The Decline of Guitar Civilization?

Since last month’s installment of Esoterica Electrica, I’ve been thinking about another instrument that rose and fell in the public consciousness. There was a time when the accordion was king. Not cool, maybe, but unavoidable—wheezing its way through dance halls, weddings, and smoky cafés. On TV, accordionist Lawrence Welk squeezed out over 1,000 episodes of his immensely popular show in one of the longest running serials of all time. Then, the electric guitar as we know it showed up, with its raw edges, bad attitude, and built-in middle finger, and the accordion got shoved in the closet next to grandma’s fondue set. But over the last few decades the accordion has been creeping back from the shadows, and that tells us something strange—maybe even prophetic—about where guitar culture might be headed.

The guitar has always been more than a musical instrument. It was rebellion you could strap on and crank up. It said, “I don’t care about your rules, and I’m not going to college.” Eventually, rebellion got turned into a brand. It became a logo on a shirt and a preset in a digital amp. The raw energy of rock, blues, and even jazz got scrubbed up and packaged for mass consumption. And that’s where things started to get boring. Even saturated, detuned 7-string metal got—yawn.

Guitarists might wonder if this is the decline of civilization. Probably not, but it might be the decline of a scene—the kind of place where you could write poetry about your friends, your lovers, or your city’s crumbling infrastructure. The clubs in Paris before the revolution, the jazz dives in Harlem, the punk storefronts in the Midwest—their influence was all replaced by sports bars, chain restaurants, and multi-use “event spaces.” There’s nowhere left to be inspired by place, because everywhere is the same. Meanwhile, popular music culture is drowning in junk. But that’s not new—it’s always been full of crap.

Every era had its disposable acts, cheesy hits, and manufactured stars. But now we’ve added infinite shelf space and instant access to the mix, and it’s overwhelming. Bad music isn’t the problem. It’s the sheer volume of it. Anyone with a phone can make a song, a video, and a fake album cover in 15 minutes, and then post it. And then maybe go viral. Or not. No one really knows. Algorithms don’t help, they are the sycophant friend that won’t tell you that you suck. They track clicks, not quality. In the analog days nobody knew if an album got played 50 times in someone’s bedroom—but those plays meant something. Now, we’ve turned music into data points. If it gets enough hits, it must be good, right? But we know that’s not true.