Name me a situation, any situation in life, that can’t be improved by an immediate guitar solo.
You’re running for the bus. You just miss it and it’s going to take you another 10 minutes to get home. In the distance, Marc Knopfler has just got to the finger-picking crescendo of Sultans of Swing and Joe Walsh is stretching off ready to blast through Hotel California. It’s going to be a good 10 minutes.
You turn on the kitchen tap, it comes off in your hands and water is gushing across your kitchen. Slash turns up and starts shredding Sweet Child O’ Mine behind you. Let it flood.
It’s the night before your final exams and you haven’t learned anything. You need to pass these tests so you can pursue your dream career. There’s a knock on the door; Eddie Van Halen wants to come in and play Eruption on loop less than a metre from your ears. Come right in Eddie! I’m just about to put the kettle on.
Unfortunately, none of these guitarists have put out a defining record in the last 30 years, because guitar music is dead. The defibrillators are being put away and the duty doctor is looking at his watch ready to declare the time. The time is 2006.
So why is there no guitar music anymore?
10-year cycles
Broadly – very broadly – guitar music has had 10-year cycles. You had rockabilly, original rock and roll and the popularisation of the Fender Telecaster in the 1950’s. In the 60s the Beatles and Rolling Stones came along and revolutionised pop music. The 70s brought punk, glam and stadium rock. The 80s saw hair and heavy metal, the 90s grunge, indie and Brit Pop. At the start of the noughties we had a wave of scenester bands from London and New York; The Libertines, The Strokes, The random nouns. Since then it’s been barren.
The bands that are currently selling out stadiums – and bizarrely it’s still mostly bands who draw the big crowds, despite the lack of new music – are the bands who started years ago and are still going. Green Day, Muse, Coldplay and the Arctic Monkeys, who put out their debut in 2006, are the acts on world tours and topping festival bills. The only real newcomers have been The 1975 but they’re probably not going to be treated with the same reverence in the history books. We’ve gone from a constant stream of guitar music to guitars being pushed to the fringes for the last 15-20 years. We’re feeding off of scraps of neo-soul clips on Instagram.
Why is there no guitar music anymore?
Is guitar music in terminal decline? It’s normally the teenagers who pick up a guitar and start a band. Now there has been no new and interesting guitar bands in the last 15-20 years they’ll have no new role models and no incentive to pick up the guitar. Fatally, it’s now been missing for a generation.
This shouldn’t be the case. The era of the internet, livestreaming and viral clips arrived at the turn of the century when bands were at their peak. Napster, Kazaa and MP3s were in the ascendancy at the start of the millennium and MySpace was a glittery colourgasm of emo and ironic sparkles. Guitar music was in prime position to capitalise and did dominate the early sharing. Yet it couldn’t stay in the zeitgeist.
Music, like fashion, often moves in cycles. Ideas that have lost momentum are revitalised as new and edgy in due course. Will guitar music witness a revival? It’s going need more than a few opportunely-timed solos.