Man! I just do not get what people see in electric guitars. How those sounds are constantly appealing to so many people I can hardly fathom. On a few rare occasions I can find them an interesting addition to the music, but on the whole I would not feel I had missed anything if I had never heard one in my life.
Indeed I wonder at the obsession with guitar at all. Even acoustic guitars do not rank in my list of most pleasurable sounds. Oh yes, occasionally they can be nice, the same as almost any other instrument. I certainly wouldn't want every song I listened to to contain flute, or trombone, or clarinet, or marimba. So why, I wonder to myself, do so many people seem to feel that all songs require guitars? Indeed it sometimes feels that people believe that ALL music requires is guitar and drums and someone singing, giving barely a thought to any other instrument. Why is this? It seems to me almost absurd.
My speculation is that a hand-held plucked-string instrument has become so popular because it is relatively accessible to anyone with fingers, isn't particularly loud and grating when played wrong, and is light and portable. Of course there are plenty of other light and portable instruments, but the woodwinds require learning to control one's breath and can be rather piercing when played by an amature. Likewise violins are known for being atrocious in inexperienced hands. Trumpets tend to be loud and raucous, not to mention requiring powerfull lungs. Cellos and tubas and harps and pianos are all large, and the latter two at least can be extreemly expensive. Thus, it seems most likely that for purely pragmatic reasons the guitar has gained unprecidented popularity. Why particularly the guitar, and not the banjo or ukelele or some other small stringed instrument I cannot say.
But while I can understand why the guitar has come to be the most frequently owned, experimented with, and experienced among the general population, I still do not understand how it could have such an appeal as to enjoy the exclusivity that it does, being in most cases the only necessary and required instrument, the primary instrument which people expect to hear in every song. What would modern/popular music be without the guitar? It would practically cease to exist. Try to immagine the last half of the 20th century without the guitar. It seems impossible.
Of course the same could probably also be said for the modern drum set, yet it seems that there is a bit more variation in the realm of percussion instruments used in popular songs. But I think one would hard pressed to find a song on a popular radio station that does not include guitars -regardless of whatever other instruments or synthesized sounds have been incorporated. The guitar is promenent across 'genres' and in both quiet and upbeat songs, and when there is a bare minimum being used, you can count on it being guitar over drums in almost every case, and even over voice.
So I sit here in all my alienity asking Why? Why is the 'western' world so enamoured of the guitar? What is it about this sound that is so universally appealing, so captivating as to make it practically synonimous with music itself? Why do so many people accept it as a given in all the music they listen to without questioning it's ubiquity? Why does no one seem to grow bored of hearing it in every song of every band they listen to?
And Why have I never caught this bug in spite of constant exposure?
I cannot buy the simple answer of 'you didn't grow up with it in your home' because in spite of listening to little music aside from classical at home, I have listened to guitar based music everywhere else - in stores, in cars, at friends homes, in restaraunts, at the movies, in commercials on TV, on hold on the phone. If I haven't gotten familiar with this type of music by now I don't know what you would call familiar. Yet it has never come to feel comfortable to me. Had I the slightest inclination toward this instrument, or the general popular style of music, I would have had that interest sparked long before now by all that I have heard of it, and would have very easily been able to seek out and feed the guitar obsession that so many others seem seiezed by. So how have I missed it? Am I the only one? Is it just a crazy phenomenon? Mere happenstance or convenience that has caused the omnipresence of the guitar? Or is there something about this instrument that connects deeply with most people's souls?
I find myself continually and increasingly baffled and perplexed, not to mention turned off, by the constant barrage of guitar + voice + drums that the majority of the population subjects themselves to.
