What Happened To The Guitar Hero?
ByIs it just me or does it seem that the “guitar hero” in rock and pop music has been long gone for a while and doesn’t seem to be coming back? I mean, back in the 60’s and early 70’s we had Clapton, Hendrix, Page, and Beck. Then in the 80’s the idea of a “guitar hero” seemed to be even bigger where we had Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Paul Gilbert just to name a few. Now while I know the popularity of the alternative/grunge scene, which I really liked by the way, put and end to another music scene that quite frankly in my humble opinion needed to die, I have to say I miss the guitar solo being played by a wicked guitar slinger. That’s not to say there are not any new smoking guitar players out there because we have the likes of Andy Wood, Guthrie Govan, John 5, Jim Root, and I’m sure I’m missing a few but it just seems the idea of guitar playing being out front as it once was has yet to come back to popularity. A lot of the instrumentalists and soloist, new and old, have seem to be a more underground thing which I guess could be argued is a good thing to a certain extent. I guess what I’m saying is I just miss hearing a good solo in new music these days. I hear some here and there in popular bands but not what it used to be. Maybe I’m getting nostalgic… I dont know but I do see hope in young players who post clips playing in online contests like Guitarmageddon. Then you have the young guns I hear playing in stores that rip out some of the older rock and metal songs, Vai licks, and even some of these young Jazz cats you hear on line….. so I have hope that one day the “guitar hero” will come back to forefront again but who knows.
What do you guys think?
I was thinking the same thing, but in terms of bands. I think that the music scene is over-populated, too many people (some very good, others very bad) have raised the bar, it’s hard to be extra-ordinary…
Yeah the whole rock music landscape as a whole has hit a weird place. There are some good bands out right now pushing things like Mastodon, Porcupine Tree, Dredg, Radiohead, etc but man I want some young gun to come on the scene and light it on fire guitar wise like Eddie Van Halen did. Hopefully it will happen here in the near future but I agree that’s a big thing to ask to be “extra-ordinary”.
It seems after the 80s era, guitar hero’s kind of took a step away from the lime light. Which was kind of cool because some really good songs came out of the 90s and it seemed in the later half of the 80s the shredders surfaced but song writing suffered.
It seems to me there has been no real innovators hit the scene in the last 2 decades or so. Yeah, some good guitarists, but no innovators. The guitar hero’s of the 70s were preceded by Hendrix…innovator. The guitar hero’s of the 80s were preceded by Eddie…innovator. Some claim Kurt Cobain was an innovator, but I see him as more bringing a not-so-technical in your face style raunch kind of thing, but I don’t know that he discarded any rule books.
I don’t want to take away from other guitar greats. It just seems to me there are eras in which traditional playing was redefined by someone. All the other hero’s seemed to have branched off, and perhaps perfected, modified, or took in a different direction, that era of music. But none that redefined the way it is done.
I don’t think it has to be a super technical wiz. It does seem though, that the really good guitarists of the past doesn’t pound out chords. They’ve got neat things going on that is beyond chord structures. It’s like they bought a guitar and a beginning guitar book, sold the book and bought a coke, and went home to figure out how to play.
I wish that I never tried using guitar hero – I should be spending more time with my own wife and children however it is simply too much fun.
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