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From the New York Times:
The Face of Solo Guitar Is Changing. It’s About Time.
Since the heyday of John Fahey, the genre has been seen as the province of white men. A new generation of diverse players is rapidly changing that.
By Grayson Haver Currin
April 28, 2021Before Yasmin Williams became a teenager, she found her perfect sport: “Guitar Hero,” the dizzying video game where aging rock staples enjoyed an unlikely second life through players wielding plastic controllers fashioned after vintage Gibsons.
… More than competition, “Guitar Hero” represented a revelation for Williams. Though she was often the only Black student in her public-school classes, she didn’t know the Beatles, let alone heavy metal, existed before the game. She cut her teeth on her father’s vintage go-go tapes and her brothers’ hip-hop CDs. Williams loved the clarinet, but she wondered if she could make more exciting music if she had an ax like her onscreen idols.
… Long dominated by much-mythologized white men like John Fahey, the form’s demographic is slowly broadening to include those who have often been omitted, including women, nonbinary instrumentalists and people of color.
Remember back when John Fahey got all the publicity and nobody had ever heard of Jimi Hendrix?
And who can forget the legendary Marty McFly, who taught Chuck Berry his new sound before vanishing into the mists of time?
And some claim that Prince was the second most famous black fentanyl abuser to die in Minneapolis, but I never heard of him.
Okay, seriously, I finally figured out that despite the confusing opening reference to “Guitar Hero,” the article is talking not about guitarists who play guitar solos in bands, but about solo guitarists who play unaccompanied by any bandmates.
You’ll be reassured to learn that even this extremely obscure and more or less pointless genre (if you are a really good guitarist, it’s not all that hard to find accompanists who will help you make more money, even after paying them, than you would make just noodling by yourself) is being culturally enriched by Diversity. Finally, women, nonbinary instrumentalists and people of color are overcoming the enormous hurdles that society erected to prevent them from picking up a guitar and playing it all by themselves.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Persian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Is it true that the Ramones never recorded a single guitar solo? If so, more power to them.
Or, rather, less. Van Halen’s notorious “no brown M&Ms” clause was meant to trap venues that hadn’t read the entire contract. Their sound-and-light system was potentially deadly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyw6cfLd_poReplies: @Sternhammer, @Lurker
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Nowadays it seems that every journalist's beat is race and diversity--or else. You have to find the woke angle hiding in any story.
This story seems to be, "There didn't used to be that many black folk guitarists. Now there are a few, but they're not that good, so we'll have to add the angle that they're black or female. And they're really transgressive against the whitey patriarchy with their urban rhythms."
The article reminded me of the gimmicky Japanese genre of shamisen, shakuhachi, or koto players who, rather than play traditional Japanese court music, get up and rock or jazz out. They're usually young men, and have green hair and wear sci-fi looking kimonos. They're the Japanese version of the adolescent American Jew whose parents sent him to years of accordion lessons, and now he's trying to salvage things by doing "hip" rock-polka mashups.Replies: @Erik L
Didn’t Howard Stern once say that Jeff Beck could be The Best Guitarist if he got over himself and joined a group, but he has to be Jeff Beck, Soloist, so musicians admire him snd DJs talk about him but nobody of the wider world buys his albums or knows who he is?
Everybody knows who Beck is....Blow By Blow and Wired are both brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiOPvOBd8IAReplies: @J.Ross
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj7leqoEG9oReplies: @petit bourgeois
I think "Joe Blow and the Blowhards" is a fairly typical way for rock bands to style themselves, at least in the 60s-70s, usually after the guitarist or lead singer became bigger than the band, or wanted to be; Beck just billed himself like that from the start, which actually was a clever strategy to become famous, rather than the reverse.
Stevie Ray Vaughn is hands down the best guitar player of all time.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.
As one of Jerry's Kids, I can't even conceive of how anyone could leave out Jerry Garcia. Listen to this (02:50 - 04:50) and get back to me, Trinity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V72qQhm12K8
You don't usually see Lindsey Buckingham on these lists - I do appreciate that addition.Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @slumber_j, @Peter D. Bredon
http://images.45cat.com/al-anderson-grocery-store-red-rooster-ny-s.jpg
"BIG AL" ANDERSON
"300 Pounds Of Twangin' Steel & Sex Appeal!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0kJdrfzjAg
And if we are talking about pure "settin' up there on the stage all by your lonesome" guitar heros, how about Leo Kottke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gh-U9T7T4Q
How could the NY Times publish an article about black solo guitarists without mentioning the great Stanley Jordan, who has been around for 40 years?
https://youtu.be/1QXdi25469U
https://youtu.be/cwwm4yvYCocReplies: @The Alarmist
Roy Clark was fret tapping 20 years before Eddie VH was and is all around better and more versatile than most of the guys on your list.
To leave Alex Lifeson of Rush, Steve Howe from Yes, Saul Hudson (Slash) from GnR, Duane Allman, Toni Iommi, Adam Jones of Tool, Terry Kath of Chicago (Transit Authority), Joe Walsh, Darrel Paul, Mick Mars all exceed Page and Hendrix as far as technicality and speed and range. And Led Zepplin and The JHE are two of my all time favorite bands.
Keith Richards is (as well as the Rolling Stones) so overrated IMO, but in the end, your list isn't bad and these things are always largely subjective anyway.
As far as drummers go - Danny Carey from Tool is better than Bonham, Peart, Rich, Moon, Mitchell, etc, etc, etc.
https://youtu.be/FssULNGSZIAReplies: @petit bourgeois
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J642mgHFajY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdHhfhLBZLw
☮
The only people on your list I care for with are Isley and Clapton.
That's four blacks and four whites on my list, but OK NYT, white guys are "the face". Jackasses.
And if you don't include non-rock guitarists, your list is incomplete and missing the more talented guitarists. Rock guitarists are generally not at the top of the list regarding technical ability. Much of it due to substance abuse. Although there are several (Buckethead comes to mind) that could hold their own with classical guitarists.
And the worst helicopter aficionado (tied with Kobe).
It’s cliché and banal to say nowadays, especially with the Great Replacement out in the open, but still, it’s worth doing:
Imagine if a higher percentage of whites starting moving into the NBA, so that every team had 5 legitimate white players (not tokens) and these began to dominate the legitimate superstar ranks, and an article came out saying:
“The Face of basketball Is Changing. It’s About Time.
Since the heyday of Dr. J, the genre has been seen as the province of black men. A new generation of diverse players is rapidly changing that.”
Oh, the howls!
So basically, the article is pushing for more blacks to take over from whites at playing bad guitar solos at open mic nights/Monday nights in bars/ on NPR/PBS music shows like “Austin City Limits”.
White guitarists, black guitarists … is there a category for “don’t know?”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead
Beautiful Summer Evening.
https://www.rockhall.com/sites/default/files/styles/c03g_desktop_1920_870/public/2019-11/Hero_BoDiddley_photoBobGruen.jpg?h=38669ab1&itok=lolOQh1-
“What is these white people talkin’ about?!”
Imagine if a higher percentage of whites starting moving into the NBA, so that every team had 5 legitimate white players (not tokens) and these began to dominate the legitimate superstar ranks, and an article came out saying:
"The Face of basketball Is Changing. It’s About Time.
Since the heyday of Dr. J, the genre has been seen as the province of black men. A new generation of diverse players is rapidly changing that."
Oh, the howls!Replies: @Steve Sailer
Two of the top 5 leading candidates for the NBA MVP award this year are white, both Balkans:
https://www.basketball-reference.com/friv/mvp.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJttL2ZBJ-oReplies: @Morton's toes, @R.G. Camara
To play in the NBA, is all I have to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_Wasn%27t_Stallin%27
It’s amazing how much Jews get away with in Israel.
This highlights the political uselessness of the HBD approach. So eager to talk about how POC are recognized, and after all, brother Nixon was certainly trying to help out Black people with forced bussing and affirmative action.
So by golly, dontcha see, it’s just illogical to be so galldarn anti-White. Dontcha see?
You guys should’ve thrown in with White people, especially the White working and middle class. But you were so desperate to be petted by sociopathic Yuppies and liberal Ashkenazi.
For the effectiveness of moderation, look to the moderates of South Africa and what they wrought.
http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/0ea71816354e9dbdc31a56b0921b8fd4?width=1024
Of course. As it always turns out, genetics is not the deciding factor. It’s practice, practice, practice.
Stern is a douche.
Everybody knows who Beck is….Blow By Blow and Wired are both brilliant.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
I can’t EVEN….
As one of Jerry’s Kids, I can’t even conceive of how anyone could leave out Jerry Garcia. Listen to this (02:50 – 04:50) and get back to me, Trinity.
You don’t usually see Lindsey Buckingham on these lists – I do appreciate that addition.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/paul-pena-the-blind-composer-behind-steve-millers-jet-airliner/#comment-2073407
“Fleetwood mac was better than you’ll ever know prof”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5kOzGwsHXwReplies: @YetAnotherAnon, @James J O'Meara
I can't stand the sound of that guitar, for one thing. So is it the tedium people dig? The mistakes? If you're gonna devote your career to improvisation, you at least should learn to play in key or mode or whatever. This seems to have been beyond him.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Sollipsist
https://youtu.be/RhcEXk_pJ9cReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Wes Montgomery , Charlie Christian , T – Bone Walker — WTF is the NY Times problem ? Talent matters . Fuck Off you losers .
Wow, the NYT has finally discovered YouTube! They are such kool kidz!
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
What? No Al Anderson?
“BIG AL” ANDERSON
“300 Pounds Of Twangin’ Steel & Sex Appeal!”
This Fahey guy seems to havebeen a very talented man,who entertained a lotofpeople. He doesnt deserve to be backhanded by the sh#t eating NYT!
I’ve been playing guitar for two decades. I’ve never even heard of John Fahey. He’s never shown up on a setlist and I’ve played some odd setlists. Listening to his music, it’s pretty generic.
Lots of people epitomize solo guitar in various genres. Chet Atkins. Joe Pass. Tommy Emmanuel. Even Mark Knopfler at points.
I’m guessing they picked John Fahey because he’s some random dead goy and obscure enough not to offend Boomer guitar-o-phile common sense.
The big guitar solo is at the tail end of the song. Just listen to the whole thing, though - well worth your while.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8bWGGA-5HM
John williams for me. No not that one, the Australian
Or, rather, less. Van Halen's notorious "no brown M&Ms" clause was meant to trap venues that hadn't read the entire contract. Their sound-and-light system was potentially deadly.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/510519ace4b0869f641519d9/1504623982585-Q6818Z7RXQZAJWLTYRUD/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kNgFyjlEyNHlSWEjE-QCU1p7gQa3H78H3Y0txjaiv_0fDoOvxcdMmMKkDsyUqMSsMWxHk725yiiHCCLfrh8O1z5QPOohDIaIeljMHgDF5CVlOqpeNLcJ80NK65_fV7S1UdLKTLgsLX9_T7LnpaostY9WYLb0IFNaX6bgMhY2dUNBWIB-7cQgYKo_bDpR6cEVkg/Guitar+Jack+No+Output.jpgReplies: @Kibernetika, @Anon
Not sure if Steve was consciously chumming the waters, but one of Van Halen’s (or Van Hagar’s) coolest songs was titled “It’s about Time.” Forget about the lyrics and vocals, and dig Ed’s playing, which is all over the place!
Great driving music.
Steve, don’t you remember the well-worn lore of Andres Segovia meeting some Roma at Las Cruces at midnight, in order to obtain “shred-privilege?” If we want to free ax artistry from its colonialist roots, all riffs must be recalculated. For example, when Quincy Jones called in that obscure Dutch session guitarist to punch up “Beat It,” just how many trillions got redlined out of Black folks’ master tape?
The number of foreign-born players in the NBA reached a high of 28% a few years ago before coming back down to the 23% today.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/07/27/immigrant-players-steal-bases-and-basketballs-not-jobs/
I love the title ‘Immigrant players steal bases and basketballs not jobs’, who knew that the limited places at top flight professional sports weren’t really jobs. (Luka Doncic is on course to become the richest Slovenian man in the world soon)
This map is about 6 or 7 years out of date but represents all time numbers not at any given time. (Apparently the Icelandic guy couldn’t secure his work visa in 1986 so got drafted but never played. Presumably the government at the time was still able to wonder why anyone was importing Icelanders for the NBA.)
This video is by a black youth basketball coach who examines the reasons that European players are often comparatively more skilled (If not necessarily more talented) due to the academy system similar to that of European soccer.
Here is the second part.
Larry Bird was famous for being a vicious trash talker in his time, which today would've gotten him suspended for "racial hate." But Larry was from an era were whites could do such a thing, and he grew up playing in largely-white Indiana, so he was able to psychologically grow and fight blacks on the same terms.Replies: @Bubba
Still funny after all these years.
Of course, that’s the gist of minoritarianism. Yeah, once upon a time there was oppression, oppression–slavery, serfdom, etc. That’s long gone. The minoritarian demand is always that the majority make itself available–exploitation, money, jobs, schools, neighborhoods, nations … and of course, country clubs–for the minority. Straight white guys going off and doing whatever for the benefit of white guys: “Racism!” “Sexism!” “Anti-Semitism!” “Islamophobia!” “Xenophobia!” “Homophobia!” and now debuting “Transphobia!”
White guys living life for themselves … Nazis!
White guys doing stuff for everybody … Nazis!Replies: @Jim Christian
Everybody knows who Beck is....Blow By Blow and Wired are both brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiOPvOBd8IAReplies: @J.Ross
Okay.
the article is talking not about guitarists who play guitar solos in bands, but about solo guitarists who play unaccompanied by any bandmates.
Ok, but even by those criteria the premise ( Since the heyday of John Fahey, the genre has been seen as the province of white men) is wrong. Robert Johnson is more well known and influential than Fahey. I seem to remember black acoustic guitarists like Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy enjoying some popularity. There were also some obscure female guitarists once like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.
Or are we talking about a genre specific to Fahey? Unpolished, sometimes atonal, aspergery acoustic guitar music for higher IQ hipsters? In that case, even though I actually like Fahey, it is not surprising there are few non-whites or women going down that path.
Suzanne Vega
Julie Felix
Tracy ChapmanThese artistes are so obscure don't bother to look for videos on YT!
I heard the name John Fahey maybe twice before his recent death, at which I saw some obits, but never heard any of the music. The way he's referred to, by the sort of people who do the referring, leads me to think that someone like Kingsley Amis or Philip Larkin would have had a field day eviscerating such a poseur or charlatan.
I imagine he'd sound like Bernard, in Lucky Jim, except as a guitarist rather than a painter. Or, come to think of it, his recorder-playing father. King of the pseudes. Or the modernist oboe player as well; come to think of it, the jazz-loving Amis had quite a hatred for any other kind of music, including "filthy Mozart".Replies: @Barack Obama's secret Unz account, @Curle
I think we could replace the entire staff at Pitchfork with you. But the music reviewers union would have you up on charges for being too accurate and concise
“You’ll be reassured to learn that even this extremely obscure and more or less pointless genre …”
It’s not altogether pointless. Billy Bragg has made a nice career for himself staying out of bands with his strident guitar & made a lot of points along the way, even if they’re often the wrong points. Another non-fentanyl using Minneapolis product, Leo Kottke is a guitar wizard who may be a little obscure but hardly pointless. And if you want to take solo guitaring a little more seriously, there’s a long tradition of the solo acoustic classical guitar genre, which hasn’t erected too many cultural hurdles to picking up a guitar & playing it, no matter who you are (https://www.theguitarjournal.com/top-25-classical-guitarists/) Although how any list of top classical guitarists could omit Carlos Montoya beats me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BucketheadReplies: @gent
Buckethead’s skin is white, but that isn’t enough to establish race. Regardless, Monument Valley makes him an honorary Aryan.
Guitar soloists remind me of watching Bernie Williams foul off pitches with a full count. Fascinating but at a certain point it’s enough already.
Buckethead. Type him in youtube and listen to ‘Soothsayer,’ ‘Nottingham Lace,’ ‘Jordan,’ etc. Preferably the live versions.
Paul Gilbert – Anything off the “Fuzz Universe” album.
Eric Johnson – ‘Cliffs of Dover’ and anything off of the album “Tones.”
Andy McKee – ‘Drifting’ and ‘Rylynn.’
Stevie Ray, Yngwie, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, etc. are all great, but IMO Buckethead blows them all away.
I’ve been playing the guitar (sort of) since I was a teenager. And I know the story of pop music, particularly rock, probably better than I should (I should have spent more time studying useful academic subjects).
I’ve never heard of John Fahey.
Guitar Hero?
That dreadful newspaper can’t get anything right.
Not with this guy. But then, there’s only one Leo Kottke.
Donovan wasn’t a Band but when he went electric Jeff Beck was the guitarist doing the lead riffs that kept his records in the charts
Solo guitar… Solo guitar has a face… and you must make a friend of solo guitar. Solo guitar and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago.
Funny no one’s mentioned Guns n Roses’ lead guitarist Slash yet. In a band accused of White Supremacy before it was cool, especially for the song Civil War, Slash was always known to be Caribbean of African and Jewish descent.
Lots of people epitomize solo guitar in various genres. Chet Atkins. Joe Pass. Tommy Emmanuel. Even Mark Knopfler at points.
I'm guessing they picked John Fahey because he's some random dead goy and obscure enough not to offend Boomer guitar-o-phile common sense.Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Eric Novak, @Achmed E. Newman
I have some music by John Fahey. I must admit I’m not too crazy about it though, but occasionally will give it a play. As you are a guitarist I am very surprised you have never heard of him.
What they really mean is FINGER STYLE GUITAR…most definitely White Guys-Americans Guitar..
Here are a few of them:
John Fahey(Listen to Fahey’s Christmas Album)
Leo Kottke(Jack Fig)
Adrian Legg(When Steve Vai heard first heard Midwest Sunday for the first time he had tears in his eyes…according to Steve Vai)
Michael Hedges(listen to Rickover’s Dreams)
Tuck Andress
Pierre Bensusan(DADGAD TUNING)
Will Ackerman
Why was America too White back in August 1969? Is China too Chinese?….Is India too Hindu-South Asian?
Up Next: The Clancy Brothers were too Irish……The Uillean Pipes too Irish….Ireland is too Irish….
The NYT wants us DEAD….
The late 18 hundreds in the Midwest:Amateur Fingerstyle Harp Guitar Orchestras-All White Guys…
The University of Wisconsin Racine has a Fingerstyle Guitar undergraduate degree program that was started by John Stropes 25 years ago…
60’s pop tune RENEE…something like that…beautifully version by an Italian Fingerstyle guitarists…
All the Candyrat Fingerstyle Guitarists..White Guys…
There is a beautiful Fingerstyle tune about the Orkney Islands.....have you heard it?
White Guy Mark O’Connor is as outstanding on the Steel String Guitar as the fiddle..
Go to YouTube:Music for a Found Harmonium on Steel String Acoustic...
When I took fingerstyle lessons, the first thing my teacher told me to do was to get every recording by Mississippi John Hurt that I could get my hands on and immerse myself in them.
https://youtu.be/XCp8o3t-3v8
Frank Zappa was a great guitar player that should be on the list:
Guitars aside, how about drums? This is a Zeppelin cover of an old Delta blues number, about the great flood of ’27. The black influence-from Motown to Delta gospel music in Physical Graffiti-is heavy on Led Zeppelin.
Cross-pollination goes both ways: John Bonham’s (GOAT drummer for me) beat on WTLB has been sampled very heavily by rappers.
Jesus Christ, people: sometimes good music is just good music. There doesn’t need to be any story behind it. It’s like why Euler’s formula is beautiful. It just *is*.
Last I heard, Beck’s latest gig is driving around his oldest friend, Jimmy Page, to interviews and appointments, in one of his restored American hot rods. Jimmy has never possessed a driver’s license.
And neither have any of his girlfriends. They weren’t old enough.
You’re such a Boomer loser sometimes.
This well deserved shaming essay wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the brilliant Sonny Sharrock. While primarily an innovative jazz guitarist, with his skill set, you could comfortably refer to him as Jimi Hendrix Jr.
Do a YouTube search on the man and you’ll come across stuff like Sonny executing masterful guitar licks that would slap a giant grin across Jimi’s face, and did you know he was the creator of the theme to Space Ghost Coast to coast?
Enjoy listening to Sonny, and don’t pay no attention to them ig’nant dumazz wiggah house slaves at the damn-azz NYT!
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
Mark Knopfler. Duane Allman. Drum solos suck harder than tungsten carbide.
Best guitar solo of all time?
It's most of the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwyXQn9g40I
Or, rather, less. Van Halen's notorious "no brown M&Ms" clause was meant to trap venues that hadn't read the entire contract. Their sound-and-light system was potentially deadly.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/510519ace4b0869f641519d9/1504623982585-Q6818Z7RXQZAJWLTYRUD/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kNgFyjlEyNHlSWEjE-QCU1p7gQa3H78H3Y0txjaiv_0fDoOvxcdMmMKkDsyUqMSsMWxHk725yiiHCCLfrh8O1z5QPOohDIaIeljMHgDF5CVlOqpeNLcJ80NK65_fV7S1UdLKTLgsLX9_T7LnpaostY9WYLb0IFNaX6bgMhY2dUNBWIB-7cQgYKo_bDpR6cEVkg/Guitar+Jack+No+Output.jpgReplies: @Kibernetika, @Anon
Brown M&Ms would only be caught on the day of the gig, too late to rejigger the electronics or hire more qualified stage hands, so I have to call BS on that legend.
—–
Nowadays it seems that every journalist’s beat is race and diversity–or else. You have to find the woke angle hiding in any story.
This story seems to be, “There didn’t used to be that many black folk guitarists. Now there are a few, but they’re not that good, so we’ll have to add the angle that they’re black or female. And they’re really transgressive against the whitey patriarchy with their urban rhythms.”
The article reminded me of the gimmicky Japanese genre of shamisen, shakuhachi, or koto players who, rather than play traditional Japanese court music, get up and rock or jazz out. They’re usually young men, and have green hair and wear sci-fi looking kimonos. They’re the Japanese version of the adolescent American Jew whose parents sent him to years of accordion lessons, and now he’s trying to salvage things by doing “hip” rock-polka mashups.
Prince demonstrates how to make a guitar get pregnant:
Michael Hedges(listen to Rickover’s Dreams)
Tuck Andress
Pierre Bensusan(DADGAD TUNING)
Will Ackerman
Why was America too White back in August 1969? Is China too Chinese?....Is India too Hindu-South Asian?
Up Next: The Clancy Brothers were too Irish......The Uillean Pipes too Irish....Ireland is too Irish....The NYT wants us DEAD....
The late 18 hundreds in the Midwest:Amateur Fingerstyle Harp Guitar Orchestras-All White Guys...
The University of Wisconsin Racine has a Fingerstyle Guitar undergraduate degree program that was started by John Stropes 25 years ago...
60’s pop tune RENEE...something like that...beautifully version by an Italian Fingerstyle guitarists...
All the Candyrat Fingerstyle Guitarists..White Guys...Replies: @War for Blair Mountain, @GeraldB, @Peter D. Bredon
DON’T TURN AWAY RENEE….yeah that’s the one…. beautifull version by an Italian finger style guitarist…
There is a beautiful Fingerstyle tune about the Orkney Islands…..have you heard it?
White Guy Mark O’Connor is as outstanding on the Steel String Guitar as the fiddle..
Go to YouTube:Music for a Found Harmonium on Steel String Acoustic…
Jose Feliciano, or am I missing something?
This NYT article is really phoning it in with their templated find some random black people doing something and just say how brave they are to overcome Emmet Till and red lining.
Also, as you mentioned the “solo” modifier on guitarists is pretty lame since most of the best are in bands or at least sing (as a non music nerd Joe Satriani and Steve Vai are the only two i can think of who did just instrumentals).
Some more modern rock non white guitarists that were viciously excluded by the man and thus nobody has heard of… 20+ years ago:
Herman Li of DragonForce (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Li)
Slash
I owned a John Fahey album, I think it was called Blind Joe Death. The author of the article is the biggest idiot in the world. Fahey had a small, cult following. Hundreds of guitarists, black and white, are better known.
I certainly agree that both Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery were outstanding innovators on the guitar and I love the music of both of them.
But I think a mention also has to be given to Robert Johnson whose guitar playing was amazing (and solo) and of course to Django Reinhardt (gypsy, not black.)
BB King was also influential on the whole generation of guitarists, and there were so many other great black guitarists like Otis Rush, a left hander like Hendrix. Another black guitarist whom I like very much is Robert Cray.
But if you really want to have brilliant contemporary unaccompanied guitar playing I don’t think you can beat the work of Bireli Lagrene and Sylvain Luc for sheer virtuosity.
This is a popular tune, but by no means their best work, but still pretty remarkable.
If it's diversity we're looking for, let's go Korean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0NJiasWrLc
Then we go to guys who have developed skills so unbelievable that they just intimidate good guitarists and make them want to quit. Look at a guy like Luca Stricagnoli, who plays unbelievable pieces, never even picking a string with pick or finger: he plays all with tapping and legato, a technique in which he hammers his left hand fingers on the fretboard, producing a note without plucking the string. Check him out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLVYK80vMMM
He doesn't just do classical stuff, and you can find his covers of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N Roses, ACDC, etc.Replies: @jon, @AndrewR, @Jonathan Mason
Lots of people epitomize solo guitar in various genres. Chet Atkins. Joe Pass. Tommy Emmanuel. Even Mark Knopfler at points.
I'm guessing they picked John Fahey because he's some random dead goy and obscure enough not to offend Boomer guitar-o-phile common sense.Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Eric Novak, @Achmed E. Newman
I’ve been playing guitar since 1980, at age 11, and in the past 40 years have only seen John Fahey referenced once. In the 1980s, I had a single piece of sheet music for a John Fahey fingerstyle piece called “Over the Waterfall”. Forty years, one reference. I thought the John Fahey named in article cannot possibly be the same guy. How did they dig this guy up? Leo Kottke, who was on Capitol Records, was massive in comparison.
I wouldn’t say he’s unknown. Here’s Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jeff Beck playing “Jeff’s Boogie” which is a Yardbirds song from 1966:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyw6cfLd_poReplies: @Sternhammer, @Lurker
Yeah, man, that guitar is unbelievable. But Hagar’s vocals? Compare to Plant and Page “When the Levee Breaks” a couple of comments down, and good singing will sure make people listen to good guitar for a lot longer.
So they’re referring to classical guitar, which very few white men play?
I repeat: Buckethead
He's a good guitarist, and he does indeed wear a bucket on his head. So he's way ahead of me measured by those criteria.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
I would add Richard Thompson to the list. He’s equally accomplished on acoustic and electric guitar, and he doesn’t really go in for pyrotechnics so it’s hard to pick out a single video that will blow you away, but here is a nice one:
And if we are talking about pure “settin’ up there on the stage all by your lonesome” guitar heros, how about Leo Kottke:
Meanwhile, underneath manufactured corporate pop stars, most Jazz musicians are now … White. And most of the Blues musicians are White also.
As far as blues goes, go to any biker bar on a Saturday early afternoon and you will hear a local blues band playing. Like for example Cooks Corner in Orange County. [Yes its Orange County so the vast majority of the bikers are dentists and doctors].
Blues Saraceno, a White guy, was the guy who did the theme to the History Channel “Men Who Built America” and a bunch of other stuff, movies and video games.
When it comes to having people actually PAY to listen to your music, or use it, its pretty much 100% White guys on guitars. Under the corporate radar, blues and jazz turned White and are mostly the playground of White dudes. Rock by another name.
I await the next NYT article in the series—in which we will learn that white people stole the guitar from black people while they ruled Spain with wisdom and justice.
ps: I note that comments are turned off. If they hadn’t been, the mockery of the historical ignorance in the article would have been unbearable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJttL2ZBJ-oReplies: @Morton's toes, @R.G. Camara
The European tennis system is completely squashing the American tennis system on the men’s side (which is only one 95% of people pay any attention to) now and for over the past fifteen or so years.
The last time an American was at the top of men’s tennis is around the last time anybody cared who the best guitar players were, BTW.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
How could you leave out Dick Dale?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56SAxtf-RTg
I saw Manitas de Plata perform at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall when I was thirteen. I became familiar with him through an album of his my hillbilly dad gave me. A fledgling guitar player at the time I was almost convinced to put down the guitar. I thought it impossible to attain that level of mastery. He was not technically a solo artist as he often had singers and dancers with him in performance.
Fifteen years or so ago I attended one of Muriel Anderson’s annual concerts in her home town of Downers Grove, IL. She is one of the finest solo guitar players I have ever heard, in concert or on vinyl.
When I think of solo guitar I think of players like Leo Kotke, John Fahey, and Derek Bailey. And to be honest I’ve never equated facility with a game like Guitar Hero to be an indication of talent on an actual guitar
All of the legendary bluesmen were essentially solo guitarists.
Even the wokest NYT subscribers must get tired of reading the same article (with the same tone of sullen hostility mixed with gloating triumphalism) day after day after day after day.
For the white NYT subscriber, this steady diet of spiritualized, abstracted "cutting" provides solace, release, some measure of absolution for their whiteness. And no small measure of smug sanctimony.
how about this? Roy Clark, “Malaguena”
Well, that and genetics. Pretty sure they are 6’11 and 6’7, and I think Balkans are genetically some of the tallest people in the world. At 6’3, with an English-Welsh background, Steve Nash seems like a pretty good example of what you’re talking about, and I recall some grousing when he got his second MVP, which I chalked up to racism.
Shades of how Pedro Martinez was listed as 6'1" and was really 5'8"
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
Carlos Santana. Europa is hair-raising. And it’s about my continent! Black Magic Woman is almost as good.
guitar has been dead since the late 00s. there was still some stuff happening in the early 00s but by 2007, the specific year i use to measure this stuff, things began to fall off a cliff. and it’s been totally and completely dead for over 10 years now. as have all instruments, but guitar serves as the bellweather for music.
since 11 or 12 about 90% of music has been studio produced claptrap. notable scores for films aren’t even produced anymore. John Mayer was the last good guitar player, and he wasn’t even that good. a fact i lamented on here over 10 years ago.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
Never heard of Steve Stevens but for his name alone should be in the iSteve hall of fame.
How could the NY Times publish an article about black solo guitarists without mentioning the great Stanley Jordan, who has been around for 40 years?
Ok, but even by those criteria the premise ( Since the heyday of John Fahey, the genre has been seen as the province of white men) is wrong. Robert Johnson is more well known and influential than Fahey. I seem to remember black acoustic guitarists like Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy enjoying some popularity. There were also some obscure female guitarists once like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.
Or are we talking about a genre specific to Fahey? Unpolished, sometimes atonal, aspergery acoustic guitar music for higher IQ hipsters? In that case, even though I actually like Fahey, it is not surprising there are few non-whites or women going down that path.Replies: @Ano, @Peter D. Bredon, @Barack Obama's secret Unz account
Hello,
Just off the top of my head…
I alone in the whole world have heard of these American guitar-playing female solo artistes who were cruelly denied worldwide commerical success and fame because of white males….
Melanie Safka
Suzanne Vega
Julie Felix
Tracy Chapman
These artistes are so obscure don’t bother to look for videos on YT!
like most people in this thread i’ve also never even heard of John Fahey. but i’m not surprised by that kind of thing. this is the kind of stuff NPR does all the time, and by extension i figure, other extreme leftist outlets. they do a show or article on some VERY obscure musician.
so we’re gonna pretend Segovia didn’t even exist? since they’re trying to make this about something really specific. guitar players who don’t even play accompanied, so supposedly Satriani and the like would be out – even though some of those guys play solo once in a while too, they mainly play in bands because they’re…better. and can sell platinum albums by playing in bands.
back during the real music era from the 70s thru the 90s, there were a bunch of solo albums released by mind blowing players, who weren’t even able to sell 500,000 units because the average music buyer doesn’t care as much about solo guitar playing with no singing or even drumming. there was this bass player, Michael Manring, who was insane.
I, as an older iSteve reader can attest, no white man ever wanted to hear songs by, let alone buy records by nor attend concerts by a black female guitarist solo artiste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Armatrading
As one of Jerry's Kids, I can't even conceive of how anyone could leave out Jerry Garcia. Listen to this (02:50 - 04:50) and get back to me, Trinity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V72qQhm12K8
You don't usually see Lindsey Buckingham on these lists - I do appreciate that addition.Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @slumber_j, @Peter D. Bredon
Commenter Trelane posted this great clip in 2017:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/paul-pena-the-blind-composer-behind-steve-millers-jet-airliner/#comment-2073407
“Fleetwood mac was better than you’ll ever know prof”
Here, Lindsey Buckingham does the the same thing, live, with one guitar. Admittedly, he'd been playing this song for about 30 years.
https://youtu.be/qNM6IuA87eM
Chet Atkins anyone?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OfJunCpEMyQ
Exactly. Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Earl Klugh. More ignorant kneegroidal BS. History began the week before last.
Off topic, the khaki Dockers coservacux are raving over Tim Scott’s load of blackety black sugar-coated manure that he delivered in response to Joesheimers Biden tonight.
Over at (Brains)-Free Republic, some cuck posted a vanity post: Tom (sic) Scott Nails It.
LOL–can’t even get the boy’s (short and simple) name right, but he’s our hope for 2024. Got it.
A negro can take a dump on a paper plate and these White clowns will reach for a knife and fork.
I saw Stanley Jordan doing his amazing guitar solos in the mid eighties and it looks like he still is going strong, although he changed his hairstyle. He plays all the accompaniment to his solos at the same time he plays solo guitar.
Very talented guy!
Bill Burr, back when he was still funny, had a bit about how the “White people are evil” movies had been done so much that they were all the way down to the first all-black swim team, and he just didn’t care anymore. This article is kind of like that bit.
Glenn Jones
not only plays solo guitar beautifully but is phenomenal in Cul de Sac – their track Nepenthe (from the album “China Gate”) is stupendous. Jones may also have carved out a career as a black R&B star.
Nevertheless, the best axeman has to be Robert Fripp who long ago established full plectrum dominance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8wtZeVAa9IReplies: @Niccolo Soldo, @frankie p
Wow, what a horribly dull song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyw6cfLd_poReplies: @Sternhammer, @Lurker
Great phrase, never seen it used like that before.
Not to mention buskers polluting the airwaves:
https://cwbchicago.com/2021/04/woman-gets-4-years-for-stabbing-cta-busker-whose-music-gave-her-a-headache.html
After ten seconds of the video played in court I’m sure the perp has a decent chance of a plea of “self defence” succeeding on appeal.
Of course, that's the gist of minoritarianism. Yeah, once upon a time there was oppression, oppression--slavery, serfdom, etc. That's long gone. The minoritarian demand is always that the majority make itself available--exploitation, money, jobs, schools, neighborhoods, nations ... and of course, country clubs--for the minority. Straight white guys going off and doing whatever for the benefit of white guys: "Racism!" "Sexism!" "Anti-Semitism!" "Islamophobia!" "Xenophobia!" "Homophobia!" and now debuting "Transphobia!"
White guys living life for themselves ... Nazis!Replies: @Lurker, @RichardTaylor, @Random Anonymous
White guys doing stuff for other whites … Nazis!
White guys doing stuff for everybody … Nazis!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8wtZeVAa9IReplies: @Niccolo Soldo, @frankie p
Always my favorite work from Stevie Ray Vaughan. It pointed to the direction that he would have moved in if he had lived longer. He would have made songs like this, much richer in harmony than the straightforward blues that made him famous. He was moving towards jazz, in a way similar to Jimi Hendrix before his death.
Of course, that's the gist of minoritarianism. Yeah, once upon a time there was oppression, oppression--slavery, serfdom, etc. That's long gone. The minoritarian demand is always that the majority make itself available--exploitation, money, jobs, schools, neighborhoods, nations ... and of course, country clubs--for the minority. Straight white guys going off and doing whatever for the benefit of white guys: "Racism!" "Sexism!" "Anti-Semitism!" "Islamophobia!" "Xenophobia!" "Homophobia!" and now debuting "Transphobia!"
White guys living life for themselves ... Nazis!Replies: @Lurker, @RichardTaylor, @Random Anonymous
The fundamental issue is not minoritarianism vs majoritarianism. That evades the central issue of RACE.
As our noble host pointed out, the NYT article was about unaccompanied guitar. I am a fan of this genre and of John Fahey in particular. As long as we are doing lists, Leo Kottke, David Lindley, Doc Watson, Tommy Emmanuel, Chet Atkins, Ry Cooder, Michael Hedges all belong.
I am not a fan of NYT or of race conscious art criticism, so I was prepared to be disappointed. And comparison to Fahey did not help my expectations.
But the gal can play. Here is Miss Williams doing her “Restless Heart”, which reminds me a little of Fahey, but maybe more of Michael Hedges. And she’s got David Lindley’s fashion sense.
Have you heard of Justin Johnson? He's a little more "conventional" but very good.
There are many excellent jazz players who put all of the traditional “guitar heroes” to shame with greater technique, deeper harmonic understanding, and excellent right hand picking or finger style skills. Now there is a whole new generation of young acoustic players who employ superior pick ups to enable them to play guitar and drums at the same time, using the percussive sound of fingers or nails on strings or the top of the guitar to play percussion and guitar parts at the same time.
If it’s diversity we’re looking for, let’s go Korean:
Then we go to guys who have developed skills so unbelievable that they just intimidate good guitarists and make them want to quit. Look at a guy like Luca Stricagnoli, who plays unbelievable pieces, never even picking a string with pick or finger: he plays all with tapping and legato, a technique in which he hammers his left hand fingers on the fretboard, producing a note without plucking the string. Check him out.
He doesn’t just do classical stuff, and you can find his covers of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N Roses, ACDC, etc.
There is a lot of guitar knowledge in this commentariat and it strikes me that some of it is age-related.
I know that when I used to evaluate elderly clients, it was very rare indeed to find people over the age of 70 listening to music for recreation or even background and if they were asked about that taste they would usually reply country.
There was one black woman who listened to a lot of blues and r&b on a satellite the radio station.
The guitar became a very popular instrument because it makes sounds in roughly the same sonic range as the human voice, and is capable of expressing human emotions as a substitute for or as an accompanist to a vocalist.
Jazz and its heyday thrived on producing jazzed upversions of great songs, often from the movies or stage musicals, by people like Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, or Irving Berlin, but once the Beatles had shot their bolt, it seemed that the era of great songs had passed and there were fewer new tunes to become jazz standards.
And if you don't know the tune and you don't know the words, do you appreciate an instrumental version as much? Would this tune get under your skin in the same way if you were a young person who had never heard the song?
https://youtu.be/hDOmZhkpIiEReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’ and in the Balkans they are not Balking.
To play in the NBA, is all I have to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_Wasn%27t_Stallin%27
Fahey is one of the pioneers of ambient, he was well-versed in traditional folk music, one of his favorite albums was “American anthology of folk music” (which I highly recommend, very listenable), I personally like all of the Fahey I listened to but I recommend “Rain Forests, Oceans, & Other Themes”, “Fare Forward Voyagers” and “America”.
My favorite part of the NYT excerpt is she does not credit any humans, other than herself, for her guitar playing. No music teachers ect. She does give a shout out to Guitar Hero.
Could Jeff Beck have kept Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group as Stewart was entering into the few years when he was among the best rock songwriters?
Did Mickie Most, who had the best pop instincts of any British record producer of the late 1960's, recognize Rod the Mod's future star potential as a singer-songwriter? It's forgivable if he didn't, since Rod took a while to develop his writing skills. Even on his 1971 masterpiece, Every Picture Tells A Story, he only wrote or co-wrote three of the eight tracks, but two of them are amazing: the opening title song and "Maggie May." Given Most's pop orientation, he surely would have sought to edit "Maggie May" down to a suitable length for radio play (it was over five minutes with the long mandolin coda).
All in all, things worked out for both Beck and Stewart. Rod became the star he always wanted to be (and the Faces were a better backing band for him: Ron Wood's the right foil for just about anyone), and Beck got to play guitar in all kinds of settings, where everyone respects his musicianship. He's not the International Rock Star that Clapton or Page is, but he seems content with his lot.
Well, there’s a reference to Fahey in the video of Leo Kottke that jb posted below (LINK). It says:
So that’s two, I guess.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/paul-pena-the-blind-composer-behind-steve-millers-jet-airliner/#comment-2073407
“Fleetwood mac was better than you’ll ever know prof”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5kOzGwsHXwReplies: @YetAnotherAnon, @James J O'Meara
I think posting Fleetwood Mac is WAY off this topic (and in any case Peter Green was their best guitarist, though I do like Lindsay’s stuff). Aren’t we talking (usually) unaccompanied guitar, usually though not exclusively accoustic?
Stefan Grossman, Stefan Sobell, Davey Graham (who influenced Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, John Martyn, Carthy, Simon, Page, Blackmore), Martin Simpson, Martin Taylor, Gordon Tyrrall, Martyn Wyndham-Read – most people in the UK folk tradition in fact.
This 1963 Davey Graham recording is worth it alone for capturing the point of inflexion where the beehive was giving way to long straight hair (a la Francoise Hardy) for the hip young ladies in the audience.
My favourite accoustic guy is Martin Carthy, who plays accoustic with drone notes the way that Richard Thompson did with electric. He’s in his 70s now, so can’t do the pyrotechnics of old, but his rhythm and timing were still great when I saw him a few years back.
I’ve jammed hard with one of the best guitarists on the planet…someone you haven’t heard of, and never will.
I won’t mention his name in order to preserve his obscurity.
If it's diversity we're looking for, let's go Korean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0NJiasWrLc
Then we go to guys who have developed skills so unbelievable that they just intimidate good guitarists and make them want to quit. Look at a guy like Luca Stricagnoli, who plays unbelievable pieces, never even picking a string with pick or finger: he plays all with tapping and legato, a technique in which he hammers his left hand fingers on the fretboard, producing a note without plucking the string. Check him out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLVYK80vMMM
He doesn't just do classical stuff, and you can find his covers of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N Roses, ACDC, etc.Replies: @jon, @AndrewR, @Jonathan Mason
That guy is amazing. I didn’t even know that kind of playing was possible. Thanks, although now I am probably going to waste my night going down that rabbit hole.
Lots of people epitomize solo guitar in various genres. Chet Atkins. Joe Pass. Tommy Emmanuel. Even Mark Knopfler at points.
I'm guessing they picked John Fahey because he's some random dead goy and obscure enough not to offend Boomer guitar-o-phile common sense.Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Eric Novak, @Achmed E. Newman
Thank you! There’s another I just couldn’t think of that should be in Mr. Trinity’s list.
The big guitar solo is at the tail end of the song. Just listen to the whole thing, though – well worth your while.
Agreed about Duane and add on Dicky Betts.
Best guitar solo of all time?
It’s most of the song:
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
Rock drummers suck. But here’s a solo or two..
https://youtu.be/d33x1HyJZ10Replies: @vhrm, @Jim Christian
Then there’s the asian approach.
White guys doing stuff for everybody … Nazis!Replies: @Jim Christian
Well, White guys certainly keep the lights on and the toilets flushing. Work white women don’t compete for or demand preference-in-hiring EEOC guidelines to get, except for ez-work inspector positions. Which makes sense given they’ve never done that work. It’s for the best. We don’t need bitches on-site. They only fuck everything up just being there. Exactly like everything else they get involved with. You name it, women’s involvement ruined it.
Rock drummers? Just another term for : Roadie.
And who has ever heard of Reggie Young? Perhaps the best guitar player of all time.
It’s amazing how proud of their provincialism “Black” people are. I know mini-Beatlemaniacs of all backgrounds. Except “Black” ones, come to think of it.
Densmore was no roadie.
I had never heard of Fahey,either. At first,I thought the post referred to Jeff Healy,the blind guitarist who gained some acclaim for his song “Angel Eyes,” which was featured in the movie,”Roadhouse.”
In that picture was a scene of Patrick Swayze bearing his butt. There was a trend for a while of male stars gracing us with their derrieres. It appears to have died out…but not entirely.
Anthony Hopkins displays his rear in his new movie,”The Father,” the story of a man dying of Alzheimers.The scene was edited out of the film,but will reportedly appear in the Directors Cut.
In a scene that will surely delight the ladies,Hopkins gives us a generous view of his backside as his character attempts to defecate in the stewpot.
A very overlooked black guitarist is Eddie Hazel of Parliament/Funkadelic. His 10 minute solo in Maggot Brain is remarkable.
Clearly whites are to blame for dominating a field of guitar playing that brings little reward in fame and wealth.
Reminds one of the scandalous revelation a few years back that open source coding, ie. volunteer work in computing was a predominantly white affectation.
Jeff had been in a group. It didn’t work out so well:
OK, it’s finally been confirmed. Ann Coulter reads iSteve.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
Your list should be titled “Among the better blues/rock lead guitarists” of all time.
Roy Clark was fret tapping 20 years before Eddie VH was and is all around better and more versatile than most of the guys on your list.
To leave Alex Lifeson of Rush, Steve Howe from Yes, Saul Hudson (Slash) from GnR, Duane Allman, Toni Iommi, Adam Jones of Tool, Terry Kath of Chicago (Transit Authority), Joe Walsh, Darrel Paul, Mick Mars all exceed Page and Hendrix as far as technicality and speed and range. And Led Zepplin and The JHE are two of my all time favorite bands.
Keith Richards is (as well as the Rolling Stones) so overrated IMO, but in the end, your list isn’t bad and these things are always largely subjective anyway.
As far as drummers go – Danny Carey from Tool is better than Bonham, Peart, Rich, Moon, Mitchell, etc, etc, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFiyZB5ucgoReplies: @Stebbing Heuer
That’s fantastic.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
Hey Trinity, you forgot a couple…
☮
Minorities in solo guitar don’t come much more minority than young Jewesses. But here was Emily Remler from thirty years ago:
☮
Michael Hedges(listen to Rickover’s Dreams)
Tuck Andress
Pierre Bensusan(DADGAD TUNING)
Will Ackerman
Why was America too White back in August 1969? Is China too Chinese?....Is India too Hindu-South Asian?
Up Next: The Clancy Brothers were too Irish......The Uillean Pipes too Irish....Ireland is too Irish....The NYT wants us DEAD....
The late 18 hundreds in the Midwest:Amateur Fingerstyle Harp Guitar Orchestras-All White Guys...
The University of Wisconsin Racine has a Fingerstyle Guitar undergraduate degree program that was started by John Stropes 25 years ago...
60’s pop tune RENEE...something like that...beautifully version by an Italian Fingerstyle guitarists...
All the Candyrat Fingerstyle Guitarists..White Guys...Replies: @War for Blair Mountain, @GeraldB, @Peter D. Bredon
I agree they are talking about Fingerstyle guitar, but all of those guys you mentioned learned everything they know by listening to black Piedmont and Delta Blues musicians: Mississippi John Hurt, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Pink Anderson, Floyd Council, Etta Baker… I could list a lot more, but you get the idea.
When I took fingerstyle lessons, the first thing my teacher told me to do was to get every recording by Mississippi John Hurt that I could get my hands on and immerse myself in them.
https://youtu.be/1QXdi25469U
https://youtu.be/cwwm4yvYCocReplies: @The Alarmist
There’s a new breed of drummer up and coming …
a more blatant example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvJElTaR5kM
Though then there are also people like Senri Kawaguchi (japanase woman who's been playing since she was really young) who seems to be the real deal though she also no doubt gets some of that "idol" benefit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5YDxDuyKDIReplies: @Jim Christian
Dear Steve, and almost everyone who has commented on this post so far…
“Solo Guitar” is not the same thing as “Guitar Solo.” The article isn’t about Jimi Hendrix playing a solo while fronting for The Experience, it’s about one person, with one guitar, on a stage all by himself (or herself). This would be players like Chet Atkins, Tommy Emmanuel, and Mary Flowers.
They were all heavily influenced by Mississippi John Hurt and other Piedmont Blues artists, nearly all of whom are black.
As one of Jerry's Kids, I can't even conceive of how anyone could leave out Jerry Garcia. Listen to this (02:50 - 04:50) and get back to me, Trinity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V72qQhm12K8
You don't usually see Lindsey Buckingham on these lists - I do appreciate that addition.Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @slumber_j, @Peter D. Bredon
Not to stomp on your buzz, but I’ve never understood the appeal of Jerry Garcia.
I can’t stand the sound of that guitar, for one thing. So is it the tedium people dig? The mistakes? If you’re gonna devote your career to improvisation, you at least should learn to play in key or mode or whatever. This seems to have been beyond him.
And it must be said that many of his fans are far more tolerant, for whatever reason, than the average listener.
But when Jerry got it right, he was unquestionably among the best. Those moments are at a higher level than most players can ever reach. Certainly a dimension beyond the blues/rock "greats" that you always hear about.Replies: @Enemy of Earth
Many Hispanics have been great guitarists such as Charo , Santana and Jerry Garcia
Solo guitar at the highest level is a solitary pursuit that requires hours of painstaking study, an unusually fertile musical creativity, hard won self-sufficiency and artistic individuality, and a mostly unrewarded daily repetitive and cumulative effort over the course of a lifetime, so naturally White men pursue and excel in this challenging but obscure corner of a decaying and degenerate music industry dominated by marketing department manufactured auto-tuned divas and po’faced rapping thugs who can’t be bothered to even carry a tune, much less master an instrument.
White man, sitting alone with a guitar, minding his own business, just trying to make a little bit of beauty in an ugly world, unaware of the oppressive “hurdles” he is building with every lovingly crafted note:
I won't mention his name in order to preserve his obscurity.Replies: @Cortes
Not Caitlyn Jenner, then, hiding her light under her bushel.
I can't stand the sound of that guitar, for one thing. So is it the tedium people dig? The mistakes? If you're gonna devote your career to improvisation, you at least should learn to play in key or mode or whatever. This seems to have been beyond him.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Sollipsist
Mixolydian mode, Schlumberger, is what Jerry like to play in. The 7th is dropped by 1/2 a tone. It’s a great sound, but maybe you “gotta get your mind right” to appreciate it, haha.
What the hell is a nonbinary instrumentalist? Someone with no fingers??
Oh my gawd, you are right, how could I leave out Duane Allman. Thanks. I also forgot about B.B. King. Duane Allman definitely ranks with all those I named and then some.
-----
Nowadays it seems that every journalist's beat is race and diversity--or else. You have to find the woke angle hiding in any story.
This story seems to be, "There didn't used to be that many black folk guitarists. Now there are a few, but they're not that good, so we'll have to add the angle that they're black or female. And they're really transgressive against the whitey patriarchy with their urban rhythms."
The article reminded me of the gimmicky Japanese genre of shamisen, shakuhachi, or koto players who, rather than play traditional Japanese court music, get up and rock or jazz out. They're usually young men, and have green hair and wear sci-fi looking kimonos. They're the Japanese version of the adolescent American Jew whose parents sent him to years of accordion lessons, and now he's trying to salvage things by doing "hip" rock-polka mashups.Replies: @Erik L
The claim is from an interview with David Lee Roth and he said if they got to the dressing room and no brown M&Ms they would leave and refuse to do the show. Did that ever actually happen? I’ve never seen anyone check up on it.
They likely all did. Last-minute cancellations of big-time acts are front-page news. We'd have heard about it.
https://youtu.be/HGV3yV9q4Q4Replies: @VivaLaMigra, @Old Prude
Zappa was MAYBE a good guitarist, but DEFINITELY a 1st Class dick! This guy had no respect for any musician not named “Frank Zappa.” He didn’t have bandmates, he had employees.
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/fj2asBe sure to check out my song with samples from Rev. Wright and Obama:Listen to God Damn America Remix (Obama Feat. Rev Wright) by Prince Red-I on #SoundCloud
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/rucHL
I thought the Great Kat is the greatest guitar player, ever. Or so she says.
Joan Baez smiles.
Even the wokest NYT subscribers must get tired of reading the same article (with the same tone of sullen hostility mixed with gloating triumphalism) day after day after day after day.Replies: @JerseyJeffersonian
No, you overestimate the wokest NYT subscribers. They just luv them that droningly repetitious shit. They eat it up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as for snacks in between. The “white” subscribers find it soothing to keep up this diet of self-abnegation. It’s rather like the comfort likely derived by medieval flagellants, as they score their backs with their metal tipped whips, first over the right shoulder, then the left shoulder. Ahh…
For the white NYT subscriber, this steady diet of spiritualized, abstracted “cutting” provides solace, release, some measure of absolution for their whiteness. And no small measure of smug sanctimony.
A lot of you guys posting just don’t get it. The NYT is specifically targeting steel string finger style guitar genre because it’s overwhelming WHITE MALE……THEY WANT US DEAD!!!….And some you sidetrack into discussions about nonwhite acoustic guitar players….who cares?
If acoustic steel string finger pickers are overwhelmingly WHITE MALES…what is the a problem?
When America was overwhelmingly 90 percent demographically WHITE…..What was wrong with this? Why because the HINDUS in America…..OUR AMERICA….are opposed to this?
Steve…how about Biden’s WHITE NATIONALIST comment last night….
If drum solos suck, then bass solos blow: Like hearing a guitar being played underwater. Why, do people clap and shout after a bass solo? They are thrilled its over and they can get back to listening to music.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
I came late to the party: Chet Atkins, BB King, Roy Clark, Gatemouth Brown, Robert Cray, Doc Watson…
The only people on your list I care for with are Isley and Clapton.
That’s four blacks and four whites on my list, but OK NYT, white guys are “the face”. Jackasses.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
True dat:
https://youtu.be/HGV3yV9q4Q4Replies: @VivaLaMigra, @Old Prude
Zappa “great”. I wouldn’t know. I walked out of his concert after fifteen minutes. Complete jackassery was all I saw and heard… I got drunk and threw up later.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
Have to disagree. Vaughn at times comes off as trying to be a white Hendrix clone. In that respect unoriginal. There is being influenced by other players. In Vaughn’s case he comes off as trying to be a version of another.
Stevie Ray Vaughan & Dick Dale – Pipeline (1987)
If it's diversity we're looking for, let's go Korean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0NJiasWrLc
Then we go to guys who have developed skills so unbelievable that they just intimidate good guitarists and make them want to quit. Look at a guy like Luca Stricagnoli, who plays unbelievable pieces, never even picking a string with pick or finger: he plays all with tapping and legato, a technique in which he hammers his left hand fingers on the fretboard, producing a note without plucking the string. Check him out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLVYK80vMMM
He doesn't just do classical stuff, and you can find his covers of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N Roses, ACDC, etc.Replies: @jon, @AndrewR, @Jonathan Mason
I have a hard time separating the artist from their work. I used to like Isn’t She Lovely but ever since he revealed himself to be a black supremacist after Trayvon died I cannot tolerate his music.
Glen Campbell & Roy Clark Play “Ghost Riders in the Sky”
I listen to White guitar players, exclusively.
Jonathan Mason — Lagrene and Luc are excellent . Not familiar with them but thanks . Now I’m gonna relisten to the old Robert Johnson “Terreplane Blues” tape that’s been packed away for a while . Funny thing is I-Steve’s Blog IS just like real life / meatworld or whatever . You seem like a decent chap who I almost never agree with politically . Similiar to many of my musician friends from different local scenes over the years . Though they are moderate liberal types not these Woke A—Holes .
Admittedly, “The Jeff Beck Group” kinda straddles the line, but there’s that. Wonder whatever happened to the vocalist? Also, a group called The Yardbirds that some may have heard about. Um, Beck Bogart and Appice too (again perhaps a stretch).
I think “Joe Blow and the Blowhards” is a fairly typical way for rock bands to style themselves, at least in the 60s-70s, usually after the guitarist or lead singer became bigger than the band, or wanted to be; Beck just billed himself like that from the start, which actually was a clever strategy to become famous, rather than the reverse.
Who was the comedian/comedy group that had a parody of Prairie Home Companion, with Keillor at one point transitioning to a commercial thus: “We’ll be back with more banjo and fiddle crap after…”
https://www.unz.com/isteve/paul-pena-the-blind-composer-behind-steve-millers-jet-airliner/#comment-2073407
“Fleetwood mac was better than you’ll ever know prof”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5kOzGwsHXwReplies: @YetAnotherAnon, @James J O'Meara
On “All along the watchtower,” Hendrix played three solos, on three different guitars (well, counting the wah wah pedal), but constructed it in the studio with innumerable takes.
Here, Lindsey Buckingham does the the same thing, live, with one guitar. Admittedly, he’d been playing this song for about 30 years.
As one of Jerry's Kids, I can't even conceive of how anyone could leave out Jerry Garcia. Listen to this (02:50 - 04:50) and get back to me, Trinity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V72qQhm12K8
You don't usually see Lindsey Buckingham on these lists - I do appreciate that addition.Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @slumber_j, @Peter D. Bredon
Sorry, all references to The Dead must be followed by this:
I remember a sports talking head joking that Steve Nash was 6’3″ only in heels. The sports writer said he himself was just below 6′ and he’d stood next to Nash and they were at eye level.
Shades of how Pedro Martinez was listed as 6’1″ and was really 5’8″
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJttL2ZBJ-oReplies: @Morton's toes, @R.G. Camara
There’s also a psychological factor at play here. In the U.S., since whites are verboten from trash talking blacks in racial terms but blacks can say anything they want to whites in racial terms—even calling them “boy”—black players can essentially have unlimited demoralizing warfare on whites with no push back. White kids with a modicum of talent often get washed out from such a harsh environment as a youth, unless they spend a lot of time not with black opposing players during their formative years, or else have extreme mental toughness.
Larry Bird was famous for being a vicious trash talker in his time, which today would’ve gotten him suspended for “racial hate.” But Larry was from an era were whites could do such a thing, and he grew up playing in largely-white Indiana, so he was able to psychologically grow and fight blacks on the same terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvwRFNkqn-UReplies: @R.G. Camara
John Fahey pretty much created a unique genre of guitar playing, and has been working hard in relative obscurity for half a century. Face of solo guitar? That would be a nice reward, if it was true, but the fact is that maybe one in a million people even know who he is, and 9 times out of 10 that’s due to Jimmy Page acknowledging what a major influence Fahey was on Page’s acoustic work (arguably approaching theft, but that’s another debate).
Go figure, the NYT mentions Fahey once in 10 years (if that), and that’s only to say that he’s too well-known.
But sure, some chick who says “Guitar Hero lol” and picked up the instrument the day before yesterday deserves to be better known. Because reasons.
Ok, but even by those criteria the premise ( Since the heyday of John Fahey, the genre has been seen as the province of white men) is wrong. Robert Johnson is more well known and influential than Fahey. I seem to remember black acoustic guitarists like Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy enjoying some popularity. There were also some obscure female guitarists once like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.
Or are we talking about a genre specific to Fahey? Unpolished, sometimes atonal, aspergery acoustic guitar music for higher IQ hipsters? In that case, even though I actually like Fahey, it is not surprising there are few non-whites or women going down that path.Replies: @Ano, @Peter D. Bredon, @Barack Obama's secret Unz account
” Unpolished, sometimes atonal, aspergery acoustic guitar music for higher IQ hipsters? ”
I heard the name John Fahey maybe twice before his recent death, at which I saw some obits, but never heard any of the music. The way he’s referred to, by the sort of people who do the referring, leads me to think that someone like Kingsley Amis or Philip Larkin would have had a field day eviscerating such a poseur or charlatan.
I imagine he’d sound like Bernard, in Lucky Jim, except as a guitarist rather than a painter. Or, come to think of it, his recorder-playing father. King of the pseudes. Or the modernist oboe player as well; come to think of it, the jazz-loving Amis had quite a hatred for any other kind of music, including “filthy Mozart”.
Music journalism/reviews is just self-important but shitty writers trying to get a career going until their novel or whatever takes off. (It never does.) Or it's non-musicians trying to horn in on something they'll never understand. They're worse than useless: they're not just uninformative, they're misinformative: they make you think John Fahey is either a towering talent or (by inference) a puffed-up pile of shit - a "pseud". In reality: a guitarist that you either like or you don't.
It's basically impossible for any collection of words to accurately convey the experience of listening to a particular piece of music; and the experience is subjective anyway, so even should the journalist hit the nail on the head, it may not seem that way to you.
Maybe, to Grayson Haver Currin, Tashi Dorji's music really does "[grab] at melodic or rhythmic fragments only to grind them into dust" - ooh! - but to me it sounds like a puffed-up pile of shit.
Maybe there was an argument to be made for music reviews back in the day, if your local record shop didn't let you listen to the albums before you bought them, or if you didn't have a radio: farm boys with nothing but a mail-order catalogue and a dream, needing Rolling Stone or the NME to help them separate the wheat from the chaff. (If so, they would've often been bitterly disappointed.)
But that scanty justification is gone now. If you want to know whether so-and-so's new album is any good, just go and listen to it! It's on Youtube, and Spotify, and you can still pirate it if you know where to look. Come the revolution, I hope music journalists end up in the rice paddies with the blue-hairs and the four-eyes.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jonathan Mason
Fahey’s been idolized by music critics for as long as I can remember. At least 35 years. I happen to prefer Doc Watson, but Fahey is bona fide as the sisters in Brother Where Art Thou would say.
While most people here focus in on the first part of the sentence, I continue to be stunned and disgusted – and even horrified – by the open, undisguised, unapologetic HATRED for white people in the coda; by – of course – a white guy who comes from enough money that he needs three names to identify himself. (He’s also the ‘hiking columnist’ for OUTSIDE Magazine, which attracts many a slumming white richkid.)
His new retweet is spreading the word that Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio is hiking the Appalachian Trail – a Twitter feed with plenty of antifa snickering such as “It would be a shame if he got lost in the wilderness, never to be seen again. Those sorts of weird things happen all the time you know”, and “Bold move for him to be so alone”.
Just goes to show: behind every NYT ‘culture’ scribe is yet another race traitor hoping to encourage somebody else into killing you. We’ve been wallowing in the ghastly depths of the liberal-id septic tank for over a year now, and I’m sorry, but struggling to pull free of these creatures’ talons – only to hand them yet another free pass by pretending we’re better than them, and we must never return fire, ever! – just isn’t going to be worth the trouble. Last night, I wasted my time watching our token Negro Senator respond to the unprincipled lunatic Biden, too numb even to be alarmed or disillusioned by his utter refusal to say the word “Trump” even once….and I learned one more time what an opposition party run by a nonentity like McConnell is worth: nothing. (Why do you think Biden paused a moment to thank him by name?)
Forget your ‘vaccine passport’ and renew your regular, plain ol’ passport – and do so before they start feeding party-affiliation information on registered voters to every airline in America. Surviving the collapse of America is a feat best accomplished far from the mainland – because no one can survive a catastrophe provoked equally by an unprincipled authoritarian left and a bumbling and hopelessly-corrupt right. By my calculations, we’re down to roughly one-third of the country that can be trusted with the right to vote, and that spells ‘lost cause’ – in letters of flame a hundred feet high.
Michael Hedges(listen to Rickover’s Dreams)
Tuck Andress
Pierre Bensusan(DADGAD TUNING)
Will Ackerman
Why was America too White back in August 1969? Is China too Chinese?....Is India too Hindu-South Asian?
Up Next: The Clancy Brothers were too Irish......The Uillean Pipes too Irish....Ireland is too Irish....The NYT wants us DEAD....
The late 18 hundreds in the Midwest:Amateur Fingerstyle Harp Guitar Orchestras-All White Guys...
The University of Wisconsin Racine has a Fingerstyle Guitar undergraduate degree program that was started by John Stropes 25 years ago...
60’s pop tune RENEE...something like that...beautifully version by an Italian Fingerstyle guitarists...
All the Candyrat Fingerstyle Guitarists..White Guys...Replies: @War for Blair Mountain, @GeraldB, @Peter D. Bredon
“Fingerstyle”! Yes, I have heard that. Not Fahey. 50 years ago, John Mayall with Jon Mark on (according to the spoken introduction) “acoustic, fingerstyle guitar”.
I can't stand the sound of that guitar, for one thing. So is it the tedium people dig? The mistakes? If you're gonna devote your career to improvisation, you at least should learn to play in key or mode or whatever. This seems to have been beyond him.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Sollipsist
Garcia is tough to appreciate, mainly because he allowed all of his mistakes be heard. And he made a LOT of them. It takes a lot of balls, and/or a lot of drugs, to take the chances that he took in front of an audience. Most players find a safe zone and stay there, do the same thing on stage night after night, and release perfect studio recordings where you never hear the countless missed takes that got edited out.
And it must be said that many of his fans are far more tolerant, for whatever reason, than the average listener.
But when Jerry got it right, he was unquestionably among the best. Those moments are at a higher level than most players can ever reach. Certainly a dimension beyond the blues/rock “greats” that you always hear about.
What a question. Who says baby boomer cultural omnipotence is dead? The real question should be: how could you leave out every country player who ever lived? Fender had it’s first real customer base among country pickers. No, their solos weren’t extended meandering nonsense lasting 30 seconds or longer. That’s self-glorifying petty showmanship borrowed from black culture. My view is go ahead and let Jimi Hendrix be the king of that BS.
Because so many “guitar solo” people hate country, here’s Thumbs Carllile playing a more jazzy/bossa nova tune that he wrote. How many rock players were playing at this level in 1966?
Three great female guitarists:
Ana Vidovic – classical
Emily Remler – jazz
Molly Tuttle – bluegrass
I’m more visual.
Watching Alexandra Whittingham play the guitar ranks high.
I’ve never heard of John Fahey, either, but you know I have heard of ?
Odetta
Janis Ian
Traci Chapman
Joni Mitchell
Joan Baez
Carole King
The Great Kat
Plus a whole slew of black blues and jazz guitarists.
If it's diversity we're looking for, let's go Korean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0NJiasWrLc
Then we go to guys who have developed skills so unbelievable that they just intimidate good guitarists and make them want to quit. Look at a guy like Luca Stricagnoli, who plays unbelievable pieces, never even picking a string with pick or finger: he plays all with tapping and legato, a technique in which he hammers his left hand fingers on the fretboard, producing a note without plucking the string. Check him out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLVYK80vMMM
He doesn't just do classical stuff, and you can find his covers of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N Roses, ACDC, etc.Replies: @jon, @AndrewR, @Jonathan Mason
Thanks, nice stuff.
There is a lot of guitar knowledge in this commentariat and it strikes me that some of it is age-related.
I know that when I used to evaluate elderly clients, it was very rare indeed to find people over the age of 70 listening to music for recreation or even background and if they were asked about that taste they would usually reply country.
There was one black woman who listened to a lot of blues and r&b on a satellite the radio station.
The guitar became a very popular instrument because it makes sounds in roughly the same sonic range as the human voice, and is capable of expressing human emotions as a substitute for or as an accompanist to a vocalist.
Jazz and its heyday thrived on producing jazzed upversions of great songs, often from the movies or stage musicals, by people like Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, or Irving Berlin, but once the Beatles had shot their bolt, it seemed that the era of great songs had passed and there were fewer new tunes to become jazz standards.
And if you don’t know the tune and you don’t know the words, do you appreciate an instrumental version as much? Would this tune get under your skin in the same way if you were a young person who had never heard the song?
https://youtu.be/RhcEXk_pJ9cReplies: @Reg Cæsar
A right-handed puppet guitarist?
Q: In which band were all the guitarists left-handed?
A: Why, The Electric Mayhem
Travis style finger pinking….a White Guy art form….
The NYT wants us DEAD….
British Classical Guitarists John William’s a CD…..Magic Box…. of African Tunes….beautiful cd….
John Fahey’s Christmas Album…an all time great…first time I heard it was right down the road from John Derbyshire…It was comming through the speakers in a bakery-coffee shop where all the shops are in Cold Spring Harbor right down from Billy Joel Park(where I once caught a large Tautog(Black Fish))…….not too far from where Kevin Kline starred in a homo wedding movie(‘t Protestant Church by the fish hatchery)
Close, but no M&M. The presence of a brown M&M would do it. I’m sure the lawyers at every venue would have noticed such a contract-negating clause, especially one this weird.
They likely all did. Last-minute cancellations of big-time acts are front-page news. We’d have heard about it.
Michael Gulezian…but he’s Armenian…but he plays the White Guy Kottke for sure…check out his live concert on YouTube…there is a rendition of Leo Kottke tune from Kottke’s 12 string-6 string album recorded by John Fahey in the Tacoma Records studio……Fahey made Kottke famous with this Album after which Leo Kottke was touring with Proco Harem in really big venues such as Madison Square….
Check out Leo Kottke’s rendition of the late Dwayne Allman’s tune……
Another great White Guy finger stylist:Richard Gillewitz(former NASA Rocket Scientist)Check out Leo Kottke’s Echoing Gillewitz one of the most spellbindingly beautifull tunes ever recorded….
Nobody has mentioned Charlie Byrd. He is dead but surely not forgotten, though today he would be defenestrated for cultural misappropriation.
Sometimes even guitar soloists get lonely, and here he is in the company of another great guitar soloist Tal Farlow, and Herb Ellis too, showing that you are never to be too old to be a guitar God.
There is a lot of guitar knowledge in this commentariat and it strikes me that some of it is age-related.
I know that when I used to evaluate elderly clients, it was very rare indeed to find people over the age of 70 listening to music for recreation or even background and if they were asked about that taste they would usually reply country.
There was one black woman who listened to a lot of blues and r&b on a satellite the radio station.
The guitar became a very popular instrument because it makes sounds in roughly the same sonic range as the human voice, and is capable of expressing human emotions as a substitute for or as an accompanist to a vocalist.
Jazz and its heyday thrived on producing jazzed upversions of great songs, often from the movies or stage musicals, by people like Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, or Irving Berlin, but once the Beatles had shot their bolt, it seemed that the era of great songs had passed and there were fewer new tunes to become jazz standards.
And if you don't know the tune and you don't know the words, do you appreciate an instrumental version as much? Would this tune get under your skin in the same way if you were a young person who had never heard the song?
https://youtu.be/hDOmZhkpIiEReplies: @Reg Cæsar
An odd list for the point you make– three lyricists, but only two composers.
Mercer did compose a few songs, notably “I’m an Old Cowhand”, ” Something’s Gotta Give”, and, with an Ohio housewife, “I Wanna Be Around”. He’s widely regarded as America’s greatest lyricist, but few would put him in the top couple of hundred composers.
Fun Mercer facts: Trenton, NJ’s county was named for his military ancestor, who had to flee Scotland. Johnny’s father declared bankruptcy in Savannah, but later went back and voluntarily paid his creditors in full. Johnny’s mother was Croatian.
Of course, that's the gist of minoritarianism. Yeah, once upon a time there was oppression, oppression--slavery, serfdom, etc. That's long gone. The minoritarian demand is always that the majority make itself available--exploitation, money, jobs, schools, neighborhoods, nations ... and of course, country clubs--for the minority. Straight white guys going off and doing whatever for the benefit of white guys: "Racism!" "Sexism!" "Anti-Semitism!" "Islamophobia!" "Xenophobia!" "Homophobia!" and now debuting "Transphobia!"
White guys living life for themselves ... Nazis!Replies: @Lurker, @RichardTaylor, @Random Anonymous
Yes, I have to chime in and say that may have been one of Steve’s best sentences ever.
what they’re actually talking about here. one guy playing guitar and no other musicians.
they’re not talking about Jimmy Page belting out Led Zep chops.
And it must be said that many of his fans are far more tolerant, for whatever reason, than the average listener.
But when Jerry got it right, he was unquestionably among the best. Those moments are at a higher level than most players can ever reach. Certainly a dimension beyond the blues/rock "greats" that you always hear about.Replies: @Enemy of Earth
Jerry could be really great on any given night but I always thought Bob Weir was the more interesting guitarist. His voicings were unique and he often played some really interesting fills behind Garcia.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
Any discussion of the best guitarist is totally subjective.
And if you don’t include non-rock guitarists, your list is incomplete and missing the more talented guitarists. Rock guitarists are generally not at the top of the list regarding technical ability. Much of it due to substance abuse. Although there are several (Buckethead comes to mind) that could hold their own with classical guitarists.
Here’s an excellent guitarist you would probably not put not a top list because he was rarely flashy about it and had other talents.
Glen Campbell (starting 1:22 “I’ll play one”):
Best female guitarist at least as far as rock and roll goes is Nancy Wilson of Heart IMO.
Some you may know about Adrian Leggs’s use of banjo tuning pegs on his guitar. Go listen to these two Adrian Legg tunes where the banjo tuning pegs are creatively deployed:1)IRISH GIRL….2)MIDWEST SUNDAY…
I think it’s very safe to say that Mississippi John Hurt….and the fictional character BLIND JOE DEATH……was a very big influence on John Fahey…but Fahey went waaaaaaay behind this..way beyond….
Beautiful Leo Kottke tune:HIS FEET LOOK SAD…
I saw Leo Kottke at IMAC where he strung together 4 of his big powerful G tuning tunes on his Taylor 12 string…with the slide……with JACK FIG at the end……Leo Kottke got 3 standing ovations….He had to do three encores……..G tuning is widely used in Slack Key Guitar……
…what about Odetta and Memphis Minnie, eh?!
what they're actually talking about here. one guy playing guitar and no other musicians.
they're not talking about Jimmy Page belting out Led Zep chops.Replies: @War for Blair Mountain
Yes one of the Candyrat guitarists…And Andy McKee has made a whole lot of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$….
Larry Bird was famous for being a vicious trash talker in his time, which today would've gotten him suspended for "racial hate." But Larry was from an era were whites could do such a thing, and he grew up playing in largely-white Indiana, so he was able to psychologically grow and fight blacks on the same terms.Replies: @Bubba
The NBA went full negro-ghetto and thug-loving back in the 70’s. Maybe some white NBA players participated in trash talk, but the mob negro retaliation could be deadly for those less talented than Larry Bird.
Most White Boomer electric guitar heroes are just White guys aping apes, musically speaking.
Black American music poured a pervasive, degenerate, and morally corrosive stain onto White popular music over the course of the 20th Century. We should cleanse ourselves of it.
Solo guitar music, White Anglo style. If you think this music is out of date or corny or “too white” then maybe you’re a musical wigger and you need some stain remover. If White people have a culture, it’s not just capitalism or liberal Democracy or even muh Bill of Rights; it’s this:
I’m pretty sure that by this point, The New York Times has a program that automatically spits out stories like this: “(Some activity that lots and lots of straight white dudes are into) is experiencing a sea change as a new generation of black, brown and LGBTQ+ voices emerge.”
Speaking as somebody in journalism, I bet about 90% of these stories are bullshit. They have the feel of one of those slow news days perennials that can be slapped together on short notice when something else falls through. You can pick some white guy interest at random and call up a few experts on the subject (who are all straight white guys), and they can probably give you the names of a half-dozen blacks and/or gays they know who are weirdly into it. It’s maybe a day’s work.
It’s particular telling that you never see the reverse. You don’t ever see stories about how a bunch of straight white dudes are interested in some obscure black or gay subculture — because it’s so commonplace as to not be worth mentioning. Pick any weird black or gay hobby or subculture (well, nonsexual, of course) and there are probably THOUSANDS of straight white guys who are into it. They’ll have whole networks of websites dedicated to it. They will be far more organized than anyone else.
You might even say that straight white guys are actually curious about the world and the people in it, have an unquenchable interest in new ideas and cultures, and a genuine appreciation for the rich diversity of humanity, while other groups are so wrapped up in navel-gazing that it’s newsworthy when a few of them stop for a second to take an interest in something outside the iron cages of their identities.
It’s like the reason white dudes are always “colonizing” everything is because they’re the only ones trying to find their way out of Plato’s cave.
That’s probably crimethink, though…
It was an impressive amount of work. They had information and trivia about all the different brands, including hard-to-find brands with only regional distribution. They had ratings and tasting notes and everything.
In its own way, it was the most stereotypically white dude thing ever.Replies: @Dissident, @vhrm
Good observation about solo acoustic guitarists, generally speaking. Because I’m not very musically gifted, it took me decades to realize just how overrated Leo Kottke really was and is. Even his fans notice how inept he sometimes is at playing with other musicians. By his own admission, he failed at five string banjo, so he took up twelve string guitar, and you can really see and hear that in his playing. His later stuff was less mechanical (banjo-like) but also a little more – as you say – pointless. I can now see that it was my own focus on banjo that drew me to some of his music 30 years ago. His music appeals to the artistically insular, which describes me, as well. Tommy Emmanuel is several cuts above him, and (not surprisingly) often plays with other very accomplished guitarists.
Like, I remember years ago stumbling across a website with a bunch of white dudes who were really into malt liquor. Not craft beer — genuine ghetto-style malt liquor. That was their hobby.
It was an impressive amount of work. They had information and trivia about all the different brands, including hard-to-find brands with only regional distribution. They had ratings and tasting notes and everything.
In its own way, it was the most stereotypically white dude thing ever.
https://xkcd.com/915/
(I hadn't looked at this comic in years and in my head it was "Al Gore" eating a sandwich. Funny how the brain encodes things. )
I’m not a big listener of shitty modern music, but the only solo guitarists I can thunk of are women.
https://youtu.be/d33x1HyJZ10Replies: @vhrm, @Jim Christian
Not qualified to judge her skills in particular, but on YT with female instrumentalists there’s a significant cam girl aspect to these things where a fair amount of the attraction is not about the technical performance.
a more blatant example:
Though then there are also people like Senri Kawaguchi (japanase woman who’s been playing since she was really young) who seems to be the real deal though she also no doubt gets some of that “idol” benefit.
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
You left out the greatest electric guitarist of all time: Yngwie Malmsteen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvwRFNkqn-UReplies: @R.G. Camara
Tangentially, look at those guys versus guys who’ve played in the NBA since the 1990s. Night and day in terms of physiques—NBA guys today have been on steroids for 30 years.
I remember when William Perry of the Chicago Bears was a rookie and his 300+ lb. frame was a novelty back then. Today the NFL has over 400 players weighing 300+ lbs.
https://youtu.be/UyA93RbBndMReplies: @Kibernetika
I repeat: Buckethead
He’s a good guitarist, and he does indeed wear a bucket on his head. So he’s way ahead of me measured by those criteria.
NYT: “Black Chick Plays Guitar”
Or, rather, “Sour-Looking Black Chick Plays Guitar”.
Facepalm moment: in an article about solo instrumentalists, have a listen to the clip the NYT provides to illustrate the concept: that’s not solo guitar! That’s one person overdubbing multiple tracks of guitar (or other stringed instrument), and also some bongoes.
“A clear break with the form’s stoic, folk-rooted mores” = pleasantly-nondescript arpeggios
Fer chrissakes, John Fahey represents a clear break with the form’s stoic, folk-rooted mores, as well as a cautionary tale of why you probably shouldn’t break from those mores (i.e., his more adventurous stuff sucks).
Here’s Jon Gomm making “a clear break with the form’s stoic, folk-rooted mores” in a way that doesn’t sound terrible. It’s also actually a solo performance – with percussion and vocals, too. (Feel free to skip the first minute’s noodling.)
“Who is Robert Johnson?”
Seriously, this was a genre once known to be dominated by black guys, and its fans still listen to the old black guys from the thirties just as much as they listen to Fahey and Leo Kottke. And let’s not forget that Johnson is literally “much-mythologized”, unlike Fahey.
Yasmin Williams isn’t bad, though, but there’s no way the New York Times would be promoting her album if she wasn’t some black chick. There’s been white guys doing the exact same shit on Youtube for years. Here, here’s Andy McKee’s most popular video: 59 million views in 14 years. By way of contrast, Yasmin Williams’s most popular video has only been up for a year, in which time it has got… 109,000 views.
But Andy McKee doesn’t have the New York Times helping him sell records; he just has to rely on talent, and as a result is only 541 times more popular. White privilege!
Hey, wait a minute: much of this NYT piece is basically a seriously overwritten music review, using flowery language to make the music sound much more revelatory than it is. It’s like a Pitchfork review. Hmm… I wonder if…
[googles writer’s name]
[first thing that comes up is this]
Yep
I actually lol’d
So that’s the secret, if you’re a nothing-special acoustic instrumentalist, or a Pitchfork hack, who wants to get in the NYT: just wrap your act up in anti-white politics and pretend you’re kicking down the door that the white man locked. Ignorant Times subscribers aren’t going to be able to call you on your fake gay bullshit.
https://youtu.be/XmNPXqG6ovg?t=14Replies: @Random Anonymous, @Ripple Earthdevil
I’ll be darned. You’re not kidding.
In this particular case, all signs point to yes. See my previous comment.
Interesting “what if” kind of question. Mickie Most produced the two Jeff Beck Group albums, but he was primarily interested in placing pop singles on the charts, which meant tightly-constructed songs of under three minutes — not exactly what Jeff Beck wanted with his own group, after having left the Yardbirds. Truth and Beck-Ola, when you hear them today, sound rather tame and undercooked, considering the talent involved. Mostly, they sound like basic sketches for the first two Led Zeppelin albums. Jimmy Page had a much better sense of how he wanted a band to sound on record, and produced the albums himself, with a succession of engineers executing his ideas.
Did Mickie Most, who had the best pop instincts of any British record producer of the late 1960’s, recognize Rod the Mod’s future star potential as a singer-songwriter? It’s forgivable if he didn’t, since Rod took a while to develop his writing skills. Even on his 1971 masterpiece, Every Picture Tells A Story, he only wrote or co-wrote three of the eight tracks, but two of them are amazing: the opening title song and “Maggie May.” Given Most’s pop orientation, he surely would have sought to edit “Maggie May” down to a suitable length for radio play (it was over five minutes with the long mandolin coda).
All in all, things worked out for both Beck and Stewart. Rod became the star he always wanted to be (and the Faces were a better backing band for him: Ron Wood’s the right foil for just about anyone), and Beck got to play guitar in all kinds of settings, where everyone respects his musicianship. He’s not the International Rock Star that Clapton or Page is, but he seems content with his lot.
Nobody has mentioned the greatest black female rock guitarist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj7leqoEG9oReplies: @petit bourgeois
Those Vox AC30s are pesky creatures!
Roy Clark was fret tapping 20 years before Eddie VH was and is all around better and more versatile than most of the guys on your list.
To leave Alex Lifeson of Rush, Steve Howe from Yes, Saul Hudson (Slash) from GnR, Duane Allman, Toni Iommi, Adam Jones of Tool, Terry Kath of Chicago (Transit Authority), Joe Walsh, Darrel Paul, Mick Mars all exceed Page and Hendrix as far as technicality and speed and range. And Led Zepplin and The JHE are two of my all time favorite bands.
Keith Richards is (as well as the Rolling Stones) so overrated IMO, but in the end, your list isn't bad and these things are always largely subjective anyway.
As far as drummers go - Danny Carey from Tool is better than Bonham, Peart, Rich, Moon, Mitchell, etc, etc, etc.
https://youtu.be/FssULNGSZIAReplies: @petit bourgeois
I’ll agree with you on Steve Howe.
While everyone in that era was playing Les Pauls and Stratocasters, he was playing an extremely hollow body Gibson ES-175, which are notoriously prone to feedback through Fender tube amps:
Alex Lifeson, on the other hand, preferred the ES-335, another remarkable instrument.
“ Jimmy has never possessed a driver’s license.”
And neither have any of his girlfriends. They weren’t old enough.
I heard the name John Fahey maybe twice before his recent death, at which I saw some obits, but never heard any of the music. The way he's referred to, by the sort of people who do the referring, leads me to think that someone like Kingsley Amis or Philip Larkin would have had a field day eviscerating such a poseur or charlatan.
I imagine he'd sound like Bernard, in Lucky Jim, except as a guitarist rather than a painter. Or, come to think of it, his recorder-playing father. King of the pseudes. Or the modernist oboe player as well; come to think of it, the jazz-loving Amis had quite a hatred for any other kind of music, including "filthy Mozart".Replies: @Barack Obama's secret Unz account, @Curle
Fahey’s okay. Just don’t buy into the hype. Never ever like a journalist tell you whether music is good.
Music journalism/reviews is just self-important but shitty writers trying to get a career going until their novel or whatever takes off. (It never does.) Or it’s non-musicians trying to horn in on something they’ll never understand. They’re worse than useless: they’re not just uninformative, they’re misinformative: they make you think John Fahey is either a towering talent or (by inference) a puffed-up pile of shit – a “pseud”. In reality: a guitarist that you either like or you don’t.
It’s basically impossible for any collection of words to accurately convey the experience of listening to a particular piece of music; and the experience is subjective anyway, so even should the journalist hit the nail on the head, it may not seem that way to you.
Maybe, to Grayson Haver Currin, Tashi Dorji’s music really does “[grab] at melodic or rhythmic fragments only to grind them into dust” – ooh! – but to me it sounds like a puffed-up pile of shit.
Maybe there was an argument to be made for music reviews back in the day, if your local record shop didn’t let you listen to the albums before you bought them, or if you didn’t have a radio: farm boys with nothing but a mail-order catalogue and a dream, needing Rolling Stone or the NME to help them separate the wheat from the chaff. (If so, they would’ve often been bitterly disappointed.)
But that scanty justification is gone now. If you want to know whether so-and-so’s new album is any good, just go and listen to it! It’s on Youtube, and Spotify, and you can still pirate it if you know where to look. Come the revolution, I hope music journalists end up in the rice paddies with the blue-hairs and the four-eyes.
Ok, but even by those criteria the premise ( Since the heyday of John Fahey, the genre has been seen as the province of white men) is wrong. Robert Johnson is more well known and influential than Fahey. I seem to remember black acoustic guitarists like Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy enjoying some popularity. There were also some obscure female guitarists once like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.
Or are we talking about a genre specific to Fahey? Unpolished, sometimes atonal, aspergery acoustic guitar music for higher IQ hipsters? In that case, even though I actually like Fahey, it is not surprising there are few non-whites or women going down that path.Replies: @Ano, @Peter D. Bredon, @Barack Obama's secret Unz account
lol – nail on the head. “It’s outsider art, my dude!”
I think we could replace the entire staff at Pitchfork with you. But the music reviewers union would have you up on charges for being too accurate and concise
Honorable mentions to
Eddie Van Halen
Jimmy Page
Jimi Hendrix
Mick Taylor
Prince
Ernie Isley
Lindsey Buckingham
Eric Clapton
Steve Stevens
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai
Keef Richards
What I miss are the old drum solos from back in the day. Oh yeah, the drummer use to be seen as cool, now, not so much.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @jb, @Anonymous, @Cato, @Ripple Earthdevil, @Jim Christian, @Mike Tre, @Adam Smith, @Old Prude, @Jim Don Bob, @NightTrain, @Arthur Biggs, @JimB, @Curle
“ Stevie Ray Vaughn is hands down the best guitar player of all time.”
And the worst helicopter aficionado (tied with Kobe).
He was a bandleader, like Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Buddy Rich, etc. He was influenced by doo wop and Johnny “Guitar” Watson, and he grew up with Captain Beefheart in Lancaster.
He may have been a dick, but I respect him because he is self taught, like me.
My current quiver of axes:
1962 Gibson B-25 in cherry sunburst. When my grandpa died, I was bequeathed this beautiful parlor size acoustic.
1966 Fender Mustang. I bought this guitar in a pawn shop in Lubbock in 1990 for $185. It’s worth a quite a bit today. This was my main axe when I played professionally for reggae bands in the 90’s. It’s how I made my living on stage in places like Jackie Robinson Stadium in South Central.
2012 Gretsch Rancher. It’s a wired up acoustic with a Fishman pickup for my recording endeavors.
2015 Guild S-100 Polaris, sort of like a knock off SG but with 3 humbuckers. Kim Thayall of Soundgarden plays vintage varieties of this instrument.
I’ll self promote here since I was a one man band seven years ago. Check it out fellow UNZERS:
Check out Prince Red-I on #SoundCloud
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/fj2as
Be sure to check out my song with samples from Rev. Wright and Obama:
Listen to God Damn America Remix (Obama Feat. Rev Wright) by Prince Red-I on #SoundCloud
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/rucHL
So by golly, dontcha see, it's just illogical to be so galldarn anti-White. Dontcha see?
You guys should've thrown in with White people, especially the White working and middle class. But you were so desperate to be petted by sociopathic Yuppies and liberal Ashkenazi.
For the effectiveness of moderation, look to the moderates of South Africa and what they wrought.
http://image.slidesharecdn.com/apartheid2-130528122921-phpapp01/95/apartheid-in-south-africa-1-638.jpg?cb=1369762434
http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/0ea71816354e9dbdc31a56b0921b8fd4?width=1024Replies: @Richard B
Contrasting facial expressions. Says it all.
I heard the name John Fahey maybe twice before his recent death, at which I saw some obits, but never heard any of the music. The way he's referred to, by the sort of people who do the referring, leads me to think that someone like Kingsley Amis or Philip Larkin would have had a field day eviscerating such a poseur or charlatan.
I imagine he'd sound like Bernard, in Lucky Jim, except as a guitarist rather than a painter. Or, come to think of it, his recorder-playing father. King of the pseudes. Or the modernist oboe player as well; come to think of it, the jazz-loving Amis had quite a hatred for any other kind of music, including "filthy Mozart".Replies: @Barack Obama's secret Unz account, @Curle
“ The way he’s referred to, by the sort of people who do the referring, leads me to think that someone like Kingsley Amis or Philip Larkin would have had a field day eviscerating such a poseur or charlatan.”
Fahey’s been idolized by music critics for as long as I can remember. At least 35 years. I happen to prefer Doc Watson, but Fahey is bona fide as the sisters in Brother Where Art Thou would say.
https://youtu.be/Y9a49oFalZEReplies: @petit bourgeois
That’s a late 50’s-early 60’s Les Paul Custom, worth a fortune today. Playing a guitar worth five figures would make me uneasy in these times. It was the precursor to the SG. All the hardware was gold plated.
I had the privilege of playing one I borrowed from a friend for gigs in Old World in Huntington Beach (a german village in socal) and we won the Battle of the Bands in Laguna Beach 30 years ago when I played that thing. There’s pictures of me playing one of on Facebook that I cherish.
I couldn’t handle an instrument worth that much today. It’s delightful in an intimate setting but not for taking on the road.
Definitely – and thanks for pointing that out.
I remember when William Perry of the Chicago Bears was a rookie and his 300+ lb. frame was a novelty back then. Today the NFL has over 400 players weighing 300+ lbs.
It was an impressive amount of work. They had information and trivia about all the different brands, including hard-to-find brands with only regional distribution. They had ratings and tasting notes and everything.
In its own way, it was the most stereotypically white dude thing ever.Replies: @Dissident, @vhrm
Isn’t that cultural appropriation?
It was an impressive amount of work. They had information and trivia about all the different brands, including hard-to-find brands with only regional distribution. They had ratings and tasting notes and everything.
In its own way, it was the most stereotypically white dude thing ever.Replies: @Dissident, @vhrm
https://xkcd.com/915/
(I hadn’t looked at this comic in years and in my head it was “Al Gore” eating a sandwich. Funny how the brain encodes things. )
What women ruined was Congress getting things done in any kind of timely manner. 30 years ago and for years previous, the top male leadership would hash out matters on important bills by adjourning to a nearby watering hole. To settle their differences in a collegial manner. To get it done! And go home. In the Senate there were many small hidey hole rooms with well stocked liquor cabinets. Undoubtedly all billed to the taxpayers somehow, some way. Over a few top shelf whiskies and bourbons matters would get settled. Similar to getting all liquored up at midday in Madmen TV series.
In a visit to DC I went to the Congress building with my nephews. I said hello to Senator Daniel Moynihan as he walked down the outside steps to leave. He was obviously three sheets to the wind. He did not reply. Smart!
DC sorta worked back then. Fast forward to women taking over the House and just existing in the Senate and we see catty, nasty, revenge-laden feminist-driven, race-traitor politics the likes of which never seen before in practically any deliberative body. It IS the reason for the hideous atmosphere on Capitol Hill.
Anyone want to sit and say it was all a coincidence that the atmosphere went up in flames just as women appeared on the Hill? Please, it's the reason for our decline as a nation.
Music journalism/reviews is just self-important but shitty writers trying to get a career going until their novel or whatever takes off. (It never does.) Or it's non-musicians trying to horn in on something they'll never understand. They're worse than useless: they're not just uninformative, they're misinformative: they make you think John Fahey is either a towering talent or (by inference) a puffed-up pile of shit - a "pseud". In reality: a guitarist that you either like or you don't.
It's basically impossible for any collection of words to accurately convey the experience of listening to a particular piece of music; and the experience is subjective anyway, so even should the journalist hit the nail on the head, it may not seem that way to you.
Maybe, to Grayson Haver Currin, Tashi Dorji's music really does "[grab] at melodic or rhythmic fragments only to grind them into dust" - ooh! - but to me it sounds like a puffed-up pile of shit.
Maybe there was an argument to be made for music reviews back in the day, if your local record shop didn't let you listen to the albums before you bought them, or if you didn't have a radio: farm boys with nothing but a mail-order catalogue and a dream, needing Rolling Stone or the NME to help them separate the wheat from the chaff. (If so, they would've often been bitterly disappointed.)
But that scanty justification is gone now. If you want to know whether so-and-so's new album is any good, just go and listen to it! It's on Youtube, and Spotify, and you can still pirate it if you know where to look. Come the revolution, I hope music journalists end up in the rice paddies with the blue-hairs and the four-eyes.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jonathan Mason
In college, I could afford to buy one album every 7 to 10 days, so I read a lot of reviews in order to make better informed choices. My tastes were only slightly avant-garde: I wanted to know about bands that weren’t on the radio in Houston yet, but were going to be big stars in a year or two. Reviewers were good for that purpose.
They were especially useful for stretching my concert-going dollars. Back in the 1970s, record companies would subsidize news bands’ first few tours, so I got ridiculously good deals like The Police for $3, Elvis Costello with Nick Lowe for $3, and Talking Heads for $2.
In general, I’ve usually found reading reviews to be useful.
The Faces’ agent and label had plans for Stewart on his own greater than that which his music with studio ace and pal Beck could deliver, and Beck had no interest in being a collaborator with a hit machine, even if it was a friend.
Ah, but the value there wasn’t in discovering good music, but in discovering good music ahead of the plebs.
I used to read a lot of reviews myself, but I got burned way too many times: “This album is utterly essential, literally life-changing, it’s simply a must-buy!” (Narrator: it wasn’t.)
Music journalism/reviews is just self-important but shitty writers trying to get a career going until their novel or whatever takes off. (It never does.) Or it's non-musicians trying to horn in on something they'll never understand. They're worse than useless: they're not just uninformative, they're misinformative: they make you think John Fahey is either a towering talent or (by inference) a puffed-up pile of shit - a "pseud". In reality: a guitarist that you either like or you don't.
It's basically impossible for any collection of words to accurately convey the experience of listening to a particular piece of music; and the experience is subjective anyway, so even should the journalist hit the nail on the head, it may not seem that way to you.
Maybe, to Grayson Haver Currin, Tashi Dorji's music really does "[grab] at melodic or rhythmic fragments only to grind them into dust" - ooh! - but to me it sounds like a puffed-up pile of shit.
Maybe there was an argument to be made for music reviews back in the day, if your local record shop didn't let you listen to the albums before you bought them, or if you didn't have a radio: farm boys with nothing but a mail-order catalogue and a dream, needing Rolling Stone or the NME to help them separate the wheat from the chaff. (If so, they would've often been bitterly disappointed.)
But that scanty justification is gone now. If you want to know whether so-and-so's new album is any good, just go and listen to it! It's on Youtube, and Spotify, and you can still pirate it if you know where to look. Come the revolution, I hope music journalists end up in the rice paddies with the blue-hairs and the four-eyes.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jonathan Mason
Reviews are still extremely useful if you want to buy music from anybody’s back catalog.
Go on Amazon and see how many Diana Ross albums there are . Or take any artist of your choice with a long career. If you just want to buy one and you wanted to have her best work, which would be the best album?
What would be the best albums to buy by prolific, but uneven recording artists like John Coltrane or Sun Ra who had different phases to their recording career?
You could look up some professional reviews written by music critics whose opinion you trusted, or less reliably you could look at the amateur reviews on Amazon. Usually the bad reviews on Amazon are more interesting, as they may bring some critical insight that fan reviews tend to overlook.
On the other hand even the pros are not always very reliable. Rolling Stone magazine did an article on the 100 best albums of the century in 2000, and in my opinion some of the albums picked were excruciating.
I have also seen numerous lists of the 100 best jazz albums of all time, and totally disagree with many of the selections. Kind of Blue? Kind of meh!
Time magazine named Bob Marley’s Exodus as album of the century, but I don’t even think it is Marley’s best or second best album.
Obviously you're not going to do that, but if you just want a good proxy measure to weed out the shit, why not popularity?
Reviews can be useful for your purposes, but they can achieve that purpose in a single paragraph. Here, I'll review Master of Puppets:Compare that to Robert Christgau's review of the same, which is unrepresentative of music criticism only insofar as it's short.
All you need to know, to help you decide what to buy, is:
- What sort of music is it?
- Is it any good?
You don't need some failed novelist jerking themselves off for 800 words.Replies: @Steve Sailer
“Sage & Spirit” was the one that convinced me how good Weir really was.
She IS good. Too bad the Times had to get my back up with their race-shite.
Have you heard of Justin Johnson? He’s a little more “conventional” but very good.
Even though this is a poor recording, this Spanish/American plays it better than the rest, IMO.
And I’ve listened to a whole lot of them.
https://twitter.com/itranslate123/status/1370973910343286785Replies: @Ripple Earthdevil
How the heck does this have anything to do with solo guitar, Jew-hater?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jj1zhDpV5YReplies: @Ripple Earthdevil
Poor Emily. She struggled with opiate addiction and died of heart failure at age 32.
https://youtu.be/XmNPXqG6ovg?t=14Replies: @Random Anonymous, @Ripple Earthdevil
His last name notwithstanding, Jerry never considered himself Hispanic and neither do his fans. His father immigrated from Spain and he was of the old proud to now be American school. His name was Jose and he insisted on being called Joe. His mother was of Irish and Swedish ancestry.
As you go on to explain, reviews are a poor metric, and it’s subjective anyway. The question is, which one will you like best? And the only way to know is to hear them all.
Obviously you’re not going to do that, but if you just want a good proxy measure to weed out the shit, why not popularity?
Reviews can be useful for your purposes, but they can achieve that purpose in a single paragraph. Here, I’ll review Master of Puppets:
Compare that to Robert Christgau’s review of the same, which is unrepresentative of music criticism only insofar as it’s short.
All you need to know, to help you decide what to buy, is:
– What sort of music is it?
– Is it any good?
You don’t need some failed novelist jerking themselves off for 800 words.
Obviously you're not going to do that, but if you just want a good proxy measure to weed out the shit, why not popularity?
Reviews can be useful for your purposes, but they can achieve that purpose in a single paragraph. Here, I'll review Master of Puppets:Compare that to Robert Christgau's review of the same, which is unrepresentative of music criticism only insofar as it's short.
All you need to know, to help you decide what to buy, is:
- What sort of music is it?
- Is it any good?
You don't need some failed novelist jerking themselves off for 800 words.Replies: @Steve Sailer
But failed novelists with good pattern recognition skills can explain that new band X sounds like a cross between old band Y and old band Z, with influences by A, B, and C. Nowadays, we have audio streaming services that will tabulate what you like and recommend more stuff you are likely to like. In the old days, critics provided that service by delineating influences.
Moreover, some people just like having a conceptual map of new music, which you are more likely to have provided effectively by an aficionado with a way with words.
But with zero incremental cost to listen to new music these days, the value of critics is much diminished compared to an era when records were not cheap.
You say "delineate influences", I said "tell you what sort of music it is," either way I agree that this can be a valuable convenience. My point is that many reviews don't contain or restrict themselves to this information. Critics tend to indulge themselves instead, and in so doing, mislead the reader. Surely you must have differed sharply with a critic once or twice?
And getting a musical education from a writer is fine, but, again, that's distinct from the question of quality. It's one thing to tell the reader that the kids these days are listening to Japanese death techno, it's another thing to tell them that the new Tamagotcha! single is "an autistic piledriver whose frenzied, skittering vocals leave the listener in much the same condition that Mothra left Tokyo. 4 and a half stars"
(And then you listen to it and it's just meh 2010's electro, and the vocals are neither frenzied nor skittering)
I agree the internet changed things. But in the old days, the feller that worked at the record store or your opinionated mate in your dorm room etc could have also told you what other music you might like.
You say “delineate influences”, I said “tell you what sort of music it is,” either way I agree that this can be a valuable convenience. My point is that many reviews don’t contain or restrict themselves to this information. Critics tend to indulge themselves instead, and in so doing, mislead the reader. Surely you must have differed sharply with a critic once or twice?
And getting a musical education from a writer is fine, but, again, that’s distinct from the question of quality. It’s one thing to tell the reader that the kids these days are listening to Japanese death techno, it’s another thing to tell them that the new Tamagotcha! single is “an autistic piledriver whose frenzied, skittering vocals leave the listener in much the same condition that Mothra left Tokyo. 4 and a half stars”
(And then you listen to it and it’s just meh 2010’s electro, and the vocals are neither frenzied nor skittering)
I agree. Rather than listening to every album that anybody put out, it is more economical to get someone knowledgable to listen to them all and then offer an opinion as to which is the best.
Critics are useful but fallible. One of the most highly recommended and highly rated jazz albums of all time is Duke Ellington’s Live At Newport–all critics love it–but most versions of the album have suffered from poor sound quality, and in any case have been nothing special from a musical point of view.
I personally could recommend half a dozen Ellington albums or performances that I prefer, including big bands and small group performances and studio recordings.
This is exquisite.
I used to live near DC, worked in DC all over Capitol Hill for thirty years. Newt and Beohner and Tip and Teddy would perhaps savage one another on the Floor of whatever House, but there at 6:30 PM, there they’d be, at The Press Club, or one of the pyster bars, doing their business the way men do.
DC sorta worked back then. Fast forward to women taking over the House and just existing in the Senate and we see catty, nasty, revenge-laden feminist-driven, race-traitor politics the likes of which never seen before in practically any deliberative body. It IS the reason for the hideous atmosphere on Capitol Hill.
Anyone want to sit and say it was all a coincidence that the atmosphere went up in flames just as women appeared on the Hill? Please, it’s the reason for our decline as a nation.
https://youtu.be/d33x1HyJZ10Replies: @vhrm, @Jim Christian
Rudiments, anyone can do that shit. Simple high-hat and snare fills are so simple to perform any 5 year old could do it to a shit song like Smoke. Are you stupid, or just never play drums? What’s this kid written for herself? A girl copying, and poorly, the works of men, well, we have THAT in every area of modern life. And you celebrate that shit? She sucks at drums. Let’s see her do symphony or swing, as did Buddy Rich. Or even Ed. Her big hair would fall out trying to read the score, if she can even read music, which I doubt.
a more blatant example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvJElTaR5kM
Though then there are also people like Senri Kawaguchi (japanase woman who's been playing since she was really young) who seems to be the real deal though she also no doubt gets some of that "idol" benefit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5YDxDuyKDIReplies: @Jim Christian
Ham-fisted rudiments-ringer. She sucks. I know a suck-drummer by how they hold the left stick. And, another chick that can’t read music and so are useless.