Unplugged: Is the Guitar Solo Finished? by D. Browne
One reason of several I cannot stand most music that’s been released after the early 2000s has to do with the lack of electric guitar solos or riffs.
I don’t expect an electric guitar to be present on every single song, but most music that’s been released in the last 15 years is completely lacking in this area (and in others).
Don’t get me wrong, I did like a lot of the synth-heavy pop songs of the 1980s, but even some of the pop back then would toss in a guitar solo (or a sax solo), which broke up the monotony.
Most music the millennials are putting out and streaming is hideous (obviously), but without a strong guitar presence, their songs sound anemic and weak. (The tinny sounding drum machines and lack of melodies are other factors that make contemporary music sound awful.)
I’d like to hear more electric guitar (and more sax solos) on contemporary songs.
Unplugged: Is the Guitar Solo Finished? by D. Browne
Excerpts:
April 2019
Every song used to have one — including massive pop hits — but today it’s an endangered species. Can old-school shredding ever return to the mainstream?
….On the most recent releases by the leading mainstream rock and/or rock-adjacent groups of our era—Imagine Dragons, the 1975, Twenty One Pilots—you’ll hear plenty of rubbery beats and programming but barely any guitar, much less anything close to traditional shredding.
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