I've been playing guitar for about 6 years. I was also into the whole late 80's-early 90's grunge thing that I agree was a necassary evolution. Arrrghhh...I had all these profound things i was going to say as this issue is exactly the kind of thing I would write a book on and talk for hours about (and do) but its too late and my mind just isn't working at the moment. You can bet that I will be back, though. Let me just say before I go that I believe that the guitar hero him or herself has gone through a much needed transformation from technical wizards with no sense of emotion to lead guitarists who compliment and also frontline in every way the emotion, angst, and connection to the music with pure raw energy in a beautiful dance of the most intense feelings of peace and terrible pain and unrest. Soundgarden is an incredible example.
Quote:
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He never wanted to be a mentor, a guide - he felt like he was there by chance, for a strange destiny, in the same spot of the charts where a macho band like Guns'n Roses used to be. Looking back at his songs, after ten years, you can still feel his rage, his love, his loneliness, that loneliness that each of us has inside, the loneliness that made this life terrible and terribly beautiful, but that Van Halen is so unable to express with his memorable solos. If there is a music that stays there, in all its nude sincerity, and that can teach our god-like star system (that affects also the supposedly alternative word of metal bands) something, that is the music of Nirvana. Unique, unrepeatable, pure in its simplicity yet so full of a thing that artists seem to forget: humanity.
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No doubt Nirvana was all these great things and their music still haunts me to this day and always will. What I'm also trying to say though is I also wanted to talk about the surgence of other bands around the same time that also fit the above description of emotional connection to their music to the enth degree and also incorporated some quite masterful guitar work not necassarily always expressed so much in Nirvana. Whether Kurt Cobain is a newer kind of guitar hero in my mind is hard for me to decide...but there are certainly others who played music with the same type of direct connection to human emotions that came straight from their heart and soul when they played that are also technically good enough to be a newer kind of guitar hero. Not to say they were entirely original in this aspect, because what they did was bring back the emotional feel of greats such as Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix which was not felt during the 80's very much mainstreamwise. More on this later.
Nu-metal, as they call it, has indeed cut back on the guitar solos and masterful lead guitar work. I'll talk about my opinions on nu-metal more later.
Of course a lot of what I'm talking about is mostly mainstream music. I listen to a lot of less mainstream stuff that, IMO, is certainly not lacking in the department of insanely good guitarists. This is also a
huge reason why saying guitar heroes have dissappeared is completely ridiculous. Also, The older ones that haven't died of drug overdoses or suicide or what not are still around! They didn't go anywhere! And a lot of them are still making incredible music.
Arrghh...I have to go for now. I just can't think anymore. I think I must have sounded all over the place mentally in this post. Time for bed.
_RED_ stuff