I am a bad, bad person for posting these things from Real Peerreview. Though I choose to spare the author by not naming them or linking back to the originals.
This one reads like a nasty collision between academia’s Critical Theory and sort of terrible music journalism that gave the 1980s NME a bad name.
This paper critically examines the gendering of electric guitar technique in its limited scholarly reception. Focus is given to the work of Steve Waksman, specifically the “technophallus,†a coinage through which he engages feminist scholarship to interrogate the electric guitar’s masculine performative identity. This paper offers a counter-archive of punk guitarists whose work, when approached with a queer analytic, problematize the pairing of virtuosity with heteromasculinity. Synthesizing the work of José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam on queer failure and virtuosity, I offer disorienting guitar practice as a critical lens which can materialize efforts at refusing the linearity of guitar technique as well as guitar hero worship. Consideration is given to St. Vincent’s pairing of a disorienting virtuosity with her extension of the guitar’s sonic possibilities through effect pedals.
Let me get this right; lead guitar is sexist unless you play it very badly. Or use a lot of effects. Or am I missing something?
OK, so I get that there’s a lot of coded sexism in genre snobbery. But surely the author is guilty of the exact same mistake, by using critical theory to suggest their taste in music is somehow morally superior?
It’s not even being iconoclastic in this day and age. Today’s focus group driven mainstream rock has largely pushed virtuoso guitar to the margins. Genres like blues-rock and power-metal that still celebrate virtuoso guitar are niche scenes nowadays.
I don’t disagree with what you say but there are a *lot* of male guitarists out there that seem to play the guitar as if it were a phallic symbol or a weapon of some sort.
Yep, watching some 1980s NWOBHM videos rather confirms that. They’re usually the guitarists who aren’t nearly as good as they think they are.
Is that actually a real paper?
Didn’t link back to it, but the abstract is a straight copy-and-paste. Googling on a phrase in it ought to find it.
I am a bad, bad person for posting these things from Real Peerreview.
Yes, yes you are
It’s rather unfortunate that ‘peer review’ has been held up as some kind of banner standard for the identification of ‘worthwhile’ research, when the fact is all you have to do to pass is not have obviously sloppy methodology (and even plenty of those make it through).
That’s not to say it isn’t important – but it’s frustrating that, at least in the communication of the sciences, it’s often used as an appeal to authority. It’s a real shame because the real appeal of the sciences is the methodology employed, which is almost never covered outside the disciplines themselves. Promoting an appeal to authority as a surrogate to critical thinking is doomed to failure.
Not sure if this one really counts as sloppy methodology, since there’s doesn’t appear to be much methodology involved at all. The abstract reads like recycling other people’s theories with little or no original research. There is no indication that it involved anything along the lines of interviewing any actual, real guitarists of any genre or gender, for instance.
And we can’t use the RealPeerreview twitter feed as evidence that the humanities are <Private Frazer>doomed</Private Frazer> either, since the anonymous individual behind the account is clearly cherry-picking the most entertainingly ridiculous ones.
Yeah, that’s precisely my point. The Twitter account is funny because ‘peer reviewed’ is held up by many as a standard almost beyond reproach, so anyone posting obvious tripe that has been peer reviewed for the lolz is subverting the accepted ‘wisdom’.
The other thing worth looking at as an indicator (but not always!) of article quality is the journal in which it was published. Lazily recycling someone else’s ideas won’t get you published in Cell, Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) for example. But there are plenty of bottom feeding journals that will quite happily publish anything you like as long as you pay for it.
Of course even the big names aren’t perfect which is why it’s always a good idea to actually read the paper yourself and make your own judgement call as to the voracity of their claims. You may remember a few years back, NASA did a big press conference thingy about how a group they’d funded found evidence that bacteria on Earth could use arsenic in their DNA instead of phosphorous ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1 ). This was big news at the time because (had it been true) it would have completely overturned a scientific paradigm on life as we know it. As it stands, the paper itself is total garbage. It’s full of sloppy methodology and bad reasoning, making their conclusions utterly worthless. Where was it published? PNAS of course…
We’ve seen instances of low-quality journals being caught out and publishing papers which were either deliberate nonsensical spoofs or even machine-generated gibberish.