In a similar vein to the death of the drum solo thread - when's the last time you saw or heard a good lengthy guitar solo in a "hit" mainstream song?
If you consider mainstream music and mainstream rock these days, the guitar solo has died as well and that's quite a shame. Are there ever going to be any guitar virtuosos in mainstream music anymore?
Even watching SNL last night, it was amazing to see Prince of all people playing like he used to. Sometimes you forget just how good a guitarist that guy is, and to pull it off with his coordination for singing and dancing at the same time is unbelievable.
The guy still looks like a fruit, but man, can he ever play. That was the first time I've seen a strong guitar solo with plenty of ostentatious hammer ons/tapping and whammy bar play in a lengthy solo on mainstream TV for what seems like more than a decade.
http://www.youtube.com/w/prince?v=ho...&search=Prince
I was watching with people and they were like: "that guy must've had the guitar on a tape like Ashlee Simpson's SNL lip synching because he isnt' even strumming the strings. And how can the guitar keep playing without him? What's the lever he's pulling? He must be cheating". And it's sad because you know its because they've never seen someone play like this before. Yeah, rock in the 80s had EVERYBODY playing like that and that's why people got sick and tired of it and went Grudge, but hell, I'm sick of power chords and punk if you know what I mean and a whole generation of people don't really know what a guitar is capable of.
Guitar will always have it's circles and still be the most popular instrument and there are plenty of rock and metal bands that still play solos (of course, plenty of them go overboard with shredding and it becomes "c**k-rock" like the 80s again), but it just seems sad that you never hear or see it in the mainstream anymore and a lot of people have no idea. They're like "so uhh...Sum 41 is rock right?" and I'm like "no, that's punk...and not even the real original punk at that."