Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings…The Guitar Solo is Back!

No, I’m not just quoting scripture here.  I’m stating a fact that the rising generation is signaling the return of the guitar solo. About four months ago a friend asked me if I’d be a judge in a Battle of the Bands at a local high school.  I wasn’t wild about the idea at first but then I realized that, while I certainly had better things to do, this would be a great opportunity to see what the young music scene was up to.

The format was as follows:  6 bands would play two songs each, one cover and one original.  Much to my astonishment, every cover played by every band was from back in the day, I’m talking Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimmy Hendrix, [insert whoever from the late 60s into the 70s] day.  To be honest, I was kind of surprised that these pre-voting-age teens even knew who some of these pioneers of music were, let alone be able to do some fairly impressive renditions of their songs.  You may be thinking, “That’s not surprising – who doesn’t know who Jimmy Hendrix is?”  Well you may have a point, but I’ve actually met many.  And Credence, well there are a ton ignorant of their mark in history.  And I vaguely remember that one of the bands played a cover by The Neptunes.  But to really drive my point home, it was the diversity between the cover songs these kids elected to play and the originals that they performed immediately after that best illustrated the reason I was surprised by their awareness of things past.  In my experience most artists tend to compose music in the style of bands they listen to.  The second band up played a Steppenwolf cover and then an original that sounded like a Primus knock off.  And guess what – it had a guitar solo.  And guess what again – every original from all six bands had a guitar solo.  Scratch that – the first group rapped to a karaoke machine a la Beastie Boys.  But everyone else had a guitar solo.  And some of the guitar solos were good.

Now just to be fair, the guitar solo never really died completely, it just changed to the point where it was unrecognizable vis-a-vis what we traditionally think of as a guitar solo.  So this is not really a resurrection per se but rather a cycle coming full circle.  This is my take on what happened…

Do you remember a little movement born in Seattle and fostered by dudes with long hair and tattered jeans?  Yea, you know what that is – Grunge.  Well along with the Grunge movement came an evolution of musical aesthetic, which in turn arguably led to some increase in the cohesiveness of musical parts.  That was fluffy, I know.  But let me explain.  Whereas the traditional guitar solo was like unto a surfer riding a wave – slashing off the top, riding the barrel, cutting back, doing whatever that surfer knew how to do…, the typical guitar solo of the Grunge movement was not a surfer, but part of the wave itself (still fluffy but you get the point).  Guitar solos became more textural, performing little to no trickery or embellishments, often doing nothing more than repeating the vocal melody of the song.  Kurt Cobain comes to mind.  It would be easy to say, and many do, that he never performed guitar solos.  Well in his defense (if a defense is even needed) he actually did throw down a few guitar solos.  But they were different in the ways explained above.  And many, irrespective of the genre, followed this trend.  But let there be no mistake about it, he wasn’t the first to go this way.  U2′s Edge has never been known for flashy solos but his ability to create textural diversity in non-singing parts of their songs is legendary – and they were around long before the Grunge movement.  But it seems that it was with the Grunge movement that this trend became ubiquitous.  Coldplay, one of the biggest bands of today, still doesn’t showcase the traditional guitar solo in it’s music.  So we’re going on a good 15 years now of popular music without the guitar solo.

I love U2, Nirvana, Coldplay, Grunge, and many unmentioned bands and genres that all played their part in this boycott against the guitar solo, but dammit I love the guitar solo too.  What would Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’ be without David Gilmour’s iconic guitar solo, Metallica’s ‘One’ without Kirk Hammett’s blistering tap solo, Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Three Days’ without Dave Navarro’s master piece of musical ecstasy, or Living Colour’s ‘Cult of Personality’ without Vernon Reids’ ridiculously fast and yet somehow not completely self-indulgent series of notes?  I’ll tell you what – not as interesting.  Formulaic?  Perhaps.  But do we love it nonetheless? Absolutely.

So I say AMEN to the number one album on iTunes (three weeks ago) being from none other than Slash – one of the great masters of the guitar solo.  But after all, Slash is just one man reminding us of what we used to have and he can’t do it alone.

So play it children.  Bring it back.  It’s pudding time.

photo credit: DaigoOliva on Flickr