Friday, May 24, 2013

Eruption in the 2010s

I was going through my RSS feeds this morning when I came across this:

Girl, 14, rocks Internet with cover of classic Van Halen guitar solo by Kurt Schlosser

http://www.today.com/entertainment/girl-14-rocks-internet-cover-classic-van-halen-guitar-solo-6C10053250

Now the next bit may come across as me being a cranky old man but I'm not sure why this made my feeds, and I'll tell you why:

For one thing, everyone knows how to play it, except for me because a long time ago I adopted a no-tapping policy, so this isn't a "sour grapes" sort of thing.

Why everyone knew how to play it over 30 years ago was it was a tab in Guitar For The Practicing Musician magazine. There are countless tabs everywhere now as well as tutorials on YouTube that will step you through it.  Kids in my grade school could play it, so in grade school, even though the wankers weren't that bright, they were still 12-13 years old. I think the only difference is (and very important), there wasn't an Internet for the public back then.

Kurt might want to read the above paragraph and hopefully have a light bulb go off over his head.

Now, I'm not knocking her. It does take a fair amount of chops to play it even on what looks like a short scale guitar (unless she's 6 feet tall in real life).  I'm knocking Kurt because he didn't do his homework.  She isn't the only person to play it.  Maybe if Kurt wasn't such a cradle robber he would have written about somebody else and not a 14 year old girl. That's almost downright creepy.

The "The commenters on YouTube are perfectly happy with the way Tina plays it, with many joking that they're giving up the guitar in the wake of such young talent" is pretty ridiculous.  This may be directed to those who left a comment but I don't find repetition and practice of someone else's solo all that exciting. Improvising and creating something new on the spot is way more interesting and is the difference between someone who's a Guitar Player instead of someone who just plays the guitar.

So Tina, keep playing; Kurt, find something interesting to "report" on.  Dweeb.

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