BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : FEBRUARY 21, 2000 ISSUE
BOOKS Louder! INSTRUMENTS OF DESIRE The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience By Steve Waksman Harvard University 373pp $27.95 So far as is known, B.B. King never considered taking up the flageolet, or named an accordion Lucille. No early draft of Johnny B. Goode has surfaced in which the little country boy could play the contrabassoon just like a-ringin' a bell. No, when you come right down to it, the electric guitar is the only instrument worth fetishizing. So, unsurprisingly, most books on the subject amount to guitar porn, androgen-fests featuring lovingly exploded diagrams of humbucker pickups and painstakingly reconstructed recording-session attendance lists. Don't expect those cheap thrills from Instruments of Desire. Author and cultural historian Steve Waksman takes a Harvard's-eye view of the electric guitar's impact on popular music genres, exploring ''the deconcentration of music through the prioritization of noise and the reconcentration of music through strategies of sonoric containment.'' Too bad he didn't prioritize a strategy of geek-speak containment, because Instruments' natural-language passages are knowledgeable and sympathetic. Waksman's profiles of musicians Charlie Christian and Les Paul--each chapter centers on one guitar icon--provide useful overviews of their careers and an aficionado's suggestions for listening. Such history as he supplies is generally reliable, if too sprawling. The chapter on Jimi Hendrix, for example, kicks off with a discussion of the Black Aesthetic movement of the late '60s; four pages into it you learn that ''within such a conception of blackness, Jimi Hendrix would seem to have little place.'' The electric guitar is nothing if not a tinkerer's delight. A compromise between nature and electronics, Waksman notes, it challenges the musician to strike a better bargain between tone and tinnitus, because feedback is the price paid for volume. Unamplified, a guitarist was lost in the din of a jazz or country band. Plugged in, the guitarist was loud enough to cut loose with solos that musician Mary Osborne, recalling a 1938 Charlie Christian club performance, described as ''much like a tenor saxophone strangely distorted.'' Waksman really warms to his subject when discussing legendary Fender-benders like Led Zeppelin and Detroit's MC5, although this is where the Foucault-ate-my-homework speedbumps are thickest. You can't make it through one paragraph without bottoming out on a ''privileged signifier'' or ''gendered dimension.'' Too much of this critical theory kind of noise will leave even academics dazed and confused. By JIM TAIBI _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS Louder! PHOTO: Cover, ``Instruments of Desire'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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