I get sick of electric guitars. I think we all do. It started on a tour last year, playing a club in Liverpool where the white noise on stage was relentless. Either you wear ear plugs that remove all the attack and clarity from your playing, or you don't and can't sleep for the tinitus...
No, i'm beginning to believe that the future of valid* contemporary music lies in a swing back to instrumentation prominent in arts golden age: romanticism. The fundamental problem with the electric guitar, for me, is that you have to simulate emotivity e.g. with distortion or reverbs, and a punk rock ethic can only take one so far. For all the cliched and irrelevant images of drugs, bad teeth and hedonism this term conjures up, the true heart of punk (long lost in 'punk' bands) is the nobility of defiant self-expression and creating music that was challenging and uncompromising. Note the 'is' and 'was.'
It wasn't so long ago that i had never been to a classical concert. And so, eager to support my ladyfriend, i found myself in a church in Aldershot watching an orchestra perfoming Jean Sibelius' violin concerto in D minor and Ralph Vaughn Williams' "The Lark Ascending." I highly recommend, if you consider yourself a lover of music and believe in its power to enlighten and empower the human heart and mind, you should go out into the cultural wastes of the world and salvage these two pieces of music.
Perhaps i am being too harsh. After all, you can download bothof these on itunes. I suppose i find some bitter humour in the ease of access to fantastic art, yet the cultural spotlight of our generation always slips down to the muck of the tap-your-foot-a-hum-a-long-a-tunes lazily farted out by the likes of the pigeon detectives. Its not their fault though, its a gradual and global decline in artistic standards... fuck... i apologise, i didn't mean for this to become such a lament. Call it the repressed romantic in me.
- Alexander
*why are the Arcade Fire and Gogol Bordello such life-affirming bands to watch? I'm beginning to think you could do anything, no matter how technically incredible or sonically unique with electric guitars and i (and everyone else) would be so desensitized to it that it would provoke no emotional or intellectual reaction whatsoever. We've hit saturation point. If you're reading this and want to learn an instrument, please, for the good of humanity, skip argos and get a cheap electric piano, a violin, a cello, a tuba, anything!
