» Mon Nov 15, 2010 3:41 pm Does anyone else just find Hendrix, Malmsteen et al to be incredibly boring? Sure, their stuff is technically good, but it doesn't mean anything. It's all just pointless and self-congratulatory.
Malmsteen yes, Hendrix no.
I don't even understand why Hendrix is considered a "technically good" player, because his playing style has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of that crop and, as many people never tire of pointing out, he holds nothing against the speed and endurance of guitarists these days or even 25 years ago. He was perhaps the first rock musician out there to put the guitar in the spotlight the way it often is these days - which is why his name seems to be synonymous with shred and metal - but he was using it as a tool for musical experimentation, not as a tool for showing off how much time he'd spent learning scales and doing finger excercises. Of course he was flamboyant and attention grabbing too, but so were David Bowie and Arthur Brown - that was (and always has been) a rock and roll front man thing, it's only after Hendrix that it became a guitarist thing...
Yeah his fandom is 90% bandwagon these days, but there's definitely substance behind it.
