There's been a lot of waffle lately about rock'n'roll being dead. This is down to mainstream radio turning its back on guitar music in favour of a stew of electro-pop and R&B, and the fact that just three spots in the Top 100 UK bestselling singles (ie downloads) of 2010 were held by rock songs (for the record, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and "Dog Days are Over" by Florence + the Machine). Whenever this sort of media babble starts, it's time to run for cover because there's undoubtedly another tedious wave of guitar bands waiting gleefully in the wings.
There's been a lot of waffle lately about rock'n'roll being dead. This is down to mainstream radio turning its back on guitar music in favour of a stew of electro-pop and R&B, and the fact that just three spots in the Top 100 UK bestselling singles (ie downloads) of 2010 were held by rock songs (for the record, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and "Dog Days are Over" by Florence + the Machine). Whenever this sort of media babble starts, it's time to run for cover because there's undoubtedly another tedious wave of guitar bands waiting gleefully in the wings.
The guitar, then, is not dead. Far from it. But, as an icon, it should be. This time round we're promised in certain quarters that London band The Vaccines will lead the charge and one Brit broadsheet arts section has already devoted its front page to the battlecry, "Is 2011 the Year of the British Guitar Band?" Who knows? Maybe it will be, but that doesn't make it any more interesting. I would suggest that rather than accepting popular music is cyclical and that every few years there will be a guitar band revival, we actively discourage such retrogressive nonsense.
Come on, the guitar was dead nigh on 20 years ago. Nirvana were the last guitar band worth anything in the greater symbolic scheme of things. They finished off a job Chuck Berry began 40 years before, 40 glorious years of rock'n'roll. Every amped-up rock group since has essentially been a pastiche. Britpop was a media construct, an accumulation of witless hype by nostalgist music journalists unable to get to conceptual grips with the electronica and rave that truly represented young 1990s Britain. The gigantic week-long rave near Castlemorton in Worcestershire in May 1992 said more about the times than anything Ocean Colour Scene ever mustered. The government responded to Castlemorton as a socio-cultural threat, as rock'n'roll had once been, rushing in new legislation to combat "repetitive beats". Meanwhile Blur vs Oasis was a cosy Horlicks item to cuddle up with at the end of News at Ten.
As for The Strokes and The Libertines, those twin Noughties saviours of indie, it seems staggering that such a photocopy of a caricature of a rip-off of a parody could wash with anyone. But it did and, indeed, does. Futuristic music keeps having to retreat before tides of guitar bilge, each new wave more tepid and transparently unoriginal than the last. It's not such a problem when the guitar is safely in its niche - heavy metal, blues, country and western and so on - that's where it belongs, but when it's presented by the media as an exciting development, it's hard to stomach.
Ever since Kraftwerk first began experimenting with synthesisers the guitar has not been at the vanguard. While Seventies punk was a fabulously gnarly explosion where guitars were given raucous, dissonant character, it was electronic musicians who walked through the doors punk opened and broke new ground, from Cabaret Voltaire to Soft Cell to any number of others. By the time acid house arrived in the late Eighties, the jig was up. Even that bastion of guitars, the NME, pictured the Sheffield techno act LFO on their cover smashing up guitars. What a pleasing sight. That felt truly punk, a sea change within the enclosed world of pop culture. Cool, right? Now let's move on. But no one was ready to. They're still not. The romance that clings to the guitar appears immovable.
Once upon a time, jazz was pop music. Whether orchestra, musical theatre or touring band, jazz ruled the roost from the beginning of the 20th century until the rise of rock'n'roll. It didn't take long, however, for the iconic instrument of pop to cease being the trumpet and become the guitar. Even if we allow for the fact that the initial mid-Fifties rock'n'roll explosion was dismissed as a fad, by 1963 and the rise of The Beatles, the guitar was centre stage, shorthand for everything that was young, hip and happening, the essential implement for every starving young musician in the Western world. How long, then, must we now wait for it to be replaced in popular iconography, to be regarded as retro chic? Surely, in an era when everyone appears so willing to fetishise multiple shiny i-mechanisms from Apple Computer Inc, such a demise can only be just round the corner?
Of course, this whole argument is slightly facetious, kicking up dust, sparring, easy to tear a hole in, but at its core is a solid point: just because we've had a couple of years with contemporary-sounding music at a popular consensus doesn't make it a flailing act of youthful rebellion to, once again, pretend to be The Who. When you see Lady Gaga performing, it looks a bit like sci-fi pop as conceived in "what the future will look like" films and features 20 or 30 years ago. When you hear the elegant ambient oddness of, say, Nicolas Jaar, your ears grasp a snatch of what music might be like in another 20 or 30 years. Catch almost any rising indie band, on the other hand, and everything is borrowed, every lick, every riff, every tic and move. Squint and you could be watching a gig from the Sixties or Seventies. It's a lame, unimaginative option compared to the strange wonderful music pouring out of too many micro-scenes to mention (OK, dubstep for starters).
I don't hate guitar music. I love it. But the guitar as icon is now akin to one of those bands that misestimates its encores. The crowd enjoyed the first couple but now these endless returns to the stage are a bore. Get off. Let us consign the guitar as emblem of youthful, pop-cultural snap to the past and rush forward with open arms to see what's really new.