Signal Paths: Electric Guitar Culture in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The electric guitar’s impact across twentieth-century popular music has been a richly told story in scholarship and popular literature, but what about its present and future? In many ways, electric guitar culture today is fueled by nostalgia and a willful obsession with looking back to analog technologies, old traditions, rigid beliefs, and exhausted heroes. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, the instrument also inspires continual transformation, renegotiation, and fluidity, even as it remains heavily invested with its fraying past. This dissertation takes a granular look at contemporary electric guitar culture from the perspective of someone who is immersed in it, employing an array of historical, ethnographic, and practice-based methods. It follows the relationships people make with and through musical instruments, in pursuit of a dichotomy between fixed ideas about what the electric guitar is, who plays it, and what its traditions mean and the radical possibilities of what all of that can become. To accomplish this, I develop the theoretical schematic of “signal paths,” using the routes an electronic signal travels from input to output to map a circuit of electric guitar culture that encompasses sound, performance, media, social networks, and history. While attending to how this cultural circuitry relies on power to maintain its status quo, I argue throughout that signal paths are not static or stagnant. Rather, they remain constantly in flux and malleable to change, and I ultimately use them to locate an ongoing struggle between regression and reinvention that defines electric guitar culture in the twenty-first century. To trace a dynamic circuit of this cultural milieu, each chapter’s signal path focuses on a specific social, technological, or performative facet of the electric guitar. Chapter 1 investigates the burgeoning culture of effects pedals, an integral technology that can transform the sound of guitars beyond recognition. Exploring new technological developments, playing processes, industry spaces, and community networks, this chapter shows how pedals have become instruments and musical collaborators in their own right. Chapter 2 documents the feminist media organization She Shreds and how their approach to representation in digital, social, and print media in the 2010s tackled questions of intersectionality, ethics, and cultural belonging. Following She Shreds from its origins as a DIY magazine through its work as a multifaceted digital venture, this chapter details how its producers combatted rampant marginalization and misogyny in the guitar world through a radical redefinition of what it means to shred. Chapter 3 brings about a fitting end with an examination of guitar smashing as a strange, ongoing performance practice. Developing a new kind of forensic organology for studying instrument destruction, this chapter illuminates how the continued desire to smash guitars reflects electric guitar culture’s need to keep resurrecting itself through its own contradictory traditions.