Back in October, Marnie Stern’s dense guitar, frenetic energy, and songcraft grabbed my attention. While sounding of her time, she also sounded unique and fresh. I made a mental note of her, but didn’t investigate further until coming across a recent article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker (Jan 3, 2011). The article introduces Stern as a virtuosic guitarist, and groups her with indie rock contemporaries Annie Clark (nom de plectre, St. Vincent) and Marissa Paternoster (of the band Screaming Females), who are also invariably lauded for their guitar prowess whenever mentioned by the press.

This movement of female guitar badasses is really interesting to me. Though it might seem prima facie to be largely the construction of the media, it really does appear that, at least in the world of mainstream indie rock music, most of the guitarists pushing at the customary boundaries of the instrument are girls (the article points out that boys are more concerned with their samplers). My favorite guitarist working today is probably Shannon Wright, come to think of it.

Marnie Stern herself, though, is always quick to point out that she doesn’t see herself as a great guitar player. She opts for her technique of choice – finger tapping – because it’s “easy” thanks to using two hands instead of one on the fret board. Here’s a video of Stern talking about it. If you don’t watch it, note that she also points out that, despite not considering herself a great guitar player (though she does, in another video, refer to one of her tapping riffs as a “shred,” an idiosyncratic use of the word, perhaps naively so), people on the internet are very mean in their attacks on her playing.

So, what’s with the discrepancy between the media who revere Stern and the online public who tears her apart?

Finger tapping, the most focused upon feature of her playing, is broadly associated with 1980s rock guitar icon Eddie Van Halen, though Stern, who’s self-taught, has said that she got it from Ian Williams of the band Don Caballero (and I once read an interview with Eddie, who is also self-taught, in which he said that he got it from trying to duplicate what jazz fusion uber-virtuoso Alan Holdsworth was doing with his left hand alone). Lots of guitarists used the technique in the ‘80s, however, and some of them developed it well beyond Eddie’s approach. Check out Jennifer Batten’s 8-finger performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”; it’s quite the feat (she was Michael Jackson’s guitarist for a spell, by the way, which meant Jackson got a fantastic live rendition of Eddie’s solo for the song “Beat It”):

Stanley Jordon, another guitarist who came up in the ’80s, took tapping even further, playing bass lines and chords with the left hand while simultaneously playing melodies or improvising solos with the right. But he’s a jazz player. This is an important distinction. Most people expect jazz players to be capable of playing virtuosically, at least since music critics warmed to bebop. The same is not only expected, but demanded of classical musicians, at the very least of the soloists. And flamenco guitarists… a flamenco guitarist who can’t shred isn’t a flamenco guitarist.

Marnie Stern is an indie rock guitarist, which comes with its own technical expectations. As is Annie Clark (a.k.a St. Vincent). But Clark, though often referred to as a guitar genius, shredder, virtuoso and the like, doesn’t play with techniques or effects that would be typically be associated with virtuosity. She therefore doesn’t seem like she’s trying to be a shredder, and as a result will be largely ignored by the shredder community (I spent some time searching and couldn’t find the sort of guitar-centric vitriol you find for Stern). Stern, on the other hand, does play fast, and she does it with tapping, a technique associated with virtuosity. But, in pure shred guitar terms, what she’s doing isn’t nearly as difficult, ambitious, fast, or cleanly executed as what the best rock guitarists were doing in the ‘80s, nor what many of their (generally perfunctory) successors are doing today.

So, despite the fact that she’s an “indie rock guitarist,” Stern’s utilizing a virtuoso technique, getting media attention for it, and using that attention to her commercial advantage, which firmly puts her into the guitar player scrutiny ‘gator tank. One of the first criterion young guitarists look at when determining if someone is any good is whether they can reasonably say, “I could play that.” Most guitarists who aspire to shredder status would consider themselves to be able to play what Stern is playing, even though most of them would have a hard time imitating what she does. Getting through the entirety of such songs as “This American Life” and “Precious Metal” (from 2007′s In Advance of the Broken Arm) would take quite a bit of practice due to the stamina and accuracy that her idiosyncratic (especially phrasing-wise) self-taught style requires (especially considering that to really be true to the challenges she has set for herself, the parts should be played while singing). Still, ambitious guitarists figure that, with practice, they could play the guitar parts without too much trouble.

(As for her opponents who, even with practice, know they couldn’t play those parts… well, these types of guitarists consider even most of the people better than them to suck. They might say, in long impassioned message board debates, that Jimi Hendrix or Steve Vai suck due to not meeting some arbitrary technical or aesthetic criterion such as, “To be a good guitarist, you have to be able to uniformly pick every note with your balls.” Such haters don’t deserve more mention than this parenthetical blurb.)

Therefore, I can say with confidence that Marnie Stern is a badass musician in her own right, at the very least for the way her intricately weaved tapping riffs are part of a greater musical structure that includes the juxtaposition of vocal melody, harmonic environment, and fret board movement (it’s generally unfair to reduce a musician to a single instrumental technique, even if that musician focuses on that technique as a marketing hook; we shouldn’t conflate “musician” and “marketer”). Her music is fantastic, I love her playing, and I’m happy she’s made the scene.

That said, I’d like to dig a little deeper into our cultural conceptions of the guitar without venturing too far from the context of girl badasses. These regions may be more dimly lit than the above, so bear with me as I attempt to separate and identify the obfuscated shapes and forms dwelling there.

By employing her techniques primarily on distorted electric guitar (as opposed to acoustic guitar, as guitar wiz Kaki King does),Stern has landed on the radar screens of shredders from all walks of life: heavy metal, metal prog, jazz, fusion, neoclassical fusion, etc., despite the fact that what Stern claims to really want more than anything is to play guitar in the way that best facilities the realization of her musical vision. These other genres and subgenres continue to encourage virtuosic technique, but mainstream pop and rock music abandoned the virtuosic guitar solo when Nirvana came onto the scene. Kurt Cobain soloed, but his solos served other purposes than that of the shredders. Virtuosic rock guitar solos became quickly stigmatized in the early 1990s (Billy Corgan, however, played shredder guitar solos on the early Smashing Pumpkins stuff, but less so as time went on, and certainly not on any of their hits).

In the last several years, however, I have noticed an increasing appetite for virtuosic rock guitar playing. You can find loads of young shredders of varying skill levels on YouTube, most of whom are playing along with the same stuff I did in the ‘80s because, having gone out of style, there’s not much interesting music to choose from that’s new to the field. Even the former metal shredders who are still around have taken to holding back (compare solo Marty Friedman in the ‘80s to his solo output in the ‘00s). Media and audience praise for Stern’s playing exemplifies this renewed appetite, though, to be clear, it’s coming from people who also expect to hear their idea of a good song.

I myself get mostly positive response to my guitar solos, though there has been some anger as well. On the other hand, no one has ever objected to my playing fast, complicated music on a classical guitar. This difference in reaction is in line with our cultural conceptions of musicianship in general: it’s perfectly fine to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” on violin or classical guitar, it’s revered as high art and craft in fact. Play it on a distorted electric guitar, however, and suddenly we have an affront to taste, a soulless exercise. We praise the classical and jazz (the “purer” the better) virtuosi, and denigrate the same in rock music because of what it supposedly stands for (to be clear, in non-cultural, simple musical/sonic terms, playing a piece on one instrument rather than another is in large part merely a change in timbre; interestingly, the change from violin to electric guitar is smaller than going from violin to classical guitar, because the former two are closer in timbre). As a result, many electric guitarists who aspire to virtuosity have developed the sort of defense mechanism we see in action when people are tearing Stern apart.

These haters are, on some level, reacting to the fact that they themselves have been demonized for that which they do better than Stern, but for which Stern is being praised (Rhapsody music service describes her as the “candy-coated Yngwie Malmsteen of freak rock,” which is way off the mark any way you look at it, and doesn’t help anybody). There is certainly going to be some resentment for the likes of Stern on the part of accomplished guitarists who have not managed to have a career. It’s unfortunate, but there is an incredible amount of bitterness among many guitarists who spent years of their lives practicing eight hours a day only to be dismissed by the public as being cheesy showoffs. Their therapy is to congregate at message boards and talk shit about people who are famous. And you don’t have to be an accomplished player to join in, you just have to be a fan of the sentiment (see above parenthetical blurb). It’s not healthy. People with thriving careers don’t do this.

What the haters aren’t getting, though, is that Stern’s musical sensibility is essentially a marriage of the dirty philosophy of melodic post-punk with the technical approach of prog and metal, and that’s something the sensibility of the current (recently mainstreamed) indie rock media is going to respond to (a great example of this marriage is the song “Nothing Left” from her 2010 album, Marnie Stern). Her instrumental technique gives those journalists something new to think and write about in their field, but they wouldn’t care about it at all if they didn’t relate to the music that came out of it. Personally, I like that she’s touted by the media as a virtuoso because it might help open some doors for my own music and playing.

Before closing, I want to comment on the other guitarist mentioned in the New Yorker article, Marissa Paternoster. She shreds in an essentially blues-based rock style, and does it quite well. There has for some time been a debate amongst factions of (mostly narrow-minded) rock guitarists about the merits of such a style (famous examples of such players are Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Slash, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughn, John Frusciante, Angus Young, Eric Johnson, and Orianthi Panagaris) vs. a more modal or technically honed rock style that also draws from blues, but more predominantly takes from jazz and/or classical music. Examples of this second type, to name a small few, are Randy Rhoads, Frank Zappa, Jennifer Batten, Jason Becker, Vinnie Vincent, Marty Friedman, Paul Gilbert, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and, of course, Yngwie Malmsteen. (NB: I’m loosely categorizing some of these for the sake of making a point, not as an attempt to make some hard bifurcation of rock guitardom.)

“Tasteful” and “feel(ing)” are the words that gets bandied about the most in arguments over which of the above approaches is best, though I think it’s a pointless argument, the real purpose of which is to support tastes that are too elusive to concretize. I prefer defending my taste (if forced to) with the famous old Duke Ellington tautology because of how it underscores the aforementioned elusiveness: if it sounds good to me, it’s good. At any rate, Paternoster might be put down by the latter faction but supported by the former, though overall she will be considered a good soloist by most fans of rock guitar. I know I dig her.

I’ll leave you with another excellent musician (and songwriter), whom I referred to earlier as my favorite guitarist working today, Shannon Wright. I’ll let the music speak for itself:

To clarify, insightful critical analysis delivered in a *nonthreatening environment, generally as a feature of an ongoing dialogue with one’s mentors, peers, qualified journalists and audience (though in these last two cases the dialogue is often more figurative than literal), can be a vital, essential part of the development of an artist’s craft and creative vision. Conversely, yelling “you suck” at a show or writing “eat shit and die” at a message board is just being an asshole, and in many cases has the opposite effect of insightful criticism.

But, such assholery does exist, and it does seem that many artists have no choice but to get out of the business or learn to deal. However, the only reason performers need to be able to handle asshole behavior is because of the existence of assholes. If this seems obvious, it should. It is, by extension, equally obvious that when you write “eat shit and die” or “she looks like a retarded baby” at a message board, and then find out that it hurt the actor, writer, director, comedian, or musician’s feelings and you feel bad about it and try to justify it by saying, “if she can’t take it she shouldn’t be in the business,” what you really should be saying is, “yes, I’m an inexcusable asshole and it’s people like me who make the world a harder place to live in; I should apologize and never do it again.”

If that doesn’t convince you, keep the following in mind. Even if you feel that the person you are heckling is terrible at his craft and deserves to be berated publicly, the prevalence of this sort of behavior keeps a lot of especially sensitive performers, some of whom you might actually like, from even trying to get into the business. By contributing to an environment of meanness, you are creating a Darwinian situation in which the only performers who are able to thrive are those who are able to dish it back (especially in comedy) and those who are able to withdraw from general public contact, sticking as closely as possible to their adoring fan base and professional colleagues. These attitudes become part of the cultural fabric and substantially contribute our collective zeitgeist, unfortunately.

So, don’t be mean to your performers, generally even if they themselves are deluded jerks (you’ll have to use your judgment in this regard, but keep in mind that the consequences of that judgment are your responsibility, not the performer’s; for example, if you feel someone’s work is in the service of an ideology you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself for ignoring, attack the ideology, not the person, and not at a staged performance if at all possible). People working in the arts and entertainment industries are struggling through their lives and careers just like everyone else, and by launching insults at them you’re only adding more misery to the world.

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*Yes, sometimes insightful criticism itself is brutal, and there are differing opinions about just how nonthreatening venues for evaluative criticism should be, but that’s a different – and very long – conversation.

I don’t publish books, but, as I hope you know, I do release music. Whatever the medium through which someone is disseminating ideas into the world (whether it be writing, music, dance etc…), things usually shared in common by their creators are the toil that’s put into the piece, the excitement that comes as the piece is nearing completion, the anticipation of sharing the work with the world, and the complex emotions one experiences as the work makes its hopefully long, unpredictable, and exciting journey through the world. Rabin’s post mostly touches on this last item.

Also, as I can rarely take anything in the media at face value, I’ll point out here that in addition to giving advice, two other motives seem to be behind the blog post. One is to promote the book to A.V. Club readers, obviously. The other, and I think this might be the main reason he wrote this piece, is to address what Rabin characterizes as a particularly nasty review made by a Washington Post reviewer. This redemption of credibility, honor, morale etc… enhances the article, I think, because it’s interesting to see a critic qua memoirist responding to an allegedly mean critic in a way that doesn’t come across as overly defensive or whiney (the usual rule of thumb is to ignore the writers of bad reviews, no matter how ignorant they seem to be of the facts), and it does serve as a lesson in general for aspiring creative types.

The overriding message: when you’re selling something that is important to you like a memoir, you are unavoidably engaging in cold, hard, bottom line-oriented business; the real reward is the interaction with people who appreciate what you are doing as a feeling, thinking, creative person, not as a business person. (However, I would add here the caveat that this sort of appreciation – or admiration - is generally directed towards the image and idea people have of the person who created the work as well as the work itself, not at the actual person; that’s what friends and family are for.)

Want people to discover your great new work? Learn how to publish an eBook and share your writings with the world.

Things changed a few years ago, however, when MySpace blew up. At that point, there were already lots of ways for musicians to make their music available online, but nothing compared to what MySpace made possible. Non-musician MySpace users were actually open to, and even excited by, the prospect of being able to hear the bands that, as the thinking went, record labels were too safe to sign. But in the short span of a couple of years, those users learned that most unsung bands sound more or less the same (i.e., not good), and that there are seemingly millions of them (most of which were also sending demos to record labels; as a result, most labels no longer accept unsolicited demos).

Now, in the wake of the lost cause that is MySpace, audiences have become jaded about the prospect of checking out DIY musicians. Audiences once again look to filters to help them decide what music to give a chance. Podcasts and broadcasts (All Songs Considered, Morning Becomes Eclectic), streaming sites (Last.fm, Jango, Pandora), review sites (Pitchfork, Onion AV Club, MP3 blogs), and vendors (iTunes, Amazon.com) all employ filters that make it harder for musicians – even those with label affiliation – to get heard. But the good news is that once you get heard, you’re taken more seriously than you would be as one of millions of self-promoting unknown bands on some social networking site that does not discriminate between “serious” and “I have a computer so why not?” musicians. True, the latter sometimes has better music than the former, but that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that most people are not willing to be at the first stage of the filtering system. Rare are the people with the time and psychological fortitude and endurance to search through a thousand musicians of wildly varying levels of quality to find that one with whom they’d like to spend more time.

What made me want to write about this topic was an email I got recently from IAC, a streaming site that pays artists on a per-play basis and is funded by advertisers and artist subscriptions. IAC features artists ranging from hobbyists to professionals. Their email announced that they are going to start removing artists whose presentation doesn’t hold up to some standard of quality and might therefore scare away potential listeners. I’m all for it, and would expect that anyone who takes their music career seriously would be all for it.

I should point out that I respect and encourage people’s desire to record music and post it online. There are plenty of avenues for that, such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. What I have a harder time with is seeing avenues through which serious artists can distribute their music becoming clogged with lazy, half-finished, amateurishly presented work that scares away potential listeners. It’s in all of our best interests to have a more stringent filtering system at places like iTunes, eMusic, Amazon.com, and IAC. Actually, IAC is the least strict of these. To be at those other places, you at least have to have an album, though recently this has just come to mean meeting certain requirements that no longer include having a physical CD (and only one song is needed to qualify as an “album”). As a vendor, iTunes doesn’t have to worry about a reputation for quality so much as quantity (though I assure you not just anyone will be included on their homepage), so we’ll have to see where an increasingly open-door policy takes them. Will they institute even stricter filtering systems like CDBaby (an exclusively “unsigned artist” vendor) has with their podcasts and newsletters?

Pandora, in contrast with iTunes, is a site that doesn’t sell music, but instead streams songs in full. It’s a place for discovering music, and, once you know how to use it, Pandora works really well to that end. Because they’re all about you discovering great music based on artists whom you already love, they have to cultivate a reputation for quality in order to succeed. To ensure quality, they have a listening committee that evaluates submissions. They rejected my first two albums, in fact, and, although I do think it’s their loss, I’m really ok with it. My third album (REATTACHMENT) was accepted, and I know that their users will give it more of a chance because they know there is a filter in place.

To be clear, musicians are not to blame for the situation I’m describing here. It’s the accumulation that’s causing the congestion, not the actions of any one individual. Musicians need to take this accumulation into consideration when planning their promotions and when being rejected by a filter like Pandora, or when being completely ignored by critics and the online public in general. I think what IAC has come to terms with is the fact that they are better off (i.e., better able to avoid bankruptcy) having fewer musicians selling a-little-to-a-lot of music to a loyal and potentially expanding fan base rather than having thousands of musicians selling zero-to-a-little music to a small circle of friends. In this way, a difficult filtering process makes us work harder as artists as well as marketers (an inextricable part of being a working musician).

The slippery slope argument against stringent filtering is that we would end up with only a small selection of new music to choose from, all of which has been selected based on the taste of a class of self-proclaimed elitists. I believe that this would happen even less than it did before the digital age. In fact, now that the options are greater than ever, filtering could just be a way to help balance the scale to a more even slant in terms of which label-affiliated and “homemade” bands are being offered to the public at large for consideration.

In conclusion, it’s clear that the digital age has affected the music industry in more ways than making it easier to get a library of music for free and to carry that library around on an iPod. We have also seen an incredible decrease in what it costs to record and distribute music, which has resulted in an immeasurable increase in the amount of bands pushing their demos to record labels, reviewers, live venues, and the public in general. This increase, especially when coupled with technology itself, has resulted in a pickier than ever, jaded listening public with a short attention span (see my previous blog about the Slow Listening Movement). With this in mind, it seems it would be in the best interest of any serious musician to be in favor of stringent filtering processes that would attract audiences as opposed to repelling them.

Here’s what Godin says:

R&G: With the a la carte downloads offered by iTunes, eMusic and Amazon, when do you think we’re going to see the death of the album?
Seth: I spend a lot of time hanging out with teenagers, and I’m pretty sure the album is already dead. We bundle stuff up for economic reasons. Movies are the length they are for a reason. Songs are the length they are for a reason. Albums were invented because that’s about as much time as Thomas Edison could put on one piece of recording. But in a digital world, there’s no reason that you can’t have a six-hour product or a three-minute product. So anybody who says it has to be 46 minutes long because that’s how long you can fit on two sides of an LP, I don’t think that’s a good reason to make that your product.
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Hmm… what do we mean by “album”? In the question, they are referring to the concept of a collection of songs that are meant to go together to form a bigger whole. Godin seems to be referring as much to the physical media – if not more – than he is the concept of “album”.

Godin cites teens as his source. There’s a ton of speculation about why teens don’t buy music (including CDs or singles), from youthful entitlement to too many free options to attention span to the kind of bands they tend to like. Teens occasionally email me asking to please send them a CD because they can’t afford it or don’t have a credit card, and all they have are the free mp3s from my site (I always oblige, and I bet they’re happier to get a physical CD from me than they would be a link to more free mp3s). The credit card thing may be bigger than people realize: iTunes requires a credit card. Teens don’t have them. Give them a gift card or an iTunes allowance, are they going to spend it all on one album, or on a handful of songs they want? I don’t know the answer to this, but I am certain at least some teens would buy an album. Even if the didn’t, though, it would not mean that the album is dead. I would imagine that the limited nature of a giftcard, for example, would make a lot of people more likely to pick and choose songs.

Whatever teens are doing, adults often do still by albums (when they buy, which may not be often), either digitally or physically. There’s something very rewarding about immersing yourself in the world of an inspired artist for 30 – 60 minutes. Provided you love the music, of course. In that sense, the album as a collection of songs is not dead until there are no more good albums being made, which will never happen.

Also, western music has been coming in collections for a long time now, well predating the various playback media, whether it be a suite of etudes, movements of a symphony, or arias from an opera. I think it’s as likely that making a collection of songs will go out of style as it is that live shows will become just a band going on tour to play one song. Some opening acts do only play a few songs, but believe me: they’d rather play more, and only people who don’t like them would rather they play less.

Regarding duration, they were never able to put Wagner operas on a single disc, and Top 40 will always have their singles. Going fully digital would give a lot more flexibility in that regard: multi-disc releases are very expensive to manufacture. Going purely digital, prices would be far more flexible, especially as bandwidth-saving compression technology gets more advanced. As Godin says, a project could be 6 hours long. It could also be a minute or 45 minutes. With more options, I don’t think people will suddenly narrow their options to exclude the current 30 – 60 minutes of music we currently think of as an “album.” Again, I think the distinction between “album as collection of music meant to be exeperienced as a whole” and “physical media” needs to be clearer when discussing whether “the album” is dead. Why not have a 6 hour album?

Conclusion: Releasing collections of songs is here to stay for a good while. Whether to release them on CD or just digitally is the thing artists with limited funds for pressing CDs might grapple with. Could I pull off a purely digital release? If I were more famous I might be able to get away with it, but where I’m at now in my career, submitting press kits to reviewers without a professionally packaged CD would not make things any easier. Also, I know of no established artists who are releasing purely digital releases, including fully independent ones. Radiohead famously first released In Rainbows digitally, but then followed that with a CD release. Papers, sites, magazines etc… still do year-end (and now decade-end) album Best Of lists, so critics and their editors don’t consider albums dead, that’s for sure. Finally, it’s imperative to have something to sell at shows. Eventually even that will just involve a transfer of digital files (including artwork, credits, t-shirt coupons etc…), but for now, it’s essential to have a CD or vinyl platter.

Here’s the interview: http://www.rollogrady.com/rollo-grady-interview-seth-godin/

What he says isn’t necessarily new to anyone who spends a lot of time paying attention to this stuff, but I do like which points he chooses to bring up and how he gets them across.

I’m 1,000% for it. Who needs to download more music than it’s humanly possibly to hear, much less listen to? It hurts me, it hurts you, it would hurt music if such a thing had feelings. Check out Matos’ blog for more details: slowlisteningmovement.blogspot.com

Personally, I don’t listen to enough new music any more, so I’m going the other way: trying to listen to at least a few new albums per week, with an emphasis on nothing. If an album piques my interest but I’m on the fence, I’ll give it a couple more listens before moving on. Recently enjoyed albums have been Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future by The Bird and the Bee, and The Destroyer by Alec Empire. I listen legally at Rhapsody, which costs under $15 per month and provides me with tons of listening options. I highly recommend it.