timellison
Member
You don't like Tom Scholz?
No more guitars.
- Thread starter swears
- Start date
the real problem is that people who play guitar tend 99.9% of the time to repeat, replay, and rewrite the same old godawful tedious cliches that ought to have been jettisoned already in the 70s. even when people think they are doing a neato, crude, post-punky guitar thing, they are usually regurgitating the same old garbage
what would help is not burning guitars but a world with fewer young men who find them so attractive. the guitar is a very easy instrument to play badly (hence its appeal), and a difficult instrument to play in an innovative, non-traditional, non-cliched way.
of course interesting things can happen on guitars, especially when constraints are imposed (from james browne's funk to post-punk to no wave to prince to touch & go stylee to fennesz etc etc etc)
what would help is not burning guitars but a world with fewer young men who find them so attractive. the guitar is a very easy instrument to play badly (hence its appeal), and a difficult instrument to play in an innovative, non-traditional, non-cliched way.
of course interesting things can happen on guitars, especially when constraints are imposed (from james browne's funk to post-punk to no wave to prince to touch & go stylee to fennesz etc etc etc)
Great quote, nomos. Dare I ask where that's from? Considering that Picciotto's contributions to rites of spring and fugazi (and later as a top-notch producer) helped to define the landscape of north american hardcore . . .
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Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Yeah, being in a guitar-bass-drums-vocals lineup just gives people too many cliches to fall back on if they can't be bothered doing anything different.
Maybe if we banned the standard bom tik bom bom tik rock drum pattern instead, they'd actually have to think about rhythm and end up doing something interesting. Or using blast beats. Either way it works, and as an added bonus we'd get rid of 'funky' breaks at the same time.
nomos
Administrator
It's from "Target" on Fugazi's Red Medicine from 1995
Maybe he wrote it while watching Woodstock '94 on TV.
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This is the nub of the argument for me - guitars don't make shit music, people do
On the one hand, I'm as impassioned a critic of the guitar rock renaissance as is Swears. I still find the whole thing a little bewildering. But equally, in the back of my mind, I'm convinced that sooner or later, someone's going to come along and do something really fucking interesting with Ableton, a wah wah pedal, a 303 AND a Fender Strat (or something). And if we're not too careful, we'll all be too busy being 'progressive' and decrying the use of <insert most hated music instrument/device here> that we'll miss the whole thing.
(I am, I now realise, talking about the Second Coming of Prince. Maybe Rogers Nelson should hurry up and fuck Jamie Lidell and disgorge Jesus Christ himself).
For what it's worth, I think part of the success of 'guitar music' is that it tells stories. And people will (and, indeed, should) always love that shit. And, with the best will in the world, it's not something that dance music was terribly good at (explicitly, at least).
Anyway, this is all most frustrating. This thread, together with Woebot's on the next big thing, are clearly the most interesting of the year, and I've got a billion things I want to say. But I've got to go have a baby now
Later...
soundslike1981
Well-known member
It's a valid desire to try to be forward-thinking. But the idea that this inherently means being anti-traditional seems to me to limit a creative endeavour to faddishness and caprice. It's the irony of orthodox modernism--you're destined to keep repeating essentially the same thing, without ever being able to make a virtue of the fact that there's really no such thing as invention, just recombination and alteration. It's a pretense and a falacy that there can be a progressive future without a rooted past. To lump "tradition" and "cliche" together as though one and the same seems short-sighted, to me.
Four-to-the-floor/electronic dance music is now a tradition at least thirty years old. I find it beautiful and moving that a track from 1977 and 2007 will be able to be beatmatched comfortably, without worrying so much what's new or old. I don't think as many people complain that this is nothing but a cliche--admitted or not, it's a tradition, a framework that allows for both commonality and innovation. Are the Antirock-ists/Anti-Rockists out there wishing ferverently for the death of said beat as much as the death of guitars? Or are they often expressing a preference for one particular tradition over another, under the guise of wipe-the-slate-clean futurism?
IdleRich
IdleRich
Swears, I would have thought that you would be quite happy for their to be a default style of music that conveniently hoovers up all of the musicians with the least imagination/talent. Do you really think that if it wasn't for guitars Baby Shambles would be making amazingly innovative music in a completely new paradigm? I don't.
This is stupid. There are and have been plenty of great guitar bands. What people are doing with guitars and the rock format (on the whole, nothing really worth talking about) is the problem, not the instrument itself or the genre as a whole. No I do not want to see more Kasabians, Hard Fis, Razorlights, but I would be enormously happy if there were more bands like TV On The Radio. Swears, I think you're forgetting that we have had a period of dance music hegemony, not so terribly long ago, and for the most part, the music was bloody awful and the culture surrounding it even worse. In fact, the shortcomings of "dance music" (what is that precisely?) are directly responsible for the resurgence of rock.
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Face it, throwing on a guitar is like strapping on an AK47, while DJing is like scrubbing dishes. The problem with all these wanky current bands (apart from the fact they all look like they've been auditioning for Hollyoaks) is they haven't got a clue about phasers or distortion boxes. Do you really think Jimi Hendrix's 'Star Spangled Banner' would have meant more than fuckall if he'd strummed it acoustically?
that sounds like the most boring outcome of your experiment. imagine all the other instruments that could get used in place of guitars, not just synths and computers.
martin is right about guitars and hendrix etc, strumming isn't enough to make guitars exciting i think.
stelfox is right about tv on the radio.
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IdleRich
IdleRich
There is a lot of truth in this although hearing it crowed by triumphant NME journalists makes it quite unpalatable.
I also agree with your quotes around "dance music", I don't see this divide as strongly as a lot of people (not on here but in general).
I'm just guessing here but surely Swears isn't necessarily asking for a culture completely replacing guitarists with djs, he's asking that the default position becomes something other than forming a guitar band influenced by the Rolling Stones.
swears
preppy-kei
Of course there were plenty of amazing guitar bands in the past. But guitar music in general has been on the slide since the early 90s. I suppose it comes back to the idea that too many indie bands are clogging up that interesting space between the underground and the mainstream. Another problem is that since Oasis, it's been perfectly acceptable for "normal" (read: boring, boarish) people to form a band, the sort of people that read FHM in the sixth form common room and bragged about how many Blue Wkds they'd drank at the weekend. We're really seeing the results of that now, in the past you at least had the pretense of the musician as outsider or eccentric.
It's not the same as banishing the french horn or the xylophone, guitars represent something very sinister now.
good god. in dance music's heyday most djs were absolute morons, way worse than oasis and the like, but this wasn't as important because the marketing of dance music wasn't all tied up with the rockstar personality cult. being a dj is even easier for an idiot to manage. also, this all sounds a bit snobby to me. guitars don't represent anything at all; they make a noise. this noise can be good or bad.
swears
preppy-kei
I'm just guessing here but surely Swears isn't necessarily asking for a culture completely replacing guitarists with djs, he's asking that the default position becomes something other than forming a guitar band influenced by the Rolling Stones.
You guessed right. The idea of a default or "right" way to make music has very some very dodgy connotations.
You guessed right. The idea of a default or "right" way to make music has very some very dodgy connotations.
I would just like to point out (again) that here in north america no such hegemony ever existed and I don't care how terrible it would end up being because dear god would it be nice to have a change of pace from guitar music. (uhhh yeah, i guess hip hop somewhat counters my argument, though I don't know whether you could say it has ever been completely dominant over rock)
swears
preppy-kei
Logan Sama
BestThereIsAtWhatIDo
Worst.Post.Evar.