Customer Reviews

Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience

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this is a terrific book; it weaves together lots of well-researched cultural history, theoretical savvy, musical insight and a true rock and roll spirit to create an eminently readable and yet very intellectually responsible volume. it is hard to find a scholarly book that is so accessible, entertainingly written, and consistently adept at keeping so many balls in the air at once --gender and racial politics, sonic codings in popular music (purity of sound vs. distortion), the facts and figures of the history of popular music and the development of the electric guitar, etc. etc. highly recommended for smart groovoids.

While this book is mostly readable and does contain interesting and useful information where it is dealing specifically with guitars, and the direct histories of the artists involved...
....it fails when it takes an acedemic's perspective and drags in unwanted cultural, social speculations.
I bought a book because I wished to read about nuts and bolts guitars and electric guitar history. I did NOT wish to enroll in a class in ethnic studies. If the author wanted to write about ethnic studies, I'm sure he could have found better and more appropriate subject matter.
Tell me how Gibson put the Les Paul together with what woods and wiring and what problems they had. Tell me about electric guitar chord progressions in rock compared to jazz.
As it is there are whole pages of academic, social intrepretive mishmosh.

I will finish the whole book and there are interesting facts that are what I was looking for. But giving a psychological interpretation about a photo of Les Paul and Mary Ford sitting on a Gibson guitar was not what I need. Instead of suggesting that Les Paul was a sexist, why not talk about how Mary Ford had learned to play her electric guitar? Not a word about that.
And when it comes to an important fact like how Chet Atkins fingerpicked his electric guitar like no one else had done, there is one paragraph.

This appears to be a book for a sociologist, not for a guitar player.

I would like to quickly state my thoughts about Dr. Steve Waksman. Although I have not yet been able to read through the entire book, I have read many sections of it. Dr. Waksman is a professor of mine at Miami University in Oxford, Oh. Throughout the semester he taught me a countless amount of information on the guitar and the history of Rock n' Roll. Out of all my classes I have ever been enrolled in, his American Studies class has not only been the most interesting, but I have also gained the most out of it. I am about to start reading the book and I'm sure I won't be able to put it down. Thanks Dr.Waksman! Sincerely, Joe Rada