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The electric guitar has been a significant cultural icon for popular music in the 20th and 21st century (Dawe 2010). This instrument represented a blend between primitive simplicity and technological advancement, implicitly embodying ‘countercultural desires that hinged upon the transference of racial and sexual identity’ (Waksman 1999: 4). Since the 1960s, the electric guitar has undergone substantial changes in design and sound (see Herbst and Waksman 2024), shaping aesthetic and cultural innovations in contemporary popular music. These developments have been assessed and documented by American and British popular music critics (Lindberg 2005), who create discourses about popular music (in the press) also by evaluating sounds and instruments, including electric guitars and their broad sonic palette. In doing so, these “professional fans” (Frith 1983: 65) can confer cultural legitimacy not only to electric guitars, but also to specific social agents, influencing both the gatekeeping audience and potential consumers. This perspective strongly intersects with (corpus-based) critical discourse studies, whose interests lie in the relationship between language, culture and power, reiterated through large-scale linguistic patterns found in corpora (see Flowerdew and Richardson 2017, Baker 2023). This paper aims to shed light on the idiosyncratic evaluative strategies adopted by “pop” critics to create musical and sociocultural discourses about the electric guitar, an under-investigated topic with a high inter-disciplinary potential. The study will be conducted on a diachronic (1980-2022), specialised corpus of British and American album reviews – a prototypical text genre for pop criticism (Giannacchi 2024, see also Bhatia 2016) – published in music magazines, newspapers and webzines. The corpus will be investigated on the text analysis software AntConc (Anthony 2024) blending evaluation and metaphor studies (Hunston 2011, Fuoli et al. 2023), CADS methods (Baker 2023) and an ethnographic qualitative interpretation of specialised corpora (Flowerdew 2004), influenced by the cultural studies on the music press.
Abstract word count: 299
References
Baker, P. (2023). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis (2nd ed). Bloomsbury.
Dawe, K. (2010). The New Guitarscape in Critical Theory, Cultural Practice and Musical Performance. Ashgate.
Flowerdew, J., & Richardson, J. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (1st ed.). Routledge.
Frith, S. (1981). Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure & The Politics of Rock’n’Roll. Pantheon Books.
Herbst, J.P. and Waksman, S. (eds.) (2024). The Cambridge Companion to The Electric Guitar. Cambridge University Press.
Lindberg, U. (2005). Rock Criticism From The Beginning: Amuisers, Bruisers & Cool-Headed Cruisers. Peter Lang.
Waksman, S. (1999). Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Harvard University Press.