Guitar Smashing 101

Recently on a mediocre Saturday Night Live, the innovative band Arcade Fire performed two songs from their new album Neon Bible, which you can find here. The vocalist/songwriter Win Butler strummed away on his acoustic-electric, on which he had taped the words “sak vide pa kanpe.; That phrase translates to “an empty sack cannot stand up,” which apparently is an inspirational phrase in Haitian… To my suprise, at the end of the song he smashed his guitar:

Although I love Arcade Fire, this was unsettling for me. First of all, their sound is hardly raucous. They’ve got a powerful mellow sound but there’s not a lot of “jump” to their music. When is it appropriate to smash a guitar?

According to Wikipedia, an unchallengeable source of truthiness, the first musician to smash his instrument on stage was Charles Mingus, the famous jazz bassist, who did it out of frustration. The Animals, a great British Invasion blues-rock band, who did “House of the Risin’ Sun,” took this and incorporated it into their act. The Who then took that and made destruction their own, as seen here on the Smothers Brothers:

The destruction of the drum kit in that video cost Pete Townshend his hearing, and though the execution was less than precise, it’s obviously a well thought out plan when pyrotechnics are involved. According to Townshend, who in a recent Hendrix biography called his guitar smashing “serious art school shit”, the idea was to express a youthful anger, which also apparently involves stuttering (“M-m-m-my Generation”).

While Pete criticized it as “showing off,” Jimi Hendrix’s guitar destruction is, like his music, far more creative and spectacular. At Monterey Pop, he lit his guitar on fire, rode it, and mock-fucked the amplifiers, before finally smashing his instrument. To Hendrix, this was a “sacrifice,” though he was most likely very high from 1965 until his death, as seen here:

Jeff Beck did it, KISS did it, Metallica did it, Guns N’ Roses did it, the Clash did it, and the Sex Pistols too (though the Sex Pistols couldn’t use their guitars, so they were mainly Props of Rage). Guitar destruction has never really gone out of style, as seen in this hip Nirvana smashing. I chose this clip because Nirvana needs all the coverage they can get. If you haven’t heard of them you should really check them out, they’re this great underground rock band from the early 90s… They wrote some famous songs I think…

Yet, many artists haven’t made a spectacle of smashing their guitars on stage, even though they’ve had long tenures. Artists who haven’t smashed their guitars include the Beatles, Yanni, Sting, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd, and the Rolling Stones, who have done it rarely, and usually in self-defense:

So, why is the Arcade Fire smashing guitars? To borrow a term from the cannon of the Advanced Theory, “Overt” bands, those intentionally trying to be different, young and rebellious, are more likely to take to these theatrics than “Advanced” artists, and even regular artists. A mellow band like the Arcade Fire then are justified in this theory by their overall overtness. If you don’t understand this, try this Klosterman article, though I don’t think anyone will fully understand it.

Still, if you’re going to talk about neighborhoods, families and society and your lyrics are delicate and poetic, you probably shouldn’t be smashing guitars, just as artists like Poison shouldn’t be backed up by a xylophone and dual violinists. Not that I’m in a position to criticize the Arcade Fire, but hopefully this will put their destruction into context.