I find myself listening to Jimi Hendrix. What would he be like if he were alive today? It's an impossible vision. I cannot separate the man from his death. To me, he is not human. He is a divine dream. He is something supernatural; he exists somewhere outside of time in the still-reverberating strings of his ivory white guitar. That's where his real voice is, all the truth to his existence, to his humanity, can be heard in the conversation of chords.
My favorite artists are all dead. It comes back to that question about the separation of the artist from his art. Either way, when a piece of art is created it leaves the physical realities of the world, it enters an etheric realm whereby it reaches its audience in another language. I like to think that when the artist dies, he joins the ether and the two, art and artist, are eternally reconciled.
So to me, Jimi Hendrix and every song he ever made are at one with each other. My image of him is not as a man; in my mind he is an otherwordly expression, his body is not linked to mine, it is made out of billions of tiny strings of sound. Death turned him into a God and he is eternally captured at the peak of his youth, when his energy was strongest.
Death has given birth to so many legends like this, made saints out of human flesh. Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, James Dean, Kurt Cobain, Keith Moon. John Lennon will always exist on a different plane that Paul McCartney won't. Paul McCartney is tangible to me, he is human. But to future generations he won't be, by then he'll have reunited with John, George, and Ringo and the legend of the Beatles will flourish.
Death is the ultimate contextualizer.
