Contesting virtuosity: rock guitar since 1976

Three chords In late 1976, one of the first punk rock fanzines laid out a veritable philosophy of rock aesthetics in a graphic message. Three roughly drawn chord diagrams laid across the page, showing the readers how to finger the A, E, and G chords on the fretboard of a guitar. Accompanying the chords was a simple message: “This is a chord … This is another … This is a third … Now form a band .” The message was clear: rock music, and rock guitar playing in particular, did not have to be predicated upon the foregrounding of virtuosity. After all, despite the claims of such purveyors of “art rock” as Yes and Genesis, or such heroic guitar idols as Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore, rock was not made to be “art” in any conventional sense of the term; not without cause did Chuck Berry tell Beethoven to roll over so many years earlier. Rock was meant to be basic, simple, unschooled, or else it risked losing touch with the elemental core of emotion that sparked the best rock and roll. Forming a punk band, then, should only require the most elementary skills. Three-chord song structures were at the heart of the rock and roll form, so three chords were all that any guitarist should need to put songs together and play in a band. The renunciation of virtuosity among punk guitarists was not as all-encompassing as has often been portrayed. Depending on how broadly or narrowly one defines punk (or indeed, how one defines virtuosity), the moment of punk’s formation in the mid- to late 1970s included such formidable guitar talents as Robert Quine, of Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Television. Nevertheless, declarations of the power of simplicity such as the above pronouncement were a powerful ideological tool in the efforts among punk bands, fans, and critics to break away from the dominant currents of 1970s rock music. Even if all punk guitarists did not shun the acquisition of musical technique, most questioned the uses to which that technique had been put in recent years, when musical ability had played into the hierarchical separation between rock audiences and musicians.

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