Echoing last year’s call for discussion about great guitar riffs, this year music journalist Simon Reynolds has called for odes to the riff’s slightly-uncool sibling: the guitar solo. Naturally, you’re all welcome to join the festivities. Unlike the Great Internet Riff War of 2010, it’s a bit of a struggle at first to get people to expound upon how awesome guitar solos are. Consider that entire musical movements have arisen time and again—punk and post-punk, just to name two—that make a point of rejecting the soloing convention. While a lot can be said over the technique’s indulgent, sometimes stodgy nature, I honestly believe that a lot of the grumbling about solos is due to the fact that not everyone can pull them off well.

Really, think about it: a great riff can be just one catchy measure of music repeated for a full minute. A great solo is supposed to be an individual expression, and those by their nature have to be idiosyncratic and nuanced. They require a baseline amount of talent and/or imagination, and furthermore they are often improvised. Factoring all that in mind, even an oft-cited classic solo can have a bar or two that simply does not work for the listener. I for one can rattle off numerous riffs I consider classic, but my list of comparable solos would be much shorter.

Regardless, I’ve never been one to call for the head of the guitar solo on a platter. Having heard Pink Floyd a little too often on classic rock radio isn’t enough to make me want to deny an essential vocabulary element from genres such as blues, heavy metal, and even folk music. Additionally, solos are a handy compositional technique to liven up a song arrangement—the presence of that breakneck riff in Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” might satiate most hungers for six-string mania, but the whole affair would be a little less interesting without that “Fast” Eddie Clark speed freakout after Lemmy shouts out “And don’t forget the joker!”

Paradise Lost author John Milton, a patriotic Englishman, was absolutely an aficionado of music; his father was, in fact, a composer of some 20 works.  Scholar Diane McColley recently notes that “Milton collaborated with a court composer, praised the church music that Puritans attempted to destroy, and in his epics represented choral and instrumental music in Heaven, Hell, and Paradise” (Milton in Context, 2010).  Notwithstanding, music is typically associated with the sacred among the devotional, and, for them, particularly and personally with God; in Paradise Lost, the angels endlessly, tediously sing to praise the heroic sacrifice of the Son.

This, I think, indicates that in some sense it is understandable that another Englishman and polemicist, Christopher Hitchens, refrains from citing music too frequently or specifically in his several endeavors.  “Why, if god was the creator of all things, were we supposed to ‘praise’ him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally?  This seemed servile, apart from anything else”, professes Hitchens in his book God Is Not Great (2007).  Aware of both Milton and the Bible, he links music, generally, with “songs of praise” to the Almighty, and, of course, a loathsome variety of human slavishness and worship.

I’m writing this (relatively) brief blog entry because I want to start what I hope will be a long discussion in the comments section.  I’m also writing today from a position of genuine ignorance, which is why I want to hear from you, PopMatters Readers the World Over.

Jake Cleland’s recent piece here on the evolution of punk culture struck me for a few different reasons, not the least of which was because it began with an apparent breakup over punk music.  Jake, for what it’s worth, my wife loathes my collection of My Bloody Valentine, Mogwai, and Merzbow records, and we’ve been happily together for eleven years now.  Don’t let punk rock get in the way of love—or, I suppose, sex.  It’s not worth it, my friend.

Many of porcupine Tree member Steven Wilson’s mostly accurate, but increasingly tedious denunciations of inferior audio can be attributed to genuine motivations. He really does despise digital downloads and looks askance at those who would abuse their ears (and his art) by listening to them. You can usually ascertain if someone’s agenda is disingenuous by the amount of money they stand to make; in Wilson’s case, sniffily censuring consumers for their philistine proclivities is certainly not going to line his pockets. Bully for him—his browbeating-bordering-on-bullishness comes from an uncorrupted heart. Still, fans that are sufficiently removed from the sullied means of production and procurement Wilson whines about might hope he can avoid becoming known more for his crankiness than his musical proficiency. 

It’s not that he’s a snob, these fans could claim; it’s that he really cares about music (his already notable street cred as a proponent of progressive rock was augmented by his recent undertaking to remaster—for the umpteenth time, it might be noted—the (brilliant) back catalog of King Crimson; suffice it to say, this is not a task the merely passionate producer assumes, this is an obsessive labor of love).

So what are we to make of Wilson’s latest jeremiad in Electronic Musician, “In The Mix: Everyone’s A Critic”? A knee-jerk analysis might be that the self-appointed physician who would ameliorate all that ails us might want to turn some of that attention inward. It is by now abundantly clear that Wilson would prefer that more people shared his opinion on how music is made, received, and enjoyed (an exalted regard of his own judgment includes Wilson in an artistic community that is neither exclusive nor in danger of diminishing its numbers). What is striking—and slightly unsettling—about his new piece is the implication that Wilson might prefer that a great many people have no opinions at all.

Back in 2007 Canadian music writer Bob Mersereau wrote The Top 100 Canadian Singles, a book compiled from submitted top-ten lists by around 600 music writers (including yours truly), musicians, and industry insiders. At the same time thoughtfully written and argument-inciting, it had readers across Canada vehemently debating the book’s inclusions and exclusions, whether it was complaining about its baby boomer-heavy slant or the fact that far too many Tragically Hip albums made the cut. Either way, it had Canadians talking about its musical history more than ever before, and coming from a country that doesn’t usually like to blare its own horn regarding its contributions to popular music as much as its neighbors to the South, that was no small feat.

So considering the success of Mersereau’s book, a sequel was an inevitability, and three years later he’s returned with the aptly titled The Top 100 Canadian Singles. With the list of voters even larger than the previous book (again, yours truly was all too glad to participate), one would hope for a broad selection of songs that spans the past 50 years or so, and it does so, at least to a certain extent.