Guitar's Not Dead - is it?
BBC have this piece which I contributed my thoughts to (they omitted me saying that guitar music is fine when bands like Paramore, Blood Red Shoes, Pulled Apart by Horses and Sleigh Bells are all over daytime R1, and when Weezer and Deftones have made two of the albums of the year, but I guess that didn't fit the angle of this piece) and I suspect some of you will have an opinion on this.
Why is there an apparent dirth of mainstream guitar music? Do guitars sound silly being played through computer speakers and iPods?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11664781
"I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables. / I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars!" - James Murphy 'Losing My Edge'
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It seems they've writing a different story to the one they asked contributors about
in that they've approached it as whether guitar bands can survive and adapt these days and worked it into a piece about why there are no massive new post-Oasis/KoL anthemic guitar bands. I don't want my favourite new bands to sell millions of records and head straight to the O2, I want my favourite new bands to be any good.
That would indeed be worthy of derision if it was actually what it said
but the actual quote is "Both have had great years, partly because they have broken the conventional indie stereotype" - which, as much as I'd piss in my front yard if they were playing in my bathroom, is probably a fair point in many respects
Much ado about nothing...
What about Dinosaur Pile-Up? That's a grunge band about to break the mainstream in 2010, and the shoegazing scene- almost entirely guitar based- couldn't be healthier if Mr Shields himself was penning Loveless II... and that's without looking at all the progressive bands like Porcupine Tree...
Except that list is chosen by people mostly outside of the BBC...
including me
and whenever 130 people agree on anything, it usually is the most agreeable, rather than the best or most exciting, that rises to the top.
totally. i did this interview with my ears still ringing from Factory Floor, Mazes and No Age the night before, just before our 2nd bill at In the City with HEALTH, Let's Buy Happiness and Sky Larkin about to strum their guitars. I'm currently considering putting together a grunge revival mixtape.
wait, factory floor?
grunge?
hur dur duhbstep
veedubstep
I think that since 90% of the bands I've seen over the past few years feature guitars as their primary instrument
sort of negates this thesis. (Yes, it's perfectly fine that I use my own experiences as the benchmark here. Heh.)
I think the more interesting approach to this story would be that the best indie music sounds like adult contemporary. I blame the phenomenon on Grizzly Bear...god bless 'em!
Everything's gone quiet. I listen to NPR and fall asleep. Sure, a lot of it is rather great. Chillwave? Yeah, I like to chill. But I also like to rawk! There's Japandroids, and Titus Andronicus and some others...but really there's not a lot in the way of great, loud guitars.
It's the hardest thing in rock music to do: put out a familiar sounding rawk record, that doesn't sound familiar. Most musicians don't even try, they go for an "experimental" sound where they're more likely to receive critical acclaim.
That said, the guitar is still...and probably always will be the single instrument that defines rock music.
Know what you mean about the quiet stuff...
though I think that's just what media picks up on.
Plenty of loud guitars out there, just not getting the same amount of attention.
didn't NPR do a big thing on No Age last week? Or was that all their ambient end of things? :)
Pft, the mainstream is pretty daft anyway and tends to go in cycles.
After the landfill indie of the last couple of years, I'm not suprised that there's few mainstream guitar-based hits.
So long as good bands exist to listen to, guitars or otherwise, I'm not too bothered.
^this
Rewind a few years to the era of 'landfill indie' and articles like this would have been talking about the 'death of dance music.'
Really not impressed by this article, simplistic and vague to the point of not getting any kind of clear argument across
The guitar's just one instrument - you don't see people asking whether piano music's dead. In that sense it refers more generally to rock music, rather than anything that uses guitars.
And rock/indie music IS at a low ebb at the moment, for sure, even below the mainstream. There's little real innovation going on, and perhaps the appeal of a lot of electronic music to a wider audience at the moment is that it breaks beyond the limitations of the guitar band format. A lot of regions of dance music are wholly preoccupied with sonic and compositional innovation and futurism, and I like to think peoples' gravitation towards it might be to do with demanding MORE from their music.
But then maybe that's just me, idk.
There's still some guitar stuff out there that's fucking exciting - Marnie Stern's new one is unsurprisingly incredible - but so little compared to the sheer variety elsewhere.
Perhaps more people are starting to cotton on to the idea that there's more to music than guitar, bass and drums.
Thinking more about this
Rock music is one of the only forms of modern music that tends to fetishise the past, obsessions with retro sounds and bands that broke up 40 years ago.
Place that alongside the sheer blaze of glory that is the Big Boi album, or anything from Outkast, Timbaland, The Neptunes -- now even James Blake -- and it's not surprising people are getting a bit bored of hearing stuff that's so wilfully got its head stuck in the sand.
And before people yell, yes I know it's a generalisation, but you can't avoid those when talking about such a wide and vague issue...
Deftones, I mean, how on earth does the new record take influence from m83 and Kode9 (whereas White Pony took influence from Mogwai) and still sound brutal but so tender?!
I think it's in the guitar sound.
It's so dense and compressed, it becomes all enveloping white noise at points, but with that amount of distortion becomes quite chuggy and rhythmic when notes are 'choked'..
Love the Deftones, but has to be Steven Wilson (what genre hasn't the man done at some time?) or North Atlantic Oscillation surely?
yeah, ditto Holy Fuck, Foals, etc. Whereas conversely acts like Fuck Buttons seem like they're playing rock music on electronic instruments.
Very standard, crap, non-enlightening article
And cheers for dissing Editors, you BBC pricks.
They're doing very well last time I checked.
What a horrible, vague article
Please don't let it start some sort of "Rock! It's backward looking! Dubstep! You're a hipster!' sort of discussion.
Guitar based music and electronic music have run parallel to each other, each having peaks and troughs in their respective popularity, for so long that it's hard to imagine that not continuing.
This is very true
It's something I've chatted with people quite a bit about before - rock's at a low ebb at the moment, but it'll come back in some way, shape or form, these things move in cycles. I think the current state is inevitable in the sense that a lot of mainstream rock/indie in the noughties was dominated by retro/revival stuff rather than anything genuinely groundbreaking, and swiftly got stale in the endless rehash of Libs/Monkeys into landfill stuff.
That said, it's not like there's a lack of rock music in the charts...
and that said, its not like the charts are that reflective of critical praise/hype, either. a little study i did a while back on here showed that nearly no-one bought digital downloads and that most people still bought CD albums, so it isn't even as if, especially considering how fractured things are, that any of the sort of music that is great and exciting at the moment, is charting. not that popularity based on sales is a true gauge of anything, really. especially when it's just about a small amount of people agreeing on something that has been heavily marketed. anyway, i digress...
.
what a load of shit. there’s crap guitar/rock music everywhere (esp in mainstream), but there’s also a shedload of crap dance music, crap dubstep, crap whatever…it’s not really fair to compare KoL to Mount Kimbie, because you’ve taken one mega-stadium band and compared them to one ‘underground’ electronic group without actually looking at the below-the-radar guitar/’rock’ bands. stupid stupid stupid. there’s shit music and there’s good music and some of it’s easier to find than others. not news.
That was the other thing I was going to mention
The bloke from Now Wave, asked to name what the mainstream recognises as indie bands who are doing it differently (to The Enemy), comes up with Errors and Mount Kimbie? That's like a piece about UK rap centering on Art brut.
It's only a matter of time before that side project
But you know what I mean? It's no good asking what the next big indie band will be like and answering Errors, because that's something entirely different.
really agree
that its silly to pit a progressive, under the radar band from one genre against a mainstream band from another genre. All genres produce music that's progressive, music that's nostalgic, music that's aimed at the chart and music that isn't. But only the people who bother to investigate further know about the good stuff. So, if you're really interested in one kind of music, you're bound to think it's more innovative.
.
also all these 'genre' pieces are a complete load of ass, because it presupposes that these genres can be defined in the first place, and that bands are either 'IN THEM' or 'NOT IN THEM'. especially with something as completely vague and meaningless as 'guitar music'...or even 'indie music'. i'm not sure anyone can really say what either of those terms refer to
You speak a lot of sense
indeed
i have an inbox full of shit guitar bands to prove this theory. iceberg tip, etc.
no more
whining bedroom acoustic demos for you, you ungrateful bastard! :p
I guess one case in point is
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who ditched guitars in favour of synths for their last record, I think that was the USP of that record at the time. Nick Zinner, brilliant guitarist, so lets, er, not have him play guitar. I don't remember much "oh, the guitar's so dead" chatter round then. Even in the late nineties when turntables were outselling guitars and everyone wanted to be Norman Cook there wasn't this sort of talk, so why now...!?!?
Precisely
Editors did the same on their most recent record (but still with some guitar) and will still be using guitars on album 4.
to be fair
they basically ditched the synth for the first two songs, it's pretty guitary after that.
It's not dead
but it's certainly going in new directions. I love the fact bands like Mount Kimbie, Forest Swords, Gold Panda, Four Tet take blueprints of dubstep/dub/dance/etc and add guitar elements to it, be it samples (GP + FT) or actual guitar lines (MK + FS). It's that melding of electronic and organic that is going to be really interesting in future, especially from British music.
The article seems to be based on the singles chart.
And really, there are two types of 'singles' in this digital download age - the genuinely single track that basically exists on its own and is generally the province of the X-Factor, 'manufactured' acts that are the ones that generally sell by the shedload to folk who don't buy anything else, and the 'taster' track which is little more than an advertisment for an act that expects to do most of its business by shifting units of the new album. 'Rock' and guitar bands tend to generally fall into this latter camp. By their very nature, these tracks are not going to sell as well, because their prime audience will wait for the album.
So the premise of the article is flawed - 'guitar bands' (for want of a better term) are not represented at the top of the singles charts because this is not the area where they are concentrating their efforts.
What a silly piece
no real acknowledgement by anyone that times have changed in terms of download culture/streaming culture/diversification of tastes, just vaguely suggests 'fashion' and record company short termism are entirely to blame for everything, as if things might easily go back to the way they were ten years ago.
'Indie' fans don't really buy singles anymore because under current circumstances there isn't really that much point - back in't day, you'd buy a single plus b-sides to tide you over til the album came out; now I don't think many people can be arsed to buy a digidownload of their new fave band's track when they know the album itself is out in a couple of weeks, including said track (and they probably won't buy that anyway).
it's old yardsticks for success in general
though I mean, with albums there are at some new bands that chart pretty well who've had no singles success at all, despite hardly being the most abrasive bunch - Everything Everything, for example, or Best Coast in the states. They write poppy songs that clearly HAVE got out there, but under this article's definitions they're unpopular artists...
I don't think an "obsession with albums" is a problem
but I do think bands should be less... stringent with them. British bands have it hard enough as it is, but there's such an obsession in this country with THE DEBUT ALBUM,. it still feels like everyone wants to make an Unknown Pleasures / Definitely Maybe / Stone Roses-style 'statement', and consequently spend three years over-analysing everything to end up either (a) doing this, and forver setting themselves up for failure in future, or (b) not doing this and coming off as a damp squib based on their early promise.
Compare this with a lot of American bands, who make an album, release it, tour it, make the next one, tour that, etc etc, and hit their personal magnum opus three or four albums in.
Do American bands
have better/more reliable funding then? I don't think it's the bands who have this obsession with debut albums, I think it's the media/industry people. You're not forgiven for making an 'average' debut album anymore - you'd be dropped and your career over.
I think, in terms of the US, it's got a lot to do with there
being more than about 12 places for bands to play, as well as there not being a singular, homogenous media market like we have. It seems very easy for bands in the UK, particularly ones on small labels, to just run out of steam. If you can't/not able to break out into Europe or the US you're basically limited in how much you can tour, and if you don't get anywhere with Radio 1 or the NME you're not going to get any kind of media exposure worth a damn.
You say that about the media/industry, but I can think of a number of British artists who got some initial underground buzz but have largely failed to capitalise on it by taking forever to release any substantial body of work. Banjo or Freakout still hasn't put one out, has he? Gentle Friendly took ages and then basically split up. Factory Floor are apparently in no hurry. Contrast that with someone like Grass Widow or the Fresh & Onlys, who are playing for basically the same team, yet who have released multiple records in the past year and gone on to tour them mercilessly and will probably still be around in five years as a result.
Gentle Friendly split up?
That's really disappointing. I loved that album.
Sorta
The drummer quit like three days after the album came out, hence why they never toured it.
There's a new drummer now, they played at Yes Way, although I dunno if they've played since.
Fair enough
You seem to have a grasp on it. Not familiar with the artists you mention so can't comment. I do think there's a destructive obsession with 'new and fresh sounds' that is being perpetuated by the media though. I'm all for progression, moving things on and welcoming 'the new' but it can seem like in some influential quarters there's a 'we are zeitgeist-defining!' attitude of "2nd album now is it? See ya... I want the fresh meat!!" This is negated by Heart FM-type radio stations and the BBC etc but still. Hmm, think I might be out of my depth here. (Scuttles back to watch from afar.)
This article is trotted out every three years or so
And it's usually written by people with precisely no imagination, research skills or any sense of the wider perspective on UK music as a whole. It's so defiantly boring that it makes those OK Computer vs. Kid A bores at the time seem vaguely interested in music at all.
I was going to
post something quite stupid, like should the guitar as an instrument be evolving with the times and like "iaminterested" said, should bands be looking for different ways to approach it... and there are people that are still innovating it. However, even now you can plug a guitar into the USB of a laptop or whatever, the software available seems still bent on trying to recreate "vintage" sounds instead of something new-
But you know what? Think of the violin, no one's felt the need to fuck with that for a couple of hundred years and there are still artists that are creating beautiful and innovative music without feeling the need to, I dunno, bolt it to a grindsaw or something. Why should the guitar be any different? I think there will be indie bands still chugging out weak beatles style pub rock in fifty years' time and further, just due to the sheer accessibility of the guitar.
"Two years ago, more than a dozen guitar-wielding bands - including Coldplay, Oasis, Razorlight, Kaiser Chiefs and The Kooks - reached the same heights."
Razorlight? Two years ago? Really? A #5 single in October 2008. Piss all else worth mentioning since 2006.
The Kooks? Two years ago? Really? They had a #3 single in March 2008, and a #1 album in April 2008, but no matter how much blanket airplay and TV ad support they had, everyone realised they'd had more than enough Kooks, tyvm. Their peak was in 2006.
Kaiser Chiefs? Two years ago? Only on a technicality. They had one Mark ("big ROCK name") Ronson produced single at #5 in Oct 2008 off of the back of an album that hit #2 and then faded away. They had two top 20 singles and a big album three years ago. Their peak was in 2005.
The Killers? = The American Kaiser Chiefs. With a career path to match. 1 Brandon Flowers single? Geri Halliwel managed to blag a couple of hit singles off of the back of record co promo in the absence of anything by their former band. It amounts to nothing.
Coldplay? Guitar-wielding? Really? No. But let's run with it. Massive, obviously. And their 2008 album threw up a couple of big singles. But you'd hope so after the massive success they'd had leading in 2005 and the blanket coverage they got. Let's be honest, they're crossing over into a bi/tri-annual 'event band', like U2, the Stones, or Oasis (RIP, for now...), rather than an indication of any kind of trend. And as I say, they're not a 'guitar band'.
Oasis? Yeah, they've sneaked a top 10 single in each of the past 3 years, but in 2005 they managed 3.
I'm sensing a 2005/6 theme here....
Kings of Leon are the odd ones out. They were an alright band who only managed to get where they are now by filling the vacuum left by the 2005/6 burnout bands who couldn't muster anything of note in 2008. But it was only really 2 big singles and an album with sales bolstered by 'dance music' fans and supermarket music buyers who were kinda getting into this new fangled guitar music trend just as it had died a creative death. Their big live performances were panned. Kings of Leon were the death rattle. They'll never come close to matching previous success. They'll probably do well to manage to scrape credible festival billings over the next year or two, before falling off the radar.
All of the above was shit anyway. It's just unsuccesful shit now.
In terms of actual good music, there's always fucking loads of it. Be it guitar led, or electronically based.
"Mr Adams, who released the Kaiser Chiefs' first single, also believes fans find it unnatural to listen to something that is "attached to previous generations" on their ultra-modern devices."
I don't really do this under normal circumstances, but: LOL.
I was fucking bored the other day
and I watched this Coldplay 'storytellers' thing on Virgin Media. It was pretty dire really (Martin is a crap live singer) but the bit that stood out was when Berryman (the bass-wielding rock maestro that you can never hear on any Coldplay record) chimed in with something like "I think for me, I'll always remember 'Rush of Blood..' coming out and hearing 'Politik' not long after 9/11 and it just seemed so poignant really. That track just seemed so poignant at the time..."
You fucking what? Self-proclaiming that your band can assuage massive grief or capture the mood of a time with a non-lyrically-specific track called 'Politik'??? Berryman, thy do nobly crown thyself.
That'd probably be me
interspersed with some electronic stuff like Depeche Mode.
I care not though.
I'm hardly crawling the walls panicking about where the next guitar band is coming from. There are oceans of music and there's plenty still out there for me.
Fuck it
I was replying to brightonb and fucked it up.
Meh
There will always be guitar bands because watching people play the guitar live will always be more exciting that watching someone play most electronic instruments.
Some 'guitar bands' do exciting things with their sound, incorporating other instruments, sounds ideas. Some are dull.
Same as always really.
sean
i was actually gonna start a thread about this, but you beat me to it.
however, do you really think that it's limited making sounds with a guitar when you've got a palette of others?
surely, there's been other palettes of sound since forever?
going on to the argument of who wants to listen to guitar music all the time in 2010, i don't think anyone does.
However, I'm more than happy to listen to Metallica and then change over to the Knife.
Sorry, I've kinda forgotten what point I was trying to make.
Fundamentally, I don't give a shit what instrument it is, just as long as it sounds good to my ears.
Personally
I'll be glad when analysing the music industry is dead.
I'll be glad when the music industry is dead.
And the media.
Seriously though
I wish people would stop talking so much about the current state of music, the industry and what's in and what's out, etc. and just enjoy whatever music tickles your fancy.
It's almost as boring as people who talk about drugs.
I thought this thread would be about
A Liars concept album
The thesis does not stand up as well when you look at the lineups of the major festivals
Glastonbury, Leeds/ Reading, T - all very healthy festivals, full of guitar bands. I'd suggest that the non-guitar types would be in the minority,
I wonder how it'd look in terms of number of gigs across the country?
I remember when NME did their "guitar music is dead" piece
They had LFO smashing guitars on the cover. Wikipedia tells me that was in 1992.
.
as an aside, i'm not sure that jazz musicians (or any musicians worth their salt) could give two shits whether they are part of some dominant force...it's just (and should be) people just doing what they do, simple as
surprised no-one has posted this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Llv6Wpm99uo
the dis homepage looks exactly the same every day, give or take
four guys posturing moodily, or maybe three guys and a girl posturing moodily. sort of sums up why there are no good guitar bands.
it just seems so old-fashioned and everything that goes with it really out of date.
This is more to do with the problem of promo photos...
...and photos of musicians in general than the music that we cover. People who make non-guitar based music can posture moodily, too.
i always try to use promo photos when bands ain't much to look at.
it helps that Gary and the In Photos crew take some pretty amazing shots a lot of the time.
My internet died.
I was gonna follow up my all-the-bands-the-article-mentioned-'died'-in-2006-anyway rant with a comment that you nailed it in your OP, sean.
"I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables. / I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars!"
Lol at 'Weezer and Deftones have made two of the albums of the year'
Good grief
a sean OP wouldn't be right without at least one weezer reference
Blue>Pinkerton>Green>Maladroit>Red>Hurley>Chinese Democracy>Carrot Cake
Deftones certainly have
Weezer less so, though it's alright
Ian Youngs
Is he the BBC 'journo' who used to do the music reviews on Ceefax? The ones where they seemingly weren't allowed to be critical in any way of a record presumably because, y'know, it's the Beeb and neutrality and all that? Like the palest of pale imitations of Planet Sound on C4 Teletext.
FANG ISLAND
FANG ISLAND
FANG ISLAND
FANG ISLAND
I haven't read the article, and having read some of the responses to it on here, I'm not going to
but certainly within the genre of 'indie rock', or even 'rock' more generally, there does seem to be something intrinsically limiting about the reliance on two guitars, a bass and a drum kit. For that reason - even though indie rock is my one true love, music-wise - I do frequently find myself becoming disenchanted with it as a genre. How many directions can you really take it in? How many bands can you listen to before you realise that you're just listening to more or less the same thing you've heard a million times before? Whereas (and please forgive the shitty genre names here) hip-hop, electronica, 'IDM', 'ambient' and others surely have richer palettes from which musicians can pick and choose their sounds from. That CMG review of Public Strain you all loved so much covered it quite nicely, I thought: http://www.cokemachineglow.com/record_review/5678/women-publicstrain-2010
Sorry, it's not particularly interesting or insightful but I wanted to say it, so there.
I love that review.
And I don't even really like Women (the band).
When I heard Women perform (at Now Wave)
I remember thinking, will this ever be bettered?
To me, Public Strain is like a full stop on an era; and that we have not yet got there is irrelevant.
However, I love the guitar, and I am sure it has a bold future. It's not the instrument, but the musical structure and form which will change.
I love the controversy which the guitar still brings when introduced into other hitherto sacred domains, like minimal techno. The depth it adds still leaves me gasping.
As to the guitar in rock, well it's not just the music that changes. People change. Goodnight.