New Guitar Magazine...

Future US, has just published a new guitar magazine, called Guitar Aficionado, that's targeted at the 35-54 year old male reader with significant disposable income. While I'm a little skeptical of the timing of publishing such a rag, given the economy and the fact that I thought such an audience was dead, that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is it's perspective.

Don't get me wrong.. the magazine is elegant, with beautiful photographs, and somewhat interesting people as interviewees, and is as fine a piece of guitar porn as you'll find anywhere, without actually touching a guitar. But it's focus is on guitars as objects, things whose worth is measured solely by their financial value, or their rarity as collectible objects. And given it's predisposition towards the solid-body era, and Rock music, it misses the point entirely.

There's an interview with Joe Perry, in the magazine, that talks about his horses, his houses, his cars and his guitar collection, without once referencing the fact that he was the man who wrote the riff to "Walk this way". There's no mention of the music or the makers, or the players as musicians rather than as squires of country estates.

And that's ultimately a jejune perspective. Rock and Roll isn't a lifestyle.. it's a way of life. It's Iggy Pop and Lemmy, not Richard Gere or Johnny Depp. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant didn't get all that tail by showing off how big their cars were. They did it by playing "A whole lotta love" on stage, and meaning it. John Lee Hooker was still getting young pussy at the age of 80 because he could still play the blues with true soul.

I'm loathe to criticize a magazine's first issue, and I get the idea that this is a publication designed to ease affluent men through their midlife crises, and that through the possession of symbols of rebellion, some youth may be recaptured. You know, the guitar magazine Playboy would publish. But I'm a little angry about it, because of the cynicism. This is the same mentality that turned the Rock fan into a demographic, took Rock and Roll away from it's real audience, sanitized it, and caused the Eagles to charge $250 for concert tickets. By embracing the arrogance of wealth, the idea that being rich in of itself makes you a better person than someone who's poor, it encourages the delusion that if you buy an expensive enough guitar, you'll magically be good.

What this magazine lacks is soul. The publishers and editors seem to know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing. The Bible says it is easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And the same is true of rock and roll, which is about rebellion, anger and hope, and desperate animal sex with a skanky chick up against a side-alley wall. Rock and Roll isn't the sanitized airbrushed Playboy, it's the down and dirty Hustler.

Still, I'll probably end up buying more issues of this thing. You know, for the bathroom.