An exploration of the role the guitar has played across different eras and cultures around the world. The name comes from the most conservative estimate of the number of people for whom the guitar has meant something – and that floor alone is 100 million. Skill level, playing frequency, and years of dedication don’t determine membership. Only that the guitar has mattered.
The electric guitar arrives in modern memory already screaming. Feedback hangs in the air, amplifiers cover the stage, and the player carries the posture of someone who has decided the room belongs to them. Rock culture built that image so successfully that rebellion can seem like a natural property of the instrument, something waiting inside…
In late 1912, Pablo Picasso assembled a guitar from paperboard, coarse thread, twine, and wire in his studio on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris. The paperboard was the heavy laminated stock used for commercial hat boxes and shoe boxes. It bent, creased, and retained the pressure of the hands that worked it. Nothing about the…
Political resistance often begins before anyone gives it a formal name. It begins in a union hall, kitchen, church basement, public square, or crowded back room where something privately understood is about to be spoken aloud. Someone has to carry the idea through the door, make it intelligible to the people gathered there, and give…