It’s is an album made by a genius who spent years high, heard special music in his head, and then painstakingly translated it, or as much of it as he could, onto this eternal album. Electric Ladyland isn’t the work of someone dillydallying with psychedelic signifiers, drooling while he futzes around with the crossfaders. And Jimi’s vocals have a mystical, lagging quality, as if the words were coming to him in the half-instant before he sang them. The lyrics - even on the epic aquatic love story “1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” - have an earthiness, a solidity, to them, free from any of that Professor Picadilly’s tangerine-tart whimsy that sank so many of the era’s songwriters. The sonic effects - all the stereo panning, the way the drums shimmer, that omnipresent wah-wah guitar - are placed with wizardly detail. The genius of Electric Ladyland, though, and the thing that lifts it above all other ’60s psych albums, is in how fully it captures, and then conveys, a stoned worldview.

So many of the trippy albums from the psychedelic era sound today like a sort of twee playacting - as if frilling up a song with sound effects and singing about gnomes constituted true trippiness. Electric Ladyland, the Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968)

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