Madam, – Your reviewer of Brown Sugar on Jimi Hendrix, said, “If I follow Marsha Hunt correctly (and I’m not at all sure that I do) then her ramshackle show about Jimi Hendrix and 1960s America portrays the singer and guitarist as a marvel of easy racial integration, who nevertheless struggled within a bitter culture of racism, which the iconic Hunt (aka Brown Sugar) contends is ultimately all about sexual anxiety, in which fear of miscegenation renders all black men violent threats, which Jimi certainly was, apart from his gentleness, and this may somehow explain that his fatal drug overdose was in fact a conspiracy of either the Black Panthers, the record industry or both.”
This long-winded, poorly-constructed sentence could lead your readers to believe that the event I’m staging is about America in the 1960s. How could he fail to note that not only do I insist on the importance of the UK during that decade, but that without the UK, Jimi Hendrix could have never emerged?
That the reviewer claims I said that the Black Panther Party for Self Defense had anything to do with the death of Jimi Hendrix is wrong. It’s also ridiculous. Nor would I have said that Jimi’s death was a record business conspiracy. Perhaps your reviewer was so preoccupied with the nudes on stage who seemed to offend him that he failed to hear what I did and did not say?
The link between sex and racism in the US is not, as the reviewer suggests, a notion that I dreamed up. It’s an established fact that I reiterate in my talk about Jimi Hendrix, an artist who dared to flaunt his sexuality and was a major sex symbol of the 1960s. – Yours, etc,