The Are You Experienced album is all about extremity, exaggerating on every aspect to ensure that the listener understands the point that is trying to be made. Listening to the album takes you on a journey through the soaring highs and the bleak lows of the album, seemingly with no middle ground in between. It is a non-stop rollercoaster that does not slow down until the very end.
This suggestion of life in the extreme is first seen in Purple Haze as Jimi Hendrix sings “am I happy or in misery?” It seems as if Hendrix feels so much but has a difficult time analyzing and understanding his feelings. This can be seen in the song Love or Confusion where the lyrics state “my heart burns with feeling, but my mind, it’s cold and reeling”. This adds to understanding the purpose of the album: to experience. When experiencing, it does not matter that you do not understand your emotions. All that matters is that you go into the experience and obtain the burst of feeling you get from it.
Of course not understanding your emotions can be a very confusing thing to live with, and can be frustrating at times. Jimi expresses this frustration in manic depression, a bipolar disorder where one experiences intense spurts of emotion, of both extreme highs and scary lows. This bipolar nature is seen throughout the album as often the songs alternate where a happy and dreamy song is juxtaposed with a frustrating and chaotic one. The fourth song on the album, Love or Confusion is very tense and chaotic, while the next song, May This Be Love, is peaceful, relaxing, and an emotional high. The listener is brought right back down however as the next song is I Don’t Live Today, a fast paced and altogether confusing song. The song then changes, again abruptly changing tone, as the next song is The Wind Cries Mary, the most conventional sounding love song on the album. It is beautiful and fast, nothing like the next song, Fire.
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