My Question for White People

White friends, I have a question for you. What is it with you guys and the electric guitar? I don't get it.

Well, that's not fair -- sometimes I do get it. I've always loved Jimi Hendrix. The White Stripes can often be amazing. I love a lot of Beatles. But even with the Beatles, I prefer their later albums, when they brought in more than than just electric guitars and drums.

I get bored with most rock, which seems overly fixated on guitars. Oh, I'm sure you can come up with a few dyed-in-the-wool rock bands that also feature a keyboard or a flute or a sousaphone or whatever. But for the most part, those are novelties -- most music classified as rock is heavy on the guitars and light on everything else.

Granted, if you're going to pick one instrument, the electric guitar is a good choice, no doubt. It can do an amazing amount of things. I'll go as far as to say it's the best instrument in the history of popular music.

My point is that it's crazy to pick just one instrument. The possibilities for exciting new sounds expand exponentially if you have a bunch of different instruments working together. Every other musical genre has been pretty liberal about which instruments get to join the party. Jazz was open to any kind of wind instrument, and then electric guitars and whatever else. Hip-hop has been open to every instrument plus every conceivable sound that can be recorded and looped into a beat. It's only rock that is so conservative: guitars and drums. Eventually even great recipes get repetitive.

Nervous Nellie rock fans have been proclaiming "rock is dead" probably every year since its creation, usually because they are too old to comprehend the new sound. But nowadays they might be right. And I think it's rock's own fault, for boxing itself in as far as instrumentation.

I saw an article on the A.V. Club a while back saying that in 2012, only one album of the Top 50 best-selling albums of the year was a rock album, one by Everclear. You can be sniffy about the list of most popular albums as representing lowest common denominator and just music for 12-year-olds and etc., but you know what, those 12-year-olds eventually grow up. They might develop more sophisticated tastes and move from Drake to the Roots or Blackalicious or what have you. They're not likely to move from Drake to Black Sabbath, methinks.

I like to think that Radiohead was the band that brought the world around on this. They were an extremely good guitars-and-drums rock band, and then all of a sudden they released "OK Computer." The title says it all -- they acknowledged that computers can make some pretty terrific music, and then they went on to prove it. In my admittedly very amateur observation, it seems like music slowly followed their lead, and by now, only a few bands since even try to do much of interest with just guitars and drums.

I perhaps should have mentioned at the outset that I am a white man. It's true -- I'm not proud of that fact, but it's a burden I have to live with. But I am one whose CD collection is probably 90% made up of African-American artists, with the lion's share going to hip-hop. Public Enemy was the first music that I became truly fanatical for, and after them De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. (Other lifelong favorites include the Smiths, Radiohead and Beck. I didn't say that white people can't make good music. Just that they do so less often.)

I certainly didn't gain these predilections from my peers. Like most people who grew up in suburbia in the 1980s and 1990s, I've spent a lifetime among almost exclusively rock fans. I seemed to have similar tastes to theirs in most everything except when it came to music. When they would gush about whatever guitar-based band they loved, I usually felt like an outsider. Sometimes I got it, but more often I just didn't.

That's music, I suppose. It's so subjective that trying to describe why you like something, or moreover, trying to convince someone else to like something, is usually pointless. Occasionally you can learn enough about the context of some song or genre that you can develop a taste for it. More often, though, it just moves you or it doesn't.

So I guess the question I posed at the outset is a futile one. Maybe it's something you just can't figure out -- white people just love their electric guitars, and that's all there is to it. More likely, though, I think it's because you are all racists.