This is how an electric guitar works:

The guitar pickup—itself a magnet wrapped a thousand times over with copper wire—has a magnetic field, and when the strings are plucked, they cause vibrations in the magnetic flux, which creates an alternating current through the coil of wire. This in turn travels down the patch cable, through whatever pedals or effects there may be, and to the amplifier where it is amplified from a very weak instrument-level signal into the crushing sonic assault that turns your brain to jelly.

Think about that: Guitar notes originate from interference, vibrations—from change itself.

From Chuck Berry to Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge to Joy Division, Bauhaus to Oneida, rock music has been the catalyst for socio-politcal change. It’s unfair to say that Rock and Roll invented sex—just go to the zoo and look at the monkeys—but it certainly brought it to the forefront. The cerebral academic music with it’s precious counterpoint and harmony suddenly was replaced by tight pants, and, in my opinion I say GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE. But it goes further: Examine the artists you like and then examine why. There is a simple expectation we have for these artists to self-destruct. If they’re not destroying themselves in the process, they’re not rocking hard enough. And so with the advent of stars like Elvis, Jim Morrison, Hendrix—or even father back, someone  like Robert Johsnon with his Faustian bargain—we affirm our desire to annihilate this pathetic reality we call life with the ritual of rock and roll excess. Nick Drake drove off a cliff. Jeff Buckley drowned in a river. Elliot Smith stabbed himself in the heart. To listen to a Drake record is to drive off a cliff; and when the drums kick in on Everything Means Nothing to Me, I feel the steel between my ribs.

Distortion is the result of various forms of clipping—the word we use for lopping the head off of a perfectly good waveform when the input signal exceeds the voltage limit of the amplifier. Your average Overdrive pedal does just that: it feeds the amp a signal so hot that the tubes saturate and the resulting wave begins to approximate the shape of a square wave. But in this process the signal itself becomes harmonically richer, as overtones are amplified and added to the signal.

For example:

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I don’t know where these waves came from, but there they are. The first is a perfectly healthy wave. An acoustic guitar played by Jullian Bream probably wouldn’t look so different. The second is a signal hard-clipped to all fuck.

But tell me, Doktor, what are you getting at?

It is that selfsame process of destroying that which is perfectly natural—be it the natural wave or the natural order—by turning the volume up to the point where it’s causing physical hearing damage, brain jelly and loss of breath where the rock and roll guitarist becomes the unification of messenger and message. The messenger is a messiah and the message is freedom. We are free to manipulate the natural world and bend it at our whim. That’s why we stand in the front row, in front of a combined 1000 watts of power running guitar, bass, vocals, a volume hovering between 125-130dB (enough to cause permanent hearing loss after 10 minutes of exposure). It is a participation in the modern ritual of saying we don’t care, we want to cram as much energy (voltage) into this life (amp) as we can, try to approximate something of a meaning (harmonic overtones) to existence, and run the car till the wheels fall off and it dies ragged in the gutter (death).

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