Guitar history and guitar as “tool of rebellion”

Can the guitar ever actually return to pop culture? Did it ,as some now seem to think, simply overstay its welcome? Is pop culture music simply exhausted by instruments altogether and desperate to move on to a permanent “no instrument zone”…unless of course we are to consider laptops as instruments?

I am convinced that this type of question is really one of the more interesting questions we can ask these days. One reason it’s so interesting is because i am also convinced that the instruments a culture chooses to use, or not use, at any given time in its history, says much more about that culture & what it’s going through than most would ever dream.

For example, for those of us who are very into history and all that, we know that the guitar, even though it now seems as if it has been around “forever”, actually has a birth date, especially so far as pop culture is concerned. This birth date is usually considered to be the early 1950s, which is when we are told that the guitar “suddenly exploded in popularity”, almost like a supernova star. 

In the pre-war decades (which means to say before the Second World War) the guitar had obviously  been around…in fact technically it has been around since 1600s Spain, or thereabouts, when it first comes to slowly replace the lute, but it really only seems to catch a giant wave of popularity in the 1950s, and then especially in the 60s. All of a sudden, every single musical act just needs to have an awesome guitarist by then. We also see that the design for the guitar, at that point, starts to undergo about a million changes. If you found a guitar in, say, a year like 1949, just a few years after World War 2 ended, you’d find something that looked sort of, to my modern eyes, boring. 

Come back to look again just 20 years later in 1969 and you have something that is far, far more interesting looking. It also developed cooler names by then too. By the 60s guitars start to get funky names like “the Mustang”, and “the Jaguar”. Even the “Stratocaster” sounds sort of funky, as if it is something that’s supposed to be from outer space. Also we should take note of how similar the guitars evolution at this point seems to be to the cars of the time as well. Cars also even had similar names. 

It is sort of interesting to think about all of this because we can’t really say the same thing happened to literally any other instrument. Go pick up a clarinet and it usually just looks exactly like you imagine all clarinets have for the past…i don’t know…400 years. With pianos its similar story. The traditional conservative style of the piano never totally faded away. 

Yes, the keyboard eventually came around; but show most average people a fancy black Steinway piano and, even if they have no interest in piano, they’ll be impressed and think it looks so “elegant”. The guitar isn’t like that: Nobody actually ‘fetishizes’, not to such a degree at least, the “original” “trad” guitars. They usually like the look of the |”new ones” far, far more. Just like they tend to like newer cars too. 

The guitar seems to have almost been “chosen”, as a space age instrument.

And what was miraculous about it, for awhile, was that the guitars staying power proved very long lasting. It was literally as if the thing would simply never go away. Through the decades of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and even very much of the early to mid 00s, guitars were still totally one of the key tools that operated, constantly, at the center of pop cultures bizarre “orb”, its “vortex”. It was all the more fascinating too because through those years, the guitar constantly kept changing costume and style. It became a tool for the music of incredibly angry people, very calm and soft people, very weird people, very flamboyant people, etc. It was as if it could simply do anything, and it did. You could use a guitar and appear incredibly elegant, like we might say Prince appeared; or you could hang out like Kurt Cobain and use it to look poor and ragged and beaten up, like Cobain did.

Then one day, the guitar , some said “finally” with a sigh of relief, almost entirely disappeared.

The question, however,  is : Why?

For awhile, i’ll admit, the guitars disappearance mostly seemed either a mystery, or just the result of, as i said before, years of “overuse”. The common narrative about why it disappeared usually revolved around an idea like this too: People said that everyone had gotten tired of guitar music, that guitar music had simply reached its ‘climax’, and that absolutely nothing else was to be done with the instrument. That everything which the guitar could do, someone had already done, and so now everyone was naturally bored to tears (or maybe they were all just very bad guitarists).

 It sorta made sense. After all, Jimi Hendrix had been extremely good and who had really outdone that strange character? It was as if he’d come from outer space to blow the mind of pop culture, successfully blown it, subsequently inspired a few future generations of guitarists, but then nothing else could really happen. The instrument had accidentally reached its climax mostly with Hendrix and then maybe Van Halen afterwards; we had thought it was just the beginning but it was also sort of the end; and now we had to watch it die and vanish. It was like being born at the tail end of an awesome party. 

I suppose i might have found this argument totally convincing too, if for instance a new wicked cool instrument had arrived to replace the guitar. But thats not actually what happened. Instead, and I want to really stress this point now, no new instrument ever arrived at all. There was, in fact, nothing that came in place of the guitar. 

What instead  came to replace the guitar and even drumsets, which are very fun if you’ve never been close to one or gotten to bang one, was merely a little laptop. Usually an Apple laptop. 

Indeed, the guitars “total disappearance” can definitely be said to coincide completely not just with the mass market release of big home computers - it pretty much survived that period if you look into that time - but much more so with the rising popularity of laptops and particularly smart phones. Like i wrote above, the true “death” of the guitar is usually said to be around the late 00s. That is almost exactly when laptops and smart phones get very big. It’s likely not at all a coincidence.

This is something else I’d really like my reader to dwell on for a moment: The common narrative would have us believing that the guitar simply got eclipsed by the same “instrument”, in this case the laptop, that you use to do your taxes with, your schoolwork with, your corporate job with, et cetera. Could anything be worse? 

This should, at least I feel, be the first thing that stands out as terribly odd and totally lame: Do we really want to be a society - a cultur - that primarily relies on the same tool to do boring crap like taxes and corporate work …and also make most of our music with? “A laptop? Of all things, this?” 

It seems a bad idea to me- yet it’s literally what happened. 

Pop culture chose a laptop over a guitar. It’s like choosing…I don’t know…a photo of the stock market over a DaVinci painting. 

Far more than that, many young people - at least in my personal experience - even became almost viciously defensive of this situation.  To try and put up a defense for the guitar, as I’m doing now, came to be seen as rather obnoxious. Because it came to seem as if you were defending some old, dried up past. 

Yet I think those of you out there who swear you detest guitars have to admit that laptops look horribly lame compared to it, don’t you think — but it was evidently what we were all stuck with now. Laptops looked boring and were also the tool of corporate offices worldwide; the true tool of new capitalist nightmares; the chosen weapon of all the anti-creatives;  but hey, it was high tech and could make insane sounds. 

So if the guitar had been chosen to represent the Space age of music, if it had been there for the lunar mission, for the rise of LSD, for the Cold War and so forth, now the laptop had been chosen, we were sternly told, to represent the…21st century? Hell, the laptop can even make artificial guitar sounds that basically sound real. So we are told. (I mean, it can’t bend notes, and you can’t really throw it across the stage, and you probably don’t want to light it aflame like a guitar, and you can’t really pretend to have sex with a laptop like you can a guitar, but whatever). 

Whatever the case, all of it seemed to make perfect sense. As Cobain had once said in that famous song of mortal rage, oh well, whatever, nevermind. The rock culture has always been very apathetic, so to publicly and openly mourn much of anything was a bit forbidden. 

 Most guitarists deep inside guitar culture didn’t really care one way or the other, is the point.: Long had we all relished the idea of being a culture hidden deep in the cultrues underground; the further below you were submerged, the better . Who cares if no one likes us? Fuck the whole lot of ya, the guitarists seemed to think, your tastes were crap the whole time anyways, and even when the great guitar gods had performed, most people hadn’t given them their due even in the “golden age”. Hendrix had certainly been somewhat scorned in his own lifetime. Then with Cobain, I mean, he’d felt so depressed over everything he’d gone and done suicide.  Cobain, and other similar artists, they had made the guitar sound very scary. This probably also served to put pop culture off of it, i am convinced. Perhaps pop culture began to think, “hey, if you play guitar, eventually you’ll end up dead.” Who could blame them?

For there is something bit dangerous about this instrument! Compared to little puny laptop…

The situation became bleak; maybe it always had been. To put up a fight for the guitar, inside a public forum of pop culture, like a magazine,  just seemed, to many guitarists …even lamer than a laptop.  Lawyers put up “defenses”, but lawyers are lame. You know what i mean? Even now as i write this, i mostly want to get back to playing guitar. This might seem funny but i think it’s why an adequate defense for the guitar and why it needs to stay has, to this day, almost never been launched. All the people who could best explain why we shouldn’t get rid of it are far too busy having loads of fun with the guitar. Again, you know what i mean?

***

In my own case, it only began to dawn on me, more towards the mid to late 2010s, that perhaps there was another “slightly obscured” narrative, beneath the common narrative, as to why the guitar had largely disappeared from pop cultures hands. Slowly, it began to seem as if maybe the laptop had not simply won as the result of “technological evolution”. Keep in mind, dear reader, that “tech evolution” is also what they want us to believe about, say, the entire advent of capitalism from feudalism too. They want us to believe that capitalism was the “next best thing”, the “upgrade” from the medieval feudalist system. But in fact, it was no such thing. So you start to think, maybe this common story on laptops being “the next best thing” is a bunch of bullshit. Maybe guitars have been purposely killed by the capitalists, replaced by a tool that they know won’t cause much harm… 

What i thus began to think was that perhaps the sudden and, to me personally, shocking decline of the guitar perhaps had far more of a connection to, say, the decline of the Economy and peoples quality of life, than anyone really wanted to believe or even imagine. 

To begin, we all have to remember that, as truly odd as it may seem, the rising popularity of the smartphones and the laptops in the late 00s and early 2010s also coincided with, as everyone on the left now knows, the dramatic commencing collapse of the US economy. It’s therefore almost as if, just as we start to enter into the period that some like to call “late stage capitalism”, which many might say officially began with the 2008 financial collapse, the guitar also suddenly begins its vanishing act, “back to the underground”. 

In other words, just as the common person starts to lose more of their “power” within the world of labor, just as they start to lose the good jobs and only get given bad low wage jobs, just as they start to drown in student debts, just as the mortgage crisis ensues and so much else, the music culture also simultaneously loses the guitar, this once glimmering jewel of an  instrument that , sure, is pretty expensive. Especially compared to todays totally crap wages. 

It began to be easy to see there was a connection, at least to me. But more than that, what I also began to feel, in fact what I could not help but feel, was that pop cultures precious obsession with the guitar, and don’t ever forget that every race had once been obsessed with the guitar, actually now seemed to symbolize all this “POWER” and “POTENCY” that they’d once had, but then, after the financial collapses, tragically lost. Or at least began to lose. 

In this narrative then, the replacement of the guitar with a little laptop, to make mostly all our music nowadays , can perhaps be seen as symbolic of the “cultural acquiescence to the corporate overlords” that we can argue occurred, or at least began to occur, after the 08 financial collapse. Some will really hate the idea I suppose, but basically what I’m putting forth here is that the laptops rise and the guitars sudden fall and disappearance can actually very much be framed as representing “our cultural  submission” . 

Of course I can totally understand why some readers won’t like this view: It seems a bit insulting to swathes of awesome new and creative music produced on laptops , plus who really wants to believe something as negative as this about the state of the world? I will merely ask such doubtful readers to …well, read on, I guess. And consider with me the history of the guitars rise too. 

In fact, one thing I find terribly intriguing about trying to examine all of this music history of yesterday and today is that, as desperately as people want to believe we are currently living in some unprecedented period right now of “musical futurism”, the truth is that many of todays artists seem weirdly similar to what artists were like prior to the guitars meteoric rise. What this means to say is that, in the early 50s or late 40s, many artists - if not nearly all of the most popular ones - were strictly mere singers/dancers. Often they did not even bother with writing their own material. They were, we might say, “heavily directed” by …more powerful people. I.e. Employees with a boss, in this case often called a “manager”. An incredibly overbearing manager. 

 More than this, most of the songs prior to the “guitar revolution” were often rather childish in nature, or just about very common, everyday themes, like love or sexual innuendo, broken hearts. Et cetera. Music had yet to be infused with the political rebellion stuff it would later come to be well known for, temporarily, in the  1960s and 70s. It had yet to get “angry”.

 Music in the 50s could not have even dared to imagine the utterly explosive manner in which an artist like Hendrix performed his own “insane” interpretation of a famous traditional tune like “Star Spangled Banner”. Hendrix’s version is made to sound like bombs are exploding, like machine guns are being shot violently, maybe even like dozens of people are screaming and moaning in despair. It sounds a bit disturbing, ugly, wretched, mean, aggressive, tough.

 Almost as if he’s actually attacking us himself. For an artist whose said to be so steeped in peace and love in fact, many of Hendrix’s songs can sound oddly turbulent, chaotic, and to use the term again, “explosive”. One of his greatest songs is considered also to be one called “Machine Gun”. 

The same way you shoot me down baby

You'll be going just the same

Three times the pain

And your own self to blame

What’s strange today is that many new artists seem to be doing the same thing as those earlier artists, however. They’re not like Hendrix; they’re his polar opposite. 

 Their hit songs are usually completely apolitical; they’re choreographed dancers (I.e. “controlled almost militant movements) ; they could totally be said to be bubblegum artists, even if they are highly sexualized now.  Beyond that, just like those early 50s or 40s artists, they often never play any instruments of any kind. Again, they’re just performing with their voice or singing or dancing. 

What we then start to see, I believe, is that maybe an artist like Jimi Hendrix, armed with a guitar, was “fighting” against something, whereas a dancing artist or a mere singer or voice performer  is …well…first of all, unarmed, and therefore also not really capable of creating music that seems as explosive as the guitar can be made to seem. The human voice can make a lot of sounds. But I don’t think it can crash like a guitar being run through tons of distorted feedback can. I don’t think it can really sound like a helicopter being shot out of the sky, boom boom boom. Especially when you remember that we’ve basically gotten rid of the heavy drummers too. 

So now we are onto a whole new thought. This thought is that, strangely enough, the guitar can be seen as being a sort of weapon. 

It’s actually a rather big thought.

** 

The next following truth about this strange musical instrument is that we can start to truly understand its power …only once we ironically also start to take note not just of who has been considered the greatest guitarist over the years…but rather who hasn’t been playing the instrument much at all.

Once we take into consideration who hasn’t much been playing guitar, or at least who hasn’t been seen to play guitar, the entire theory that moving onto using laptops to make music was our “evolution” really just gets a gigantic hole ripped through it. In my opinion the entire theory actually just falls flat on its face. 

For the obvious truth is that women and minorities seem to have not just been written out of the guitars history much of the time, but they also seem to be frequently directed, “purposely”, away from the guitar. As if it’s an instrument that is “not for them”, and that they “should not choose to use”. 

Like I’ve been saying, this is when you start to realize that maybe - just maybe- something a little strange is going on here. If, as we are now sternly told, the guitar is just some old dried up and worthless tool of the past, compared to this shiny new laptop of the corporate overlords, why then weren’t women ever playing it often  in the first place? 

To me, it’s like, if we lived in a world where women had been also playing guitars a lot for all the old decades, and where there was an equally popular equivalent for Hendrix who had been a woman, then maybe I’d acquiesce and agree that the guitar is now just an old dried up tool. But because oppressed groups seem missing from the old guitar scene, and because now guitars seem to be disappearing only during bad economic times, I can’t help but imagine there’s something more going on here. 

To put it simply, pop culture losing the guitar feels less like evolution and far more like it is being stripped of one of its most powerful weapons of rebellion. 

****