Lecture: The Strange Afterlives of Jimi Hendrix

We are thrilled to have Dr. Christian Lloyd joining us to give a lecture on Jimi Hendrix. Dr Christian Lloyd is Reader in popular Music at Bader College, Queen’s University. He was researcher on the project to reconstruct Jimi Hendrix’s London flat and is the author of Hendrix at Home: a Bluesman in Mayfair.

What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!”: the Strange Afterlives of Jimi Hendrix 

Vanstone Lecture Hall
St. Jerome’s University
October 18, 4:30 - 6:30

Jimi Hendrix’s premature death in 1970 seemed to foreclose an era he had done much to define. Yet at the very moment he fell silent, Hendrix’s music and image catalysed a multitude of artworks that fed off his energy and inventiveness. Pop, jazz, and classical musicians, visual artists, writers, and fashionistas homaged, pastiched, translated, plagiarised, covered, adapted, or cowered before his creations.

In this lecture, Dr. Christian Lloyd examines the responses to Hendrix’s work and image ranging from the brilliant to the bizarre, from sampling by hip hop artists to Hendrix’s appearances in literary works and fashion collections. Dr. Lloyd argues that it is a mistake to frame Hendrix as an icon of ‘classic rock’ and that analysis of his influence on other artists restores one of the strangest and most dangerous musicians of the twentieth century to us as a provocative figure in the age of AI and VR.