Talk of the Town

It is away from the usual trend of thoughts on this blog, but it seems like an appropriate moment to discuss pioneering female guitarists.  Actually, going to discuss just one, Chrissie Hynde, this bear's second favorite female guitarist according to the latest published rankings.

[As an aside, this bear almost always favors the Telecaster among electric guitars.  A crisp, biting, even harsh sound is preferable to a fat, thick, smooth one.]

The slick and practiced world of Kpop can create innumerable seductive and addictive sounds, but true individual creativity can triumph over even such a mighty machine.  Hynde and the Pretenders rode the wave of opportunity to new kinds of music and sounds with the arrival of punk.  Punk itself opened up rock music to women without requiring them to behave themselves. 

Many interesting female artists [male too], from Patti Smith on down, found their audience at the time.  Not to belittle them, but Hynde was always operating on a higher dimension of crushing sound, musicality, and lyricism, and therefore she outlasted all of the others that were tied to brief musical fads.

Hynde had to fight hard to win acceptance as the front-woman of a pure rock and roll band.  After many false starts, she formed her band the Pretenders when she was 27. Wikipedia has most of the relevant background material.

Three exemplar tracks:

• Message of Love - No other song creates as much rhythmic intensity out of the silences between notes.  Nice lyrics too.  "We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" fits so well in this song that this bear took 30 years to learn that this is quote from Oscar Wilde.
• Kid There had been so many great hard-rocking Pretenders tracks that this "soft" sound was a surprise. But Hynde cared more about making great music than fitting any mold.  What a fantastic result!
• Talk of the Town  Gorgeously fluid buildup and drive to the unforgettable chorus.  The lyrics were always incomprehensible to me until the internet was available to explain them, but they are actually great too.

As an inexperienced kid, you tend to think that such music is very good, but just a bit better than the other music that is floating around.  But as the years pass, you gain a better appreciation that unique talents are just that, and don't come around again in better versions.  So the fans just have to hope that they are composing, playing, and recording as much as possible for posterity.

Unlike Mick Jones in the Library, Chrissie remains glamorous and hard-rocking to this day.

Hynde in 2016, age 65

Update, just to circle this back around to Mongolia...