"You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven"
About this Quote
Hendrix isn`t romanticizing dysfunction so much as he`s laying out an artist`s survival plan. "You have to go on" lands like a command from someone who knows the clock is brutal: touring, scrutiny, the churn of expectation. Then he swerves into "be crazy", turning what polite society calls a flaw into a fuel source. The phrasing matters. It`s not "feel crazy" or "act crazy" but "be" - identity, not episode. He`s claiming a mode of living where intensity isn`t managed down to fit the room.
"Craziness is like heaven" works because it`s blasphemous in a very Hendrix way: heaven is supposed to be clean, orderly, earned. His heaven is noisy, risky, ecstatic - closer to the feedback-saturated moment when a solo stops being notes and becomes weather. Subtext: the peak experience isn`t available through discipline alone; it requires surrender, even a flirtation with chaos. That chaos isn`t random. In his music, distortion is controlled violence, a kind of precision dressed up as mayhem.
Placed in the late `60s, the line echoes a culture treating altered states as both liberation and spectacle. Hendrix was celebrated as a wild man and punished by the same mythology: audiences wanted transcendence on demand, the industry wanted product, and the person inside the legend was expected to burn bright without burning out. The quote is both invitation and warning: keep the door open to the irrational, because that`s where the magic lives - but you`ll be asked to live there, too.
"Craziness is like heaven" works because it`s blasphemous in a very Hendrix way: heaven is supposed to be clean, orderly, earned. His heaven is noisy, risky, ecstatic - closer to the feedback-saturated moment when a solo stops being notes and becomes weather. Subtext: the peak experience isn`t available through discipline alone; it requires surrender, even a flirtation with chaos. That chaos isn`t random. In his music, distortion is controlled violence, a kind of precision dressed up as mayhem.
Placed in the late `60s, the line echoes a culture treating altered states as both liberation and spectacle. Hendrix was celebrated as a wild man and punished by the same mythology: audiences wanted transcendence on demand, the industry wanted product, and the person inside the legend was expected to burn bright without burning out. The quote is both invitation and warning: keep the door open to the irrational, because that`s where the magic lives - but you`ll be asked to live there, too.
Quote Details
| Topic | Live in the Moment |
|---|---|
| Source | Quote attributed to Jimi Hendrix , listed on the Wikiquote "Jimi Hendrix" page (appears in the entry). |
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