“Rolling Stone” Picks Up Its Well-Worn Six-String

Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who’s contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Rolling Stone:

This week, Your Boy breaks one of his informal rules: He shalt not assess two consecutive issues of Rolling Stone in a row. But the June 12 RS leads with a package titled “The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs Of All Time,” and if both music mag publishing trends and protocols of innuhnet bitching tell us anything, it’s that people luv lists–or at least luv disagreeing with them.

Being that the mag represents what it does, Rolling Stone is awfully invested in the totemic centrality of the guitar to “rock and roll” music. This issue is the third in five years to emphasize the guitar: in 2003 came “The Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” followed in 2007 by “The New Guitar Gods.” Typically, this sort of exercise involves a lot of grandiose verbiage regarding how the instrument is rock and roll’s “essential liberating voice,” as per this feature’s introduction.

It goes unmentioned that Guitar Hero and various YouTube shred clips have created greater general interest in the guitar in the past two years–saying so might render this list a bit more timely, and then wouldn’t have to rely purely on shopworn “these are the immortal moments of rock’s six-string legacy” tropes. It’s a point that RS never tires of making.

YB should mention that he contributed a few entries to the 2003 list: he was charged with making the case for the greatness of several players, including Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil (which he, frankly, struggled with) and Randy Rhoads (which he most emphatically did not). That assemblage drew the ire of many respondents (among them Scandal’s Patty Smyth) for the lowly status granted to Edward Van Halen (No. 70).

If Van Halen was slighted at the time, all is forgiven now, as he appears with a be-mulleted Jimmy Page, B.B. King, the Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez, Kirk Hammett, Carlos Santana, Buddy Guy, and RS‘ current “pop dude we like cuz he’s into playin’ bloozy and bangin’ famous gals” John Mayer on this issue’s wraparound cover; all are interviewed therein. Typically, RS puts an image of Jimi Hendrix on the cover of any such big guitar extravaganza, but perhaps his visage is no longer the automatic sales tonic it was for so many years.

In an editor’s note, senior editor David Fricke is described as possessing the requisite “encyclopedic knowledge of music,” which more or less identifies him as the point man for this list. YB knows that Fricke is dependable for such prose as “barbed wire fusillades” and so on, but does not know if he actually, y’know, plays guitar. As for the package’s remaining contributors, YB knows that Douglas Wolk plays guitar and that Austin Scaggs had and may still be in a band, but he does not know any such thing about Evan Serpick, Brian Hiatt and Gavin Edwards.

But clearly the “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time” was shepherded by Fricke. It’s unlikely that tunes from Moby Grape (“Omaha,” No. 95) would make a list were he not running the show. Otherwise, this is exactly what you’d expect: Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” and Cream’s “Crossroads” take the top three spots, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit (No. 10) is the only song from the past 20 years to make the top 20, the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” appears at No. 21, and…

Aww fuck, just look at the list itself and then go be a good little innuhnet whiner and complain that the mag has no credibility because songs by Deep Purple, The Band, Black Flag, Arto Lindsay, the Isley Brothers, Allan Holdsworth, Maiden, Richard Thompson, Pantera, or the cover subjects of the previous issue aren’t included. Run along now!

YB will pass, as he long has believed that these assemblages emphasize unnecessary divisions in music, which is an art form best appreciated in its vastness, and not in some stuffy (and, in this particular case, rather boring) canon-building exercise. But Rolling Stone‘s edit staff and many of their competitors know that some folks like to argue about the best this or that in bars and on their computers.

He’s also very very tired of the adulation that the mag has thrown toward the act of playing the guitar and its notable practitioners. So he’ll suggest that next time, why can’t RS do a list of the greatest rhythm sections in rock and roll history? Or of singers? Or of Australian bands? Bands fronted by women but otherwise staffed by men? Best bands with sci-fi-, fantasy-, D&D-themed lyrics? These kind of pitches are part of what made YB the success he is today, so he doesn’t expect RS to pay them much mind. But he does wish the mag’s staff would throw a curve here and there.

Now, a few notes:

• In a sidebar interview with Eddie Van Halen conducted by Hiatt, EVH repeats a claim that YB remembers the guitarist making in the early ’90s, namely, that he “doesn’t really listen to anything nowadays. The last record I bought was Peter Gabriel’s So.” YB wishes to take nothing away from EVH’s monumental talent when he suggests that a lack of musical stimulus may go some way toward explaining how his creative output has dwindled over the past decade.

• The No. 6-rated “Eruption” by EVH is a composition, a performance, and a recording. But it is not a song.

• In an entry for the No. 4-rated “You Really Got Me,” the composer Ray Davies states “I said I’d never write another song like it. And I haven’t.” YB fails to see how the very next single the Kinks released, “All Day and All of the Night,” is not a rewrite of the former song.

• YB wonders if, once the mag no longer feels the need to trumpet the way each carries on the rock tradition, My Morning Jacket, John Mayer, or the Mars Volta will make RS‘ next guitar-oriented list. He does think its funny that RS flies the flag for such unexceptional fare as the Strokes “Take It or Leave It” (No. 71) and Pearl Jam’s club-footed clamfest “Even Flow” (No. 77).

• In a brief obituary notice in the issue’s front of the book, RS mentions that the original drummer of Rush, John Rutsey, died earlier this month, which makes YB want to go back on his above pledge to not complain about this or any other list. So: RS! Please get over your tiresome institutional bias and pay the noted Canadian progressive rock/objectivist power trio the respect it is due in future iterations of your dreadfully dull rockist lists.