The century of the guitar seems to be over

If ever there were a sure cultural sign that we are well into the 21st century, this is it:

Guitar Center, the nation’s leading musical-instrument retailer, is in trouble. Changing musical tastes are partly to blame.

Ratings agency S&P Global downgraded Westlake Village-based Guitar Center Holdings Inc. for the second time last week as the troubled instrument retailer seeks to refinance and restructure more than $1 billion of debt.

“Most of what’s really selling today is rap and hip hop,” said George Gruhn, owner of the Gruhn Guitars shop in Nashville. “That’s outpacing other forms of music and they don’t use a lot of recognizable musical instruments.”

Now, I guess what qualifies as a recognizable musical instrument is going to change from time to time. Outside of specialized performances, one doesn't hear a harpischord much these days.

But rap and hip hop aren't known for fostering expansive musical vocabularies. From a rhythmic, harmonic or melodic standpoint, most contemporary popular music stays within well-worn ruts, which seems to stem from an increasing disinterest in music's possibilities, and the discipline required to mine them:

The bigger problem [than the lack of what, in the day, were called "guitar heroes"], according to [music-store owner] Concotelli, is that most aspiring players don’t want to put in the time to become proficient on the instrument.

“If they do want to learn they’ll just go to YouTube, but they’re not getting the proper instruction,” he said. “With kids these days, it’s all about instant gratification. No one wants to take six months or a year to learn. They don’t want to do the work.”

It would seem that software - capable of changing pitch, creating loops and otherwise taking the place of fingers placed on certain frets or keys - is the recognizable instrument of our age.


People interviewed for this article cite as a cause of the tapering-off the aging of the Baby Boomers. Fewer guitars are being sold, but the ones that are seem to be going to a consumer base that skews older.

I see this in my professional experience as a guitarist in the last few years. In both jazz settings, which tend to be private events, and rock / blues settings, which tend to be public venues, audiences tend to be in the 45-plus demographic.  You can put together a set list of Great American Songbook standards and a few bop charts for the former and a set list of classic rock, or maybe Chicago blues or Memphis soul, for the latter, and eminently satisfy your audience. It needn't hear anything composed in the last 30 years.

It gets one to wondering, does the guitar embody some kind of Boomer conceit that the undeniable impact of the musical flourishing of the 1955 - 1990 period was going to be the last word on cultural vitality generally? If so, that's going to come to a crashing halt as Boomers continue to age and avail themselves of less and less nightlife.

I'd been wondering for some time what the next step was going to be beyond the ubiquity of music, beyond everybody and anybody having access to every recorded performance in the world available for a couple of clicks. That ubiquity was the result of music assuming an outsized role in societal life during the aforementioned flourishing. During that time, as with everything else, Boomers' enthusiasms became society's norms, and it came to be assumed that there wasn't an occasion in life that didn't call for some kind of music. But it seems, here in the second decade of the 21st century, to have settled into a function we can describe as democratized noodling. Anyone can acquire the software needed to put some notes together over some kind of mechanized rhythm and be in the business of making "music." The dearth of guitar heroes discussed in the linked article is the manifestation on one instrument of a larger phenomenon: No one known for prowess on any instrument is generating the kind of excitement that leads to young aspirants wanting to acquire similar prowess.

Nor is this musical trend happening in a vacuum. The movie industry is similarly beleaguered. Box-office receipts get ever-more dismal, no matter what kind of budget and special-effects dazzle-dazzle Hollywood lavishes on its efforts.

The case can be made, I think, that what has happened with a number of our art forms over the last 50 years follows a pattern that exemplifies human nature generally. Inventiveness appears, and is followed by surfeit, which in turn is followed by burnout and ennui.

We just plain got tired of music.

The problem is that art has customarily given humanity a release valve, a respite from the kinds of polarization and ill will that characterizes any society that has lost sight of the whole notion of what is noble. We are mired in our bitter turf battles, with no backstop.

The only soundtrack to its life that the millennial generation is going to reminisce about is identity-politics screeching set to the compressed thud of a drum machine.

We're past our peak as a civilization.