Guitare Xtreme Magazine numéro 115

If there is a word that speaks to us, to us French, it is the word revolution, so much it is anchored in us, that it is individual or via the collective imagination. We tend to find the Revolutionary sympathetic a priori, with his figure of courageous liberator of the oppressed people. If this revolutionary has a guitar in his hands, it's even better. It is true that revolutions have been made with music and that music is a powerful vector of a certain political thought. The sexual liberation movement in the 60's, the black civil rights movement in the United States, all would have been hindered without music and the guitar in particular, the instrument of the troubadour and the poet. One only has to look at the strength with which the communist governments of the Warsaw Pact countries fought rock music from the West. Moreover, even today, culture is a major power issue.
Our instrument has also known its revolutions and its "Sans-Culottes" are called Hendrix, Van Halen, Malmsteen or more recently Plini, who has almost never played on a real amp in his life. If they all have in common to have opened a new way for music, they all have another one : they are the product of their time. If their style, their material, their approach is totally innovative, it does not necessarily call into question everything that came before. We still play blues after Clapton, but differently; we still use Marshall stacks after Van Halen, but the sound we get from them is completely different. To make a revolution is also to make a turn around a center which remains fixed. A bit like the Earth comes back to the same place every year after its turn around the Sun, without anything being the same on its surface. This issue is an opportunity for us to celebrate 50 musicians who have, in the course of one or more revolutions, changed our art, the material on which we play, and for some, a little, the world.