Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (review)

Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. By Steve Waksman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. [x, 373 p. ISBN 0-674-00065-X. $27.95.]

Steve Waksman's book is a selective history of the electric guitar since the thirties, focusing on eight key performers or groups who especially illustrate the instrument's cultural significance. They include the short-lived jazz guitar pioneer Charlie Christian; the very long-lived inventor and performer Les Paul; Chet Atkins, Nashville's versatile "Mr. Guitar"; the urban blues giant Muddy Waters; rock and roll legends Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix; the band Led Zeppelin; and the MC5, a politically radical white group in late-sixties Detroit.

Waksman's book was originally a prize-winning American studies dissertation, and it is a fine example of the "cultural studies" vogue in that field. Cultural-studies theory animates, but also hinders, the book. For example, Waksman claims that his study defines "a continuum of ideas and practices within which the electric guitar stands at the center of an effort to negotiate between patterns of racial and sexual identity that seek to incorporate the sensory excitement of the new electronic noise yet remain rooted in notions of race, gender, and sexuality that have a longer, less liberatory history" (pp. 275-76). Such abstract theorizing--in which a national culture, like a giant organism, makes "efforts," and "patterns" "seek to incorporate" the "excitement" of a "noise"--typifies cultural studies, which aims to analyze core cultural tensions with the hope of effecting progressive "utopian" change. Waksman, like others in American studies, finds powerless groups in the United States struggling against "the limits of noise and technology, of racial cooperation and sexual liberation" (p. 281), as well as against the limits of worldwide postcolonial change. He locates the electric guitar's story in the middle of "popular music's"--or is it the musicians' and listeners'?--struggles against those limits. Guitarists' playing, he argues, presented utopian visions of "desire" and change. Yet such visions either failed to displace the cultural status quo or were subsumed by its hegemonic reach.

As with other cultural-studies efforts, Waksman's theoretical foundation compels him to focus on episodes that show friction at the boundary lines of race, sexuality, technology, and politics. His book, like similar studies, is thus somewhat preprogrammed and is dedicated to providing intellectual reinforcement for a quasi- political assault on the dominant paradigm. When will the arbiters of American studies tire of this formulaic endeavor? Waksman's focus on individual utopian efforts diverts attention from rich strands in electric-guitar history. These include the story of the electric-guitar industry; the experiences of garage-band players who remained amateurs (including, curiously, the author himself); the fate of the electric guitar in country music and other nonrock genres (not alluded to beyond the fifties); and the tradition of female electric-guitar players. The final omission is the most surprising. While it is correct to argue that the instrument remains male dominated, is it proper to ignore the long history of struggling woman players since the thirties, or to discount the strong contemporary scene featuring Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, Melissa Etheridge, and others? Some musicological topics also need exploring, such as the electric guitar's evolving role in the rock band (in relation to vocalists, drummers, and especially electric bassists, who are mysteriously neglected here) and the evolution of guitar harmonies and technique in various rock styles. (Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993], focusing on heavy-metal bands, remains a model study in the latter regard.) I am not criticizing Waksman for not writing the book I want; rather, I am noting that his theoretical rigor closes off important and rich avenues of inquiry that he logically ought to have examined.

Theoretical concerns...