Tuesday 30 September 2008

Why all the fury?

Guitar magazines annoy me. Frank Zappa said that Rock Journalism is “People who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read”, but guitar journalism is all those things with an added dose of trainspotterish tedium thrown in.

I think that part of the problem is that the people who write for these magazines are fundamentally guitar people, not music people. A life that could have been spent in rock n’ roll, one of the most exciting activities mankind has ever come up with, has been spent arguing about whether glued-in or bolted-on necks produce a better tone. It’s a bit like going to the World Cup Final and examining the variety of grass used on the pitch. They pontificate about whether Rosewood or Maple fingerboards are better for legato, when they could be investigating which makes the more satisfying explosion when you shove it into a live amplifier in front of thousands of screaming fans.

It takes a certain kind of personality to make guitars boring. A guitar can be a living, breathing extension of your soul, your ticket to triumph or disaster at ear-splitting volume, but they’re reviewed as if they were food mixers.

The first two thirds of any guitar review will be spent on an excruciating description of what the guitar looks like and what it’s made of. Guitar reviewers often seem more like frustrated electricians than frustrated rock stars, poring over the minute details of construction and the exact wiring of the pickups. What in the name of all that is holy is the point of that? If you want to see what the guitar looks like, you can look at the vast 2-page colour photos of the thing that the magazine have helpfully printed to fill up space. You can see that it has a pointy headstock or a forearm chamfer. I know that a lot of rock stars are pretty strung out most of the time, but if they’re too smashed to tell what shape the guitar is, then they’re too smashed to read the article in the first place. If we want to know its exact neck dimensions or what kind of battery the active electrics require, we can look at the little tech spec box or look at the manufacturer’s website. Don’t repeat them all in longhand in the article because you don’t have anything interesting to say.

After this exercise in pointlessness, the reviewer grudgingly takes off his anorak and starts to play the thing. But wait! They’ve cunningly thought up a way of making this pointless too! Yes, they will, when reviewing an electric guitar, tell you what it sounds like if it isn’t plugged in! I’ve actually seen magazines mark guitars down because of a deficient unplugged tone. That’s like criticising a car for not going fast enough with the engine switched off.

At long last, they will plug the thing into an amp and rattle off a couple of paragraphs about frequency response and sustain, before giving it at least four out of five and telling you to buy one.

Yes, that’s right. When was the last time you saw a review in a major guitar magazine that said that a guitar was utter shit? Someone actually wrote to a magazine once asking precisely that, and the response was something along the lines that “There’s so much great gear coming out these days that we only have space to review the really good stuff”. I don’t buy that. If I walk into a guitar shop looking to buy, rather than just play Smoke on the Water, I’m going to be presented with dozens of options. Some will be good, some will be awful, and if magazines are just reviewing the latest and most fashionable things, I’ll only have knowledge about a handful of the guitars in there, and I’ll have been told that they’re great, and that if I don’t immediately buy at least twelve of them, I will be summarily sectioned as mentally inadequate.

That’s the heart of the matter. A good magazine review will boost sales, even if the product is no better, or even worse, than the other instruments on the rack. This is where the rot sets in. I’ll put it frankly - guitar manufacturers and guitar magazines have a relationship that verges on the corrupt. The makers have the magazines over a barrel. If a certain mag won’t slaver all over their latest piece of junk, they will withdraw their advertising in favour of one that will. You can always tell that a guitar is going to get 10 out of 10, a gold star and a smiley face, when the magazine has, by complete co-incidence, a 5-page article on the company, the factory, or the guy who designed it. Do you think that a guitar manufacturer is going to let a magazine tour its factory and tread sawdust into the carpet if it was going to rip into its latest model? Of course not, there’s a quid pro quo here, written or unwritten. (Although, in my view, that would be the funniest article ever written: “Here we see the dodgy wiring department, where, presumably, drug-addled illegal immigrants wearing boxing gloves shove any old wires into the body, enduring that the guitar you buy will be as appalling as the one we review on page 94.”) Guitar journalists are simply too frightened to criticise the latest models.

In some areas of critical journalism, such as motoring or films, standards are higher, and there is an unwritten law which guarantees that reviewers are entitled to say what they like and still get advertising. If a certain film is less interesting than arranging grains of sand in size order, the journalists will say so. The world of guitar journalism needs to cross that bridge, or lose all its credibility.

And it’s always the latest models that get reviewed, because that’s what the makers want to push. Their existing models already have market share, and they want to achieve market penetration with their latest thing, so they get the guitar journos to plug them. That’s no help to Wayne or Garth down at the guitar shop. The majority of guitars on sale there will be designs that have been in circulation for years, if not decades – many places won’t even stock the fancy stuff that’s plugged in the magazines. That’s another point, actually, the mags often seem to review the top-of-the-range gold plated mega-guitars, not the cheaper models that the majority of us will actually buy. Of course it’s a good guitar, you morons, it costs £3000! But for every Les Paul Custom or PRS Custom 24 bought by a serious musician (and most professionals will be given their instruments for free by the makers as part of an endorsement deal), a hundred will be bought by rich city brokers undergoing a mid-life crisis who were too scared to buy a motorbike, and will spend their lives as room ornaments, dragged out once a year to play “House of the Rising Sun” at the family Christmas do. I want reviews of the guitars people actually buy, and actually play.

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not connected to any manufacturer, and I owe loyalty to nobody. Sadly, that means that the guitars I review will either be my own, or borrowed from friends. Whilst I will miss out on the latest and greatest models, what I will review are guitars you can find in your local guitar shop and actually afford.

I’m not interested in whether the tiger stripes on the flame maple are straight or slightly bendy, or whether there is a small dab of glue visible near the neck join. You can’t see that on stage, you can’t hear that on a recording. If you care about that kind of thing you are buying a guitar as a wall ornament and therefore I hate you. Guitar music is about feel, passion, image, and very loud noise, and reviews of guitars should be on that basis. I want to know what a guitar is like to play, what it sounds like, whether it will survive the rigours of the road, what it says about me and, above all, how it makes me feel. As such, my reviews will not be fair, neutral or remotely objective. Rock music is about strong emotions and strong opinions. If rock music was reviewed the way guitars are, the Sex Pistols would be criticised for being out of tune and only playing three chords, Bob Dylan would get two out of ten because he can’t sing, and Dream Theater would be universally regarded as the best band on the planet.

I hope that I can inform and entertain, and tell you something that you couldn’t find out by looking at an advert. There’s no set formula here, and I’m not going to rattle off a list of dimensions or go through the various aspects of the guitar in a pre-set order. Guitars are all about feel, and so I will write about how a guitar makes me feel, what it makes me think about, what it reminds me of. If there’s an aspect to the construction that is worthy of mention, for being very good or very bad, then I’ll say so, but on the whole I’m not going to dwell on that sort of thing because, to be frank, it’s boring. Guitars aren’t boring.

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