Society for Music Research
On May 15, SMR member Kai West successfully defended his dissertation, “Signal Paths: Electric Guitar Culture in the Twenty-First Century,” before his committee, colleagues, and friends gathered via Zoom. Congratulations, Kai! Please see below for an abstract of Kai’s dissertation.
Signal Paths: Electric Guitar Culture in the Twenty-First Century
Abstract
The electric guitar’s impact across twentieth-century popular music has been a richly told story, but what about its present and future? In many ways, electric guitar culture today is fueled by a willful obsession with looking back: to analog technologies, old traditions, rigid beliefs, and exhausted heroes. But in the first few decades of the twenty-first century, the instrument also inspires continual transformation, renegotiation, and fluidity, even as it drags the past along in a frayed gig bag.
This dissertation takes a wide-ranging look at contemporary electric guitar culture from the perspective of someone who is immersed in it, employing an array of historical, ethnographic, and practice-based methods. It follows the relationships people make with and through musical instruments, in pursuit of a dichotomy between fixed ideas about what the electric guitar is, who plays it, and what its traditions mean; and the radical possibilities of what all of that can become. To do so, I introduce the idea of “signal paths,” using the routes an electronic signal travels from input to output to map the inner workings of guitar sound, performance, media, social networks, and history. While attending to how the circuit of electric guitar culture relies on power to maintain its status quo, I argue throughout that signal paths aren’t static or stagnant. Rather, they’re constantly in motion and malleable to change, and I conclude that the culture can only evolve by staying in flux.
To develop a dynamic portrait of this cultural milieu, each chapter’s signal path focuses on a specific social, technological, or performative facet of the electric guitar. Chapter 1 investigates the burgeoning culture of effects pedals, an integral guitar technology that can transform the sound guitars beyond recognition. Tracing new technological developments, playing processes, industry spaces, and community networks, it shows how pedals have become instruments and musical collaborators in their own right. Chapter 2 documents the feminist organization She Shreds and how their approach to representation in digital, social, and print media in the 2010s tackled questions of intersectionality, ethics, and cultural citizenship. Following She Shreds from its origins as a DIY magazine through its evolution into a multifaceted digital venture, this chapter explores how its producers combatted rampant marginalization and misogyny in the guitar world through a radical redefinition of what it means to shred. Chapter 3 brings things to a fitting end with an exploration of guitar smashing as a strange, ongoing performance practice. Sifting through a wreckage of broken guitars, this chapter shows how the continued desire to smash them reflects the culture’s need to keep resurrecting itself through its own contradictory traditions.