A Guitar-Porn Bro-Mance to Love

 Schecter Guitars at Andertons - lets take a look at some! 

 

The Andertons videos speak to me. And, apparently, considering that as I write this, they show over 360,000 subscribers to the channel, and hundreds of thousands of views for each of the hundreds of videos they've posted, they speak to a great many others, tool. Who might those viewers be? No doubt,  young men, considering that Andertons is one of England's largest music stores and the subject of the videos is flashy electric guitars.

When one views a single video of this sort, one focuses on the specific content it conveys. This one, for instance, provides some back story and information on the ins and outs of a brand of guitar favored by bands that play Metal. These guitars look a bit like a Klingon battle axe and in the right hands produce very sexy sounds. But after enjoying a few videos that one finds hyper-engaging, one begins to use the YouTube search function to find more of them and pretty soon it's not the content of individual videos that appeals so much, it's the series itself and the people who produce and post them that become the center of fascination. 

These Andertons videos clearly are intended to help sell guitars, but in reality they are so much more. For starters, they are an electric guitar 'bro-mance', a couple of guys (actually co owners of the business, I think) who so thoroughly love what they are doing that you've just got to love the infectious joy they seem to take in it. And they clearly love each other, too, or at least take great pleasure in appearing in front of the camera together trading licks and snappy comments about whatever variety of guitar at the moment we see them hawking, paying homage to, and from which they coax the kind of contemporary music from that you, the viewer, wish you could - and are enticed to believe that if you buy one of those 'bad boys' - might be able to make, too. It's all very entertaining.

 Viewing these videos also becomes the perfect moment to ponder Guitar-Porn, their genre, and its cultural significance. What is it about the electric guitar that has allowed it to assume such a lofty position as one of our society's ultimate cultural icons? Well, to begin with, look at the individuals who are associated with them. The 20th-21st Century 'guitar god', be it Clapton, Brian Setzer, The Edge, Slash, or Bonamassa, to name a few still taking bows - or the heavy weights they copped some inspiration and knowledge from, old timers like  Les Paul, Scotty Moore, and Hubert Sumlin - or the ultimate, exalted ones, departed but never forgotten, like B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and (please remember to speak this next name with proper, hushed reverence) HENDRIX - they represent the person that "EveryKid" wants to be. The guitars themselves? Sleek and high design, held close to the person of the player, but in front of him, shielding him from whatever the world might throw at him. A cross between a royal scepter, a magic wand, and a battle axe; their power is not only transferred to the player, but held back by him before it blows away his vulnerable audience, an audience that has come to worship at the temple of music, his art.  The guitarist is at once genius-artist, wizard, and warrior. The electric guitar, symbol of power and cool, represents nothing less than the distillation of millennia of Holy Grail-esque questing for that magical object that can transform and bring salvation. And you can get the one that's right for you with your credit card online from Andertons. Which one? Watch the videos and dream!