Are You Experienced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Baduizm

Erykah Badu

Socially conscious, free-flowing hip-hop soul that embodied a cultural shift.

In 1997, as the Soulquarians—a new collective of socially conscious hip-hop soul songwriters that included Common, The Roots, D’Angelo, and more—began to emerge from the underground, Baduizm shifted the entire R&B landscape. A 25-year-old Texan with a seemingly preternatural sense of groove and a jazzy twang that evoked a modern-day Billie Holliday, Badu brought an approach to songwriting that embodied the sound of neo-soul.

“I just knew I wanted to express myself in a bigger way.”

Erykah Badu

Her approach to spirituality in her music was down-to-earth—as was her style, with flowing dresses and an omnipresent head wrap. But her music was otherworldly, even as she sang conversationally about the concerns of the everywoman, whether working poverty and sociopolitical pressures or the dirty deeds of unworthy lovers. Propelled by the slow groove of her rotating backing band, including bass legend Ron Carter and a then little-known Philadelphia group called The Roots, the cohesion and promise of Baduizm embodied a cultural shift towards Afrocentricism, creating a sonic through line of Black music from ’30s blues to ’70s jazz to soul on the precipice of a new millennium.

Are You Experienced

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

A guitar-driven classic that fused blues with futuristic psychedelia.

Like a lot of science fiction, the futuristic qualities on Jimi Hendrix’s debut album—his sky-kissing use of feedback and noise and imagery—are offset by familiarity. He wasn’t experimenting with modern classical music like The Beatles or high-minded pop orchestration like The Beach Boys; he wasn’t even tapping into out-there psychedelia like Pink Floyd. Instead, he took the simple, gut-level sounds of the Muddy Waters and Little Richard records he grew up on and turned them into something new, foreshadowing the Black psychedelia of Prince and Outkast, not to mention almost everything blues-related that came in his wake.

Of all the endlessly sanctified albums that came out of the late 1960s, Are You Experienced is one of the few that still feels like a dynamic, living thing. At the very least, the concept of hummable, three-and-a-half-minute songs tricked out with sound effects is as good a definition of 21st-century pop as it was of Hendrix’s music 50 years earlier.

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Baduizm

Are You Experienced