TUNING UP
Screw “5 Things Every Guitarist Should Do” Lists
BY SHAWN HAMMOND
I
’ve lost count of how many times
I’ve ranted about garden-variety
“listicles” and clickbait headlines
leading to worthless online bullshit, but
the sad truth is that now it’s becoming
more and more prevalent from guitaroriented sites, too.
“5 Licks Every Guitarist Should Know!”
“9 Scales Only Dipshits Can’t Blaze On!”
“17 Pedals You’re a D-Bag for Not Owning!”
I’m obviously making these up—but
just barely.
Theses things push my filthy-mouth
buttons. I hate these friggin’ lists. It’s
hard for me to believe that—like their
counterparts on everyday subjects—90
percent of them aren’t crapped out in five
seconds under the vengeful eye of some
bean-counting overlord or editorial slave
driver, or by the latest over-caffeinated
social-media-sensation wannabe. But to
me even the ones that aren’t full of fluff,
even the ones that accurately analyze
some musical point or another, are badnews bears.
I know what you’re thinking: “Whoa,
there, Shawn-boy—who pissed in your
Verena Street Cow Tipper coffee this
morning? They’re just headlines vying for
eyeballs amongst a potential viewership
whose attention is increasingly fractured
by today’s snappy digital lifestyle. No
one should take them literally.” Maybe,
Ms. Very Articulate Mind Reader. But
a lot of players out there really buy into
this hyperbolic crap (craperbole?).
"You $#!@%
kids get off my
interwebs!"
@PG_shawnh
So exactly why do I hate these lists
so much? Well, I can tell you that it’s
not just because they’re arrogant and
condescending. It’s also because they’re
mind-bogglingly blind to the folly they
peddle. They teach us to be lemmings.
Every one of these listicles leads to things
someone else already did better than you
or I ever will.
Given that we’re here to talk about
guitar and music, an ostensibly creative
endeavor, it’s worth taking a lesson or
three from what we know about perhaps
the most creative person humanity
has ever known: Leonardo da Vinci. A
peerless scientific genius whose inventions
were centuries ahead of their time, he
possessed a restless curiosity and keen
intellect that altered the course of human
history. He was also one of the most
gifted, insightful, and prolific painters
and sculptors of all time—a master of
anatomy, perspective, and how they
reflect and affect emotion.
Yet, as Bulgarian New Yorker (and
MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow)
Maria Popova points out in her alwaysastute BrainPickings.org blog (“Leonardo’s
Brain: What a Posthumous Brain Scan
Six Centuries Later Reveals About the
Source of Da Vinci’s Creativity”), he
was also the opposite of everything a
15th-century listicle would’ve prescribed
for success. Gay during a period when it
was punishable by death, Leonardo was
the illegitimate son of a wealthy playboy
who later cruelly took him from his birth
mother and treated him as something
far removed from a son. Further, as a
bastard child, da Vinci was not allowed to
attend church-run schools of the day. Yet
he went ahead and became the original
Renaissance man anyway.
As Popova points out in her
commentary on the late surgeon/
inventor Leonard Shlain’s 2014 book,
Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's
Creative Genius, all of these “disadvantages”
and disconnections from the orthodox
route to success in the 1400s likely
preserved the unique natural aptitudes that
led to Leonardo’s place in history. As Shlain
put it:
Unimpeded by the accretion of
misconceptions that had fogged the lens
of the educated, Leonardo was able to
ask key questions and seek fresh answers.
Although he could not quote learned
books, he promised, “I will quote
something far greater and more worthy:
experience, the mistress of their masters.”
He disdained “trumpets and reciters of
the works of others,” and tried to live
by his own dictum: “Better a small
certainty, than a big lie.”
“The source of Leonardo’s
extraordinary creativity,” Popova posits,
“was his ability to access different ways
of thinking, to see more clearly the
interconnectedness of everything, and
in doing so, to reach a different state of
consciousness….”
Food for thought next time you see
one of those confounded listicles talking
down to you from its perch on high, eh?
Instead of falling for the bait, flush that
cyber craperbole and hit the woodshed
to start chiseling out your own “small
certainty” based on what sounds and
feels right to your ears, not some
blathering blowhard.
Shawn Hammond
Chie Content O er
[email protected]
premierguitar.com