The electric guitar marketplace icon

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1 Consumption Markets & Culture ISSN: (Print) X (Online) Journal homepage: The electric guitar marketplace icon Jacob Ostberg & Benjamin J. Hartmann To cite this article: Jacob Ostberg & Benjamin J. Hartmann (2015) The electric guitar marketplace icon, Consumption Markets & Culture, 18:5, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 04 Jun Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1111 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 22 November 2017, At: 21:07

2 Consumption Markets & Culture, 2015 Vol. 18, No. 5, , The electric guitar marketplace icon Jacob Ostberg a and Benjamin J. Hartmann b a Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; b Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping, Sweden The electric guitar is an ubiquitous part of contemporary consumer culture. In this Marketplace Icons contribution, we illuminate the iconicity of the electric guitar and what lies behind its thick layers of distorted riffs, mad soloing escapades and eccentric onstage performances, specifically within the rock genre. The genesis of electric guitar playing involves a series of technological alterations of the guitar that freed it from a mere background instrument allowing for new musical roles. It quickly became apparent that all the technical solutions designed to get rid of what was defined as unwanted noise could be turned against the clean tone and instead be used to create a unique sound. The control of these noise elements, such as feedback and distortion, became a core element of mastering the modern electric guitar. Rather than just being a marketplace icon, we argue that the electric guitar is fetishized because both its audio quality the loudness and the potential roughness of the sound and its visual looks and onstage performances symbolizes youthful rebellion, the essence of rock and roll. Keywords: marketplace icon; guitar; music; fetish; pop culture You gotta put your faith in a loud guitar. (KISS, God Gave Rock N Roll to You II, Revenge, 1992) Intro On a late summer night in 1996, Oikku Ylinen entered the stage at the Oulu Music Video Festival in Finish town Oulu and rocked out like a maniac, showing the audience, as well as the jury, all sorts of fancy guitar playing moves from the more toned down strumming of chords accompanied by rhythmic hip movements, to the most exaggerated soloing techniques, laying on his knees, bent backwards, thrusting up and down, playing behind his back, behind his head, between the knees, doing the duckwalk...it was all there! As the performance came to an end, the audience was at their feet screaming and the jury had no problem unanimously crowning him the first ever world champion. The first price was a guitar a custom-made Flying Finn guitar, to be more specific which was quite fitting, since his onstage performance had been without a guitar. Oikku Ylinen had just been crowned the world s first Corresponding author. jacob.ostberg@sbs.su.se # 2015 Taylor & Francis

3 Consumption Markets & Culture 403 ever air guitar world champion for his performance of a simulation of guitar playing. The missing guitar in air guitar playing is an homage to the material object, an act of worshipping the icon. Such is the status of the electric guitar in popular culture and especially the practice of playing electric guitar in an eccentric stylized manner that you can take the electric guitar out of the equation and it still make sense. In this Marketplace Icons contribution, we illuminate the iconicity of the electric guitar and what lies behind its thick layers of distorted riffs, mad soloing escapades and eccentric onstage performances, specifically within the rock genre. Historicizing the coolness of the electric guitar The myth has it that, if anything, the electric guitar and its players are cool. This was not always the case, however. The genesis of electric guitar playing as we know it involves a series of technological alterations of the guitar that eventually freed it from a mere background and folk instrument allowing for new musical roles of the guitar. Thus, the iconicity of the electric guitar has to be understood against its historic background beginning in the early twentieth century, when music went through a series of rather rapid changes, spearheaded by developments in North America. The genres of blues, jazz, swing and bebop held the roots of what was to become what we today conceive of as pop and rock music. This was largely before amplification of music and live music was a rather intimate affair. In these genres, the guitar was a rhythm instrument used for strumming chords and the guitarist performed primarily hidden in the backing band keeping the beat. The lead parts were instead played by a combination of various wind instruments saxophones, trumpets, clarinets and trombones and the guitar simply was not loud and distinctive enough to take on a larger role. As a matter of fact, the banjo was actually favored in a lot of swing music because of its more distinct sound and attack (Waksman 2001). (Let us all take a moment now, to thank the mighty Gods of rock n roll for giving us the electric guitar and thus saving us from the banjo; modern popular music would have looked distinctly different if Jimi Hendrix had been sacrificing banjos onstage...) What was later to become the electric guitar thus started as a series of attempts to amplify the guitar in order to move it from a position as a mere rhythm instrument into a more prominent place as an instrument that was actually heard through the various wind instruments, the bass and the drums. While a few devotees might have fantasized about making the guitar into a solo instrument, its position was still firmly anchored in the rhythm section. The first attempts simply involved trying to amplify the acoustic guitar, which, however, turned out to be far more complicated than it sounds, because of the way a guitar is built. The sounds from an acoustic guitar come from strumming the strings, which in turn starts vibrating, followed by the body of the guitar vibrating and amplifying the sound. Because of all these vibrations and resonances going on, back then, it was virtually impossible to capture and amplify an isolated enough sound of the acoustic guitar, there were quite simply too many other sounds creeping into the amplification (Waksman 2001; Millard 2004). Consequently, what the different inventors of the electric guitar aspired to do was to isolate the vibrations of guitar strings to create and amplify a clean tone. In short, the electric guitar works like this: the vibrations of the guitar strings are captured by socalled pickups, which convert the vibrations of the strings through a coil rolled around a magnet into an electric impulse by electromagnetic induction. This signal

4 404 J. Ostberg and B. Hartmann then can be amplified and made loud in a reverse movement by letting the electromagnetic signal create movement of a loudspeaker s membrane. In this process, the original vibrations and resonation of a hollow guitar body, which was the previous form of amplification, is no longer necessary. Thus, while the acoustic guitar is its own amplifier (the hollow, resonating body), with the electric guitar, the amplification is separated from the original instrument which soon resulted in the development of solid-body guitars allowing for thinner, more portable and less traditional guitar shapes the ingredients for virtuoso performances to come. While there had been some earlier attempts to create an electric guitar that was not simply an amplified acoustic guitar most notably the so-called Frying Pan produced by Rickenbacker in 1931, a guitar catering to the Hawaiian music craze during the 1930s the true predecessors of our contemporary electric guitars came onto the market in 1950 (Waksman 2001; Bacon 2011). Two different companies are typically credited with having simultaneously invented the modern electric guitar and for having come up with similar technical solutions. 1 First there was Leo Fender of the Fender Company who launched the Fender Broadcaster in 1950, a guitar that was subsequently renamed the Telecaster and which is credited by having been the first commercially successful electric guitar. Then in 1952, Gibson Guitar Corporation under the presidency of Ted McCarty brought the Gibson Les Paul to the market. This guitar was named after and endorsed by Les Paul, who was a bestselling recording artist with a popular TV show cohosted with his wife. McCarty of Gibson Guitar Corporation was subsequently responsible for bringing several other iconic models to the market, fully utilizing the design possibilities of the electric guitar. Since the modern solid-body electric guitar no longer demanded a particular shape, designers could start experimenting with a wider range of guitar designs to somehow supplement a guitarist s stage persona. One of the early examples is Bo Diddley s rectangular guitar produced by Gretsch in During this time, the electric guitars, like many other design items of the time, came to embody a belief in the progress of modernity, and not least the prospects of space travel. In 1958, Gibson Guitar Corporation unveiled three space-age style guitars: the Flying V, the Explorer and a prototype guitar called the Moderne. While the Moderne never made it to market, it has become mythologized and is referred to as The Holy Grail of guitars ( premierguitar.com/articles/the_mysterious_gibson_moderne), both the Flying V and the Explorer are today considered iconic designs in their own right (Bacon 2011; also see Figure 1). Double, triple and quadruple neck guitars as well as other customized guitars such as ZZ Top s fur-covered guitars soon followed. In addition, the electric guitar became a modular instrument, later allowing for many things to be added into the signal chain such as the various foot pedals altering the sound in desired ways: the guitar rig was born (in its most basic form consisting of the guitar and the amplifier). While today, there is a plethora of guitar brands on the market, the two original electric guitar brands, Fender and Gibson, quickly reached an iconic status and are still dominant market actors in the rock genre and overall. As a matter of fact, since its invention in the 1950s, there have not been too many major alterations to the actual electric guitars and inventions such as Roland s digital pickup system, or the MIDI guitar, whereby string vibrations are transferred into the digital domain allowing the guitarist to trigger polyphonic samples celebrate only marginal success in comparison.

5 Consumption Markets & Culture 405 Figure 1. One of the authors Flying V Ukulele, a pop-cultural tribute to Gibson s original flying V (Photo: Benjamin J. Hartmann). The rise to iconicity While the electric guitar was thus initially invented to be heard merely louder, this quickly changed: what was once set up to deliver a clean guitar sound opened the floodgates for the distortion madness of the rock guitar sound as we know it. Thick layers of rock riffs and sustained soloing escapades all rely on severe distortion of the guitar sound. Plugging the first electric guitars into cheap valve-powered amplifiers soon resulted in the appreciation of the distortion overtones and compression created by the amps being unable to cope with the loudness. Among the first reported distorted electric guitar sounds is Willie Kizart s guitar sound on the 1959 track Rocket 88 by Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm which was simply created by a damaged amplifier (Shepard 2003). Soon, guitarists aimed to replicate this cool distorted sound by cranking amplifiers beyond the limit. It quickly became apparent that all the technical solutions invented to get rid of what was defined as unwanted noise, could be turned against the clean tone and instead be used to create a unique sound. The control of these noise elements, such as feedback and distortion, became a core element of mastering the modern electric guitar and manipulating the different components of the

6 406 J. Ostberg and B. Hartmann guitar rig became an important part of the guitarist s language. Different generations of rock guitarists have since then pushed the boundaries in different ways and invented new ways of utilizing the sound; from Sister Rosetta Tharpe s twangy attacks, to Jimi Hendrix s yet-to-be-paralleled escapades, to Jimmy Page s cock-rock bravado, to Eddie van Halen s groundbreaking use of the tremolo arm, to Yngwie Malmsteen s sheer speed and the list could go on depending on preferences. Initially, however, country, blues and jazz guitarists started utilizing the variety of new tones and sounds that the electric guitar could produce, exploring innovative ways to alter, bend and sustain notes. A key figure in these developments was Chet Atkins, aka Mr Guitar, who was behind the so-called Nashville Sound that took country music uptown, in the sense that he softened the edges and made it appealing to a larger segment of the pop music audience (Waksman 2001, ). But it was especially through the rise of the genre of rock n roll in the 1950s that the instrument s full range of possibilities started to become apparent. This is also when the electric guitar starts its journey toward becoming a cultural icon. Because rock n roll came to symbolize a cultural revolution in which the younger generation rebelled against the conservative values of the parent generation, and the preeminent symbol of rock n roll, in turn, was the electric guitar (Waksman 2001). Because of the technical solutions developed by the Fender and Gibson, respectively, the electric guitars were easy to mass-produce. For example, producing electric guitars of decent quality did not require the use of exclusive types of wood, which would be the case for acoustic guitars where the sound comes from the vibrations of the body. Yet, electric guitar makers typically draw heavily from myths surrounding the craft producer (Hartmann and Ostberg 2013), thus enchanting the mass-production of electric guitars as a very special process. So the electric guitars instantly became mass market commercial endeavors allowing teenagers across the Western world to reinvent themselves in vision of musical rebellion and independence, embodying the cultural values of the youth movement at the time. Pop and rock were the music of the youth and the teenager with an electric guitar became an alluring image. The fetish of the electric guitar: ruggedness, brute force and the warrior taming the beast In the burgeoning rock scene, feedback, distortion and sheer loudness became prominent features of the electric guitar sound. The different inventions in amplification, such as ever larger and more powerful towers of guitar amp stacks led to the possibility of playing to larger and larger audiences. While the Woodstock concert in 1969, with its more than half a million visitors, was surely one of the starting points for the tradition of exceptionally large concerts, there is since a long list of rock concerts that have had an audience of over a million people. This obviously calls for significant amplification! Since then, one of the key visual tropes for rock guitarists has been to stand in front of an entire wall of amplifiers, most notably a Marshall Stack, consisting of amps from that particular brand. With the advent of this extreme amplification, the guitarist was transformed from a mere musician into someone who was able to control the notable forces at hand when connected to that many amplifiers. The rock guitarist more and more came to embody a warrior, or perhaps a knight, able to tame the wild monster that a guitar connected to such a rig is. A mere mortal would fear the potential for feedback, creating a horrible noise with the potential to ruin the hearing temporarily or permanently of fellow musicians and audiences. But a real rock

7 Consumption Markets & Culture 407 guitarist dares to challenge these seemingly uncontrollable brute forces of technology and actively play with them. An electric guitar hooked up to such a system is like a beast trying to break away from its chains, and a true guitar hero can tame this wild monster. Thus, the electric guitar stands for rugged power, which is conversely expressed in the bodily performances of electric guitar playing. One such iconic performance is Slash s (Guns N Roses) guitar solo performance in the song November Rain at the MTV video music awards in 1992 which represents an archetypal performance of rock guitar soloing (a video can be seen here Dx8qS_MT85E). At the end of the performance, Slash is soloing standing boldly on top of the grand piano played by Axl Rose, forming a pyramid with the piano as foundation and the spotlighted guitarist on top, symbolizing the new role of the mighty guitar on top of the instrumental food chain/pyramid. Thus, the electric guitar is fetishized because both its audio quality the loudness and the potential roughness of the sound and its visual looks and onstage performances symbolizes youthful rebellion, the essence of rock and roll. The electric guitar thus holds potential as a conveyor of magical empowerment, whereby power can flow from one entity to another via magical thinking described by guitarists in previous studies as a magical instrument, the electric guitar can take its players to otherwise unreachable spheres (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011). This fetishization of the electric guitar started during the larger cultural shifts happening during the 1960s, but the cultural staying power of the electric guitar has remained surprisingly potent. One of the reasons for this is that more than the electric guitar just being a generic symbol, the design of guitars themselves allows for plenty of freedom for creative expression. In rock subcultures, the guitar is also often referred to as Axe, a raw and mighty prehistoric weapon used to chop and destroy. The axe has always been the weapon of the raw and unsophisticated, lower-class warriors plundering with brute force. The myth of the Axe murderer shivers around popular culture, and similarly, the guitar is mythologized as a powerful and raw weapon that needs to be mastered. Similar to the Axe, empowering pheasants and simple warriors, the electric guitar is empowering. Put a loud electric guitar in the hands of any nerd and he will feel cool (mis-)playing the riff to Smoke on the Water. While not everyone playing the electric guitar has a powerful rig, it is the contrast between the sheer loudness and brute force, on the one hand, and the sensitive finger movements and controlled handling that is needed to control the instrument, on the other, that fuels the imagination; handled correctly the electric guitar holds revolutionary potential. The appreciation of this also distinctly separates those on the inside from those of the outside; anyone who asks to turn down the rock music be it parents, teachers or nerds listening to pop is automatically disqualified. Rock music should be listened to loudly, and the electric guitar is the harbinger of loudness. A pop-cultural reference to the importance of loudness comes from the fictional rock band Spinal Tap (This is Spinal Tap, 1984), where the lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel had custommade his amplifiers to go up to 11, which then, by his own logic, would allow him to play louder than anyone else, since all other amps merely go up to 10. The guitar hero thus bedazzles the audience by taming the wild beast right in front of their eyes, but rather than pacifying the electric guitar they constantly close in on the breaking point where control is no longer possible (McSwain and Millard 2004). This spectacle bears with it a certain sexual tension where the guitar hero seemingly draws pleasure from bringing the guitar close to the breaking point; here a certain element of

8 408 J. Ostberg and B. Hartmann introspection, sweat, exposed body parts and ludicrous facial expressions on behalf of the guitarist is valued, even called for. But there is a breaking point where you are no longer pleasing the audience, when the pleasure has been taken out of the social context and turned into pure autoeroticism, something that is stigmatized as guitar masturbation within rock culture. Such erotic connotations of the guitar are often exposed in the bodily movements of the guitar player positioning the instrument as a penis surrogate, whereby the electric guitar becomes a technophallus [working] to affirm a phallocentric, male-dominated sexual order (Waksman 2001, 253). And while part of the guitar hero mythology includes the sexual conquering of female fans, groupies, the this type of cock-rock performance is typically interpreted as a sort of homoerotic spectacle oriented toward the affirmation of male prowess (Waksman 2001, 253). The marketization of the guitar sound myth So, while the handling of the guitar onstage is important to evoke the desired effects of rebellion, controversy and power, guitarists put a lot of thought and effort into the material arrangement, aspiring to find the right sound and right looks that will mirror their personal style and stage persona. Not least the look part is echoed in brand-building activities, exemplified with a recent in-store campaign by Fender whereby they have provided vendors with mirrors saying: What kind of Fender are you? Thus, a lot of offstage work goes on hidden in bedrooms, rehearsal rooms, studios and guitar retailers, striving to find the ideal combination of elements of the guitar rig for the occasion. Pairing the sheer amount of gear and nearly endless combinations of brands (guitars, amps, effects, strings, cables, speakers, picks) with the mythology of the personified guitar sound and looks is also one of the reasons that the electric guitar is such a sustained commercial endeavor. The electric guitar is hence a marketplace icon partly because it acts in a network of other material actors as well as the guitarist (Hartmann, 2015). Any flaws in playing technique are always promised a solution by the market; not good enough? Go buy something! This condition is so common among guitarists that it is referred to as GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome): The uncontrollable need to purchase just one more guitar to satisfy an inner desire that knows no boundaries! A growing epidemic, this compulsive disorder can be triggered by the mere sight of a guitar and typically results in a financial transaction. ( guitaracquisitionsyndrome.com/page_1.php) In popular guitar culture, the myth has it that certain sounds can be achieved only with the right guitar rig, framing the quest for sound and onstage performance as a consumption problem. Thus, there are marketplace communities dedicated to iconic guitar rigs, be it Jimi Hendrix s Woodstock rig, Steve Ray Vaughan s or Jimmy Page s rig, the Internet provides consumers with complete shopping lists for supposedly achieving the desired sound and appearance. Fernandez and Lastovicka (2011) have shown how guitarists tend to fetishize certain types of gear that links iconically (i.e. resembling) and/or indexically (i.e. having a tangible connection to) to famous guitarists they admire. They even suggest that it is reasonable to think that fetish possessions can have a subtle but detectable effect in the lives of talented performers who own and use them. However, in the guitar subcultures, there is a constantly ongoing dispute over whether sound is created primarily via the material objects or the skillful

9 Consumption Markets & Culture 409 movements of hands and fingers. This idolization and fetishization of certain guitar rigs contributes to the electric guitar being a perfect marketplace icon since it encapsulates one of the most distinctive features of our current consumer society: that all problems could be re-framed as a problem of consumption! Outro Because of the iconic status of the electric guitar as a symbol of youthful rebellion, and the prevalent alluring images of guitar heroes capable of taming the monstrous creature of a guitar hooked up to a massive wall of amplifiers, it has become popular for ordinary consumers to engage in role play whereby they can pose as competent guitar players. This has led to the popularity of various simulations of guitar playing. From the unscripted spontaneous air guitar sessions happening at private parties, dance floors or in front of live bands, to the scripted air guitar competitions mentioned in the intro. More recently, the popularity of the computer games Guitar Hero or Rock Band can be connected to the common consumer fantasy of being able to play the electric guitar. Most will never spend the necessary hours tediously practicing scales and riffs in order to master the real guitar, but the appeal of the fantasy of being a guitar hero still prevails. So rather than challenging the prevalence of the electric guitar as a marketplace icon, these simulations further cement its position in popular culture. Long live the electric guitar! Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Note 1. The invention of the electric guitar is a very complex and contested story involving more actors than we mention here, see, for example, the documentary Electrified: The Guitar Revolution (2010) produced by the Smithsonian. In this article, however, we focus on the two companies that chiefly contributed to making the electric guitar a marketplace icon. References Bacon, Tony History of the American Guitar: 1833 to the Present Day. Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat. Electrified: The Guitar Revolution Accessed April 22, com/watch?v=d0alraxzrzc&index=2&list=flpckh8xu7gb11ka4cqjjl_q. Fernandez, Karen V., and John L. Lastovicka Making Magic: Fetishes in Contemporary Consumption. Journal of Consumer Research 38 (2): Hartmann, Benjamin J Peeking Behind the Mask of the Prosumer: Theorizing the Organization of Consumptive and Productive Practice Moments. Marketing Theory. doi: / Hartmann, Benjamin J., and Jacob Ostberg Authenticating by Re-enchantment: The Discursive Making of Craft Production. Journal of Marketing Management 29 (7 8): McSwain, Rebecca, and André Millard Heavy Metal: From Guitar Heroes to Guitar Gods. In The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon, edited by André Millard, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

10 410 J. Ostberg and B. Hartmann Millard, André Inventing the Electric Guitar. In The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon, edited by André Millard, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Shepard, John Musical Instruments: Guitars. In Vol. II of Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Performance and Production, edited by John Shepard, David Horn, Dave Laing, Paul Oliver, and Peter Wicke, London: Continuum. Waksman, Steve Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.