PRINCE, THE GUITARIST

This post originally popped up after I got tired of reading think pieces about Prince being the best guitarist since Hendrix. I'd always liked Prince's playing, but this framing initially struck me as the usual rolling stone clickbait banality. I encouraged a bunch of Prince fans to badger me with live improvised guitar highlights of Prince's career so I could give the whole thing a fair shake. I resisted the temptation to list an endless string of guitarists who can do stuff Prince couldn't do. I hope I addressed that in my caveats.  

1. On Prince as "best guitarist since Hendrix," or any similar honorific-- 

With a few caveats, I can actually get behind this. But the caveats are serious and significant. 

Prince is certainly not the most adept guitarist alive on earth since Hendrix-- anyone serious about music knows that there are numerous other styles of music besides American top forty, many of which involve virtuosity and extensive musical language that might have baffled even Hendrix, wonderful musician though he was. 

I submit that we are talking about guitarists who have made virtuosic and inventive guitar a significant part of their work in the American pop music world. 

And with that criterion, I can't think of any guitarist in rock since the days of Ritchie Blackmore who's done it any better than Prince did. I'm happy to hear other names in this context, and I'm certainly not interested in debating or dismissing someone else's picks-- but I think our man set a pretty strong example of how guitar (both rhythm and lead) can play an important role in pop, r&b, funk, etc. And he did this during an era where pop music (white or black) was mostly sidelining the guitar. 

2. On the question of whether Prince brought anything new to the instrument, the implication being that an expansion of the idiom should be the main criterion-- 

I'm not sure Prince's various achievements qualify as something truly new, but if he wasn't innovative he certainly represented a highly unusual and possibly unprecedented combination of eclectic vocabulary and rhythmic and melodic gifts. Like Hendrix, Prince's real advantage over his white rock contemporaries was the rhythmic vocabulary learned from long immersion in funk and soul music. And Prince's non-funky melodic invention is really strong as well. The combination of a compositional approach to melodic invention and a wide and funky rhythmic vocabulary is what makes Prince's guitar legacy so significant. 

I'll confess here (it won't surprise most of you) that I'm not a fan of shredding. Heavy metal shred soloing is impressive for its technique, certainly, but in the area of invention it generally strikes me as rigid and gridlike, with a curious blend of overstated and antiseptic aesthetics. 

Prince traffics sometimes in the neighborhood of shred, but to my ears he makes that shit listenable. The declamatory squealing approach, in Prince's hands, smacks of the black church rather than the suburban rumpus room. More Al Green, less Malmsteen. 

So for those who would put a more technically innovative or virtuosic guitarist on the pedestal, I say-- get your own damn pedestal. Or even a whole acre of them, if needed. But next time I need to play some rock lead guitar, I'll be pilfering from Prince's Mozart-meets-Jimmy Nolen legacy. Y'all can feel free to steal from the guys who are more important to you.