Joplin, the Queen of Psychedelic Rock
Joplin was an American singer-songwriter who started her fame in the late 1960s. She was the lead singer of the Big Brother and the Holding Company, a psychedelic acid-rock band. She later became known as a solo artist, with her first-ever dominant public performance staged at the Monterey Pop Festival. Her stint led her to become one of the top draws at the Woodstock festival as well as Festival Express train tour.
She was prominent for her unique ability to sing and perform various instruments. Her fans described her stage performances as “electric.” During the peak of her career, fans called Joplin as the “Queen of Psychedelic Soul.”
Photo by Malcolm Lubliner/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Known as “Pearl” among her loved ones, Joplin was also a dancer, music arranger, and a painter. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked her number 46 in its “100 Greatest Artists of All Time” list. In 2008 list, the venerable magazine listed her as number 28. In 1995, the legendary country and blues singer was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
If you do not know what psychedelic rock means, it is a unique style of rock music that is inspired, by psychedelic culture, which revolved around hallucinogenic drugs that altered perception. Psychedelic rock is meant to replicate and even improved the mind-altering experiences one can get from psychedelic drugs, most especially LSD.
Originating in the 1960s among American and British musicians, the sounds and style of psychedelic rock reflect LSD’s three core effects: dechronicization, depersonalization, and later dynamization; which essentially detach a user from the reality.
Musically, the effects can be displayed using electronic or non-Western sounds, novelty studio tricks, disjunctive song structures, as well as longer instrumental segments. Advocates of the earlier psychedelic rock showed musicians showing influences based in jazz, the blues, and folk, while some featured Indian classical influence that critics called “raga rock.”