Is guitar music on the way out?

Are guitar bands becoming a thing of the past, as dance and rap groups become more popular? Readers share their thoughts
Bo Diddley with His Guitar
Hey, Bo Diddley … He could play guitar a bit. Photograph: Neal Preston/Corbis

Amy McMullen, 19

I can't remember I last saw a new guitar band promoted on TV or releasing a professionally shot video. Even if there was a lot of promising guitar music out there, it is pushed down the agenda by TV and radio companies so much that it barely gets the exposure it deserves. Most young people in particular will only listen to music via these mediums, so anyone who wants anything that isn't dance friendly pop and rap has to make an effort to listen to it.

The live industry is still full of guitar bands doing what they do best, but it lacks the general coherence to create a proper buzz that gets people excited about it again. It would be great to have a proper movement like Britpop again; for all its disappointments and embarrassing legacy, at least it was better than this acoustic pseudo-rock beige drivel currently popular in the charts.


I grew up listening to post-punk, but dropped out of music for a few years then came back with renewed interest … in hip-hop and electronic music. Because there was invention, there was availability and there was the marriage of invention and communication that makes popular music exciting.

Guitar bands had become mindless tune machines, wearing someone else's pants, embarking on ready-made "careers" aided by the receptiveness of promoters and elements of the press. Comfortable, smug and demanding a musician with little ambition for anything other replicating what was done before. How can anyone compare a guitar band to say, Clams Casino and Danny Brown, Rustie and Two Inch Punch? The level of invention on the hip-hop/electronica side is just infinitely higher.

On the other hand I heard Savages the other day and I found, after 12 years, that sense of power and commitment and communication that guitar bands that I loved used to have. A call to arms I suppose. So yes, I'll keep Le1f and Danny Brown and Savages shuffling together on my playlist.

Trevor Jackson

Classic guitar bands will always be listened to just as we still listen Bach and Beethoven today, but when it comes to future guitar music it's only the fat cats of the music industry that can decide. The trouble is everybody has got lazy. No one can be bothered to learn and master an instrument. It's much easier just to sample someone else playing from yesteryear and produce some processed beat from a computer. It's laziness from the industry too, It's much easier to look up people on YouTube whilst eating breakfast than go to a dingy venue at some ungodly hour.

Being a guitarist in a hard working rock band myself, it is more and more frustrating with every season of the X-factor how we can get the world out of this dark time for music. It's time for a revolution, there are still plenty of hard working, talented rock bands out there waiting to be discovered. They just need someone with Jacobs big enough to take a chance and sign them. Long live Rock.

Henry Degnin

Being born into the 1990s and within the industrial peripheries of South-East London, my sonic diet grew to consist largely of the embers of the hardcore/UKG scene and, later, what would eventually form the early beginnings of Grime. Without realising, I was preparing myself for a musical journey that would consist almost entirely of "pure signals", or rather, electronically recorded, composed and arranged sound, with very little live element or instrumentation.

When very young, my musical sphere of influence was extremely varied and in many ways, made up of my father's rather predictable hangings-on to the 70s punk explosion. More than this, I played guitar, dreamt of performing live with a band on a stage in traditional form and idolised the likes of Rory Gallagher, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Rae-Vaughn.

However, as I reached adolescence and became more of a product of my environment, something changed. The moment can be pinpointed exactly: I borrowed a copy of Dizzee Rascal's debut Boy In Da Corner from a friend, and immediately felt as if I had entered some kind of futuristic dimension. As a product of Generation Z, I was merely matching up my musical tastes to my native digital instincts, a practice in which I was most certainly not alone. With less incentive for bands to even exist in an era where very few pay for music and no-one seems interested in watching live music outside of music festivals, I find myself in a peer group where a DJ triggering a series of pre-arranged samples whilst billing him/herself as "Live" is as close as I will ever get to the spit, spirit and sawdust of the Marquee Club on Charing Cross Road.

Sam Saunders

It's Autumn in rock and roll. The game is up. It has become impossible for any new guitar band to excite imagination, lust, hope, excitement, violence, delirium, joy or devotion.

Reason 1. When four people mutually decide to make one sound they have unknowingly decided that none of them can create thrilling music entirely on their own. Four incomplete musicians can no longer make one complete band.

Reason 2. The practical task of organising and playing a gig is so difficult that the important corrective of seeing an audience tide go out on weak ideas arrives too late.

Reason 3. Musical differences rarely serve their important purpose of making a band exciting and creative.

Reason 4. 80% of new bands sound like a squashy amalgam of all the weakest bits of derivative bands like Kasabian, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Happy Mondays.

Reason 5. Instead of using an early breakthrough to diversify, experiment and change, your breakthrough bands can only pay off debts and survive by producing two more albums just like the first, erasing everyone's patience and interest in the process.

In brief

There are more youngsters nowadays than ever before who are totally devoted to nothing but 'guitar music' especially in the Blues & Rock scene.

- Virgil McMahon, 20

Back in the mid-eighties, we saw a similar decline in guitar bands because of the popularity of the new synth bands. But they were still there, gigging, recording, biding their time. Guitar music may be taking a nap but it will return soon in full force with whole new set of influences.

- Jon Evans

There are way more, and much better quality, guitar bands out there than ever before. Many of them may not be as well known as global pop artists, but I think this is what appeals to their fans – especially the younger ones. People like to feel that are part of an underground scene.

- Alexandra Barlow

Guitar music cannot expect to be at the top of the food chain when Skrillex is firing his laser-guided, titanium-edged musical cluster bombs at the gangs of boys with only leather, tweed, and a second hand pair of brogues to protect them. Guitar must evolve, as it always has done, put on new disguises and take new forms.

- Matthew Cocksedge

What are your thoughts? Do you agree with any of the views above? Is guitar music less relevant in this day and age? If so, does it matter? Is it foolish to even try to define what "guitar music" means? Let us know below.