In a time now sadly passed, any rock act worth its salt had a guitarist with some serious chops. We're talking Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, AC/DC - all bands with great guitarists that knew the difference between tasteful licks and self-indulgence, who didn't rely on pure speed in their solos, as many guitarists do nowadays. (Why did I accidentally put so many food-related words in those two sentences? I just ate an' everything). But barring the few survivors from those better times (Iron Maiden, Mark Knopfler) there has been nothing in the past ten years with anything to the aforementioned guitar Gods, except The Darkness.
Despite scooping four Brit awards in 2004, The Darkness were a band that few people could take seriously. They saw the spandex, the castrato, the high-camp, and for a glorious few month everybody embraced rock, and make no mistake, Permission To Land is rock at its best. Not since Back In Black had a band wielded distortion as capably as Justin Hawkins and brother Dan. But then people began to feel a bit guilty about it all. Did we really like this lot? They are sooo unfashionable! The Darkness were swept under the carpet, and the (admittedly inferior) follow-up album, One Way Ticket To Hell sold poorly in comparision, and unlike other artists and bands that rose to prominence in the early 00s, such as the Libertines and Franz Ferdinand, The Darkness spawned no immitators. They were abandoned and left to plow their own lonely furrow until they disbanded.
I think there is also a case to be made for the guitar solo being replaced by a rap break. In the 70s and 80s many pop acts featured (bad) guitar solos, just because it was the done thing: verse chorus verse solo verse outro. Nowadays a good percentage of pop releases have some sort of rap breakdown, but there are musical and not juststructural similarites. Both are largely self-indulgent, not brilliantly skillful and often incongruous to the style of the song. Now while I don't particularly miss the fashion for songs with bad solos, it is indicative of the shift away from the use of electric guitars in mainstream music.
Okay, I'm not entirely telling the truth when I say there has been no other great guitar work. Early Muse albums dripped with Matt Bellamy's signature guitar playing, though it was less soloing and more excellent rhythm playing. Then there are the metal bands, though despite being a genre that relies entirely on the guitar, bands have tended to descend into the drop D chug of, say, Meshuggah or the aimless tragic wankery of Dream Theater. The only one that springs to mind is Opeth, and while metal isn't my forte, I know enough about it to make sweeping statements that disregard the whole genre of metal. Er...
Shredding, the art of playing a stupid amount of notes in as short a space as possible, has become the dominant form of the guitar solo. It is crap. Shredding is the guitar equivalent of X Factor melismatic, gymnastic singing that people seem to think is good nowadays. It might seem a strange comparison, but it holds water. Take Alexandra Burke. She has a good voice: it's powerful and she can hit notes accurately, but has absolutely no concept of melody. Instead of finding a note and sticking with it she blasts up and down the scales, leaving you unsure as to what tune she is supposed to be singing. This approach exists on the guitar also, for instance wank-King Steve Vai and his equally bad mentor Joe Satriani. Look them up on YouTube and it won't take long to see what I mean. When Vai tries to give his playing some space à la Pink Floyd, it just sounds dreadful: see For The Love Of God. Put it this way: I can shred. Not very well, but once you know a few scales, and have quick fingers it doesn't take much imagination to play like these guys. However writing solos like the two in Comfortably Numb, both of which are fairly easy to play, takes more than just speed.
Is good guitar playing a thing of the past? Are the likes of the Hawkins brothers, Tom Morello of RATM and Absolution era Muse the last of the old guard? I really hope not.
EDIT: Just looked up For The Love Of God on Youtube and the first video is a perfect example of what I'm talking. Fret-wankage made literal at 4:30, so bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment