we are working on Rock Band."

I have Valleys Of Neptune and it's quite good, especially the bluesier numbers like Red House. Is it for the non-Hendrix-completest? Well, I'm by no means a Hendrix fanatic and I found it quite worthwhile.