Clearly, given the fury of boomer men who have since exploded, this is the first time this has happened!
Earlier this week, musician Phoebe Bridgers – best known for being the breaking point that day, I couldn’t figure out how to do my taxes and cried deeply into my cereal while listening to ‘Kyoto’ – broke new ground during her Saturday Night Live performance for being the first person in history to break a guitar.
Now I know what you’re thinking: aren’t there many musicians throughout rock history who have broken guitars? Is it not, in fact, one of the fundamental myths of rockstar history?
Didn’t Kurt Cobain do this, more than once? Didn’t Jimi Hendrix swing his ax like an, uh, ax and then, on another occasion, set one of them on fire? It is not the splintering of a guitar depicted on the cover of The Clash’s London calling? Didn’t Pete Townsend of The Who start destroying beautiful instruments as if it were a full-time career and making music just a hobby?
Hell, Bridgers collaborator Conor Oberst of the band Bright Eyes obliterated what he later called a “very expensive” guitar while one of its members, overwhelmed by the mood of the moment, stepped on a trumpet while appearing on Craig Ferguson’s The Late Late Show? Is not obliteration legal and rock stars are not the definition of legal?
Well, I thought that too. But then, the story of Phoebe Bridgers breaking her guitar remained in the news cycle for three full days during a time when there are things to talk about besides breaking a guitar, leading me to believe that all other occurrences of a guitar being broken must have been a Mandela-style hallucination.
How else to explain the furor? An unbearable liberal type of Twitter named Brooklyn Dad, probably looking for a new grift after Donald Trump was kicked out of Twitter, called him “extra”. David Crosby called it “pathetic”, and then decided that the action was what you were looking for when you “can’t write.“
little bitch.
– traitor joe (@phoebe_bridgers) February 9, 2021
Waves of boomer parents emerged from the garden sheds they were locked in in the late 1990s, isolating themselves from a frightening and oppressive world of change that no longer needs to suit their tastes in order to condemn the action as people who watched a History Channel documentary deciding that its perspective is urgently needed on the complexities of the situation in Yemen.
Why did this woman, Phoebe Bridgers, destroy her guitar on SNL?
I mean, I didn’t care much for the music either, but it felt extra. pic.twitter.com/ayXgFXtex4
– BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) February 7, 2021
It is clear then that the fact that a musician breaking his guitar requires something more than the thought, “this is a person breaking a guitar”, means that this is the first time this has happened in history.
Oh, I mean, is that or the fact that American culture is deeply sexist and that there is a generation of people who will accept anything from male models, but will question that same behavior when it is represented by women, or by any gender or identity sexual that they do not recognize, because they are not passionate about the behavior of their heroes, they are passionate about their gender.
Any!