Introduction

My friend, Samba Mapangala, told me a story one night as we were driving home from a gig. We would often talk about the early Congolese groups, and tonight the subject was Nicolas Kasanda, known to all as Docteur Nico. Nico was the foremost player of his generation, known as a god among players, or “Le Dieu de la Guitare.” This stood in contrast to the reputation of Nico’s rival, Franco Luambo Makiadi of the group TPOK Jazz, another legendary guitarist known as “Le Sorcier [sorcerer] de la Guitare.” Both guitarists emerged in the 1950s on the eve of Congo’s independence from Belgium, and their bands provided a soundtrack not just to their nation’s liberation but to a newly postcolonial continent. “Yes,” Samba said, “we used to go hear him when I was young.” Samba had grown up in the 1960s in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), or Zaire as it had been known during the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. Samba recounted how he and other boys would hang around on the streets outside the clubs where Nico and his band were playing, “and when the band took a break, we could hear Nico’s guitar breathing!”

I was fascinated by this story. In every corner of the world, listeners and players of many genres anthropomorphize instruments, be they violins, guitars, or—per Eliot Bates—the Turkish saz.¹ Eventually, however, I realized the obvious fact that Samba and his friends were listening to the buzzing of the amplifier, which was in part the sound of the amplifier’s tubes and transformer cooking and rattling, and in part the sound of the city’s electrical grid pushing into the amp—or what American guitarists would call “60 cycle hum.” The sound of the city, thus, is amplified within the band’s music. I highlight three themes emerging from this moment. First, music—and sound in general—exceeds the spaces that are presumed to contain it, as evidenced by the boys in the Kinshasa night listening to the band’s music pour out onto the street. This is also true of regional style, which similarly carries across borders. Second, music is fundamentally material in that the sound itself is energized matter carrying through the night air, and also that the physicality of instruments and amplifiers is manifest, interacting with and expressing the physicality of the built city. Third, the timbre of music is intimately entwined with this materiality. In the case of Nico, this has everything to do not just with the electric guitar but with the volume of the amplifier and the saturation of its reverb tank. His tone blooms into distortion as only an overdriven circuit can, and as revealed by the high volume of his resting amplifier—he played the amplifier as much as the guitar.² I also note that Nico was one of the first African guitarists to record using a plectrum (which Franco never did). The diminutive guitar pick may perhaps seem a triviality to the modern reader, but the material intervention of the plectrum—as introduced to Kinshasa musicians by the Belgian guitarist Bill Alexandre—had a massive impact on Central African players, dividing them into two camps as defined by Nico and Franco for following generations.³

Materiality is both the most overrepresented and most overlooked aspect of guitar in culture. It is essential to the establishment of a genre’s aural signature, and it is central to the decision-making processes of musicians. Itself a crazy assemblage of wood, metal, and plastics from numerous sources, the guitar is an expression of many overlapping networks of supply and sociality. The breathing of Nico’s resting guitar is just one entry point into African electrical networks, but we should address two additional critical points from the Docteur Nico anecdote: that this equipment was certainly made in Europe (likely Italy), and that it would not have been accessible to aspiring young musicians like Samba. Myself, I became more aware of scarcity and gained respect for my access to equipment while on tour with Samba. As we sat backstage, he gasped as I cut the old strings from the neck of my Telecaster. His guitarist, he told me, had toured East Africa for a year on a single set of strings—and it was clear that he did not approve of my wastefulness! Different expectations, and a different relationship to both resources and to their networks of distribution. In this chapter, I explore the materiality of guitars on the African continent with attention to their circulation, and how this has impacted the development of genre broadly as well as artistic choices personally. Similarly, I explore how genre and instrumental method adhere to networks of circulation that both mirror the material and adapt to new digital technologies.

Brief Overview of African Guitar Music

Before proceeding further, I review some recurring themes in the past study of African popular music and African music generally because guitar has tended to activate older discourses. I will also suggest some new ways to understand African guitar music’s history. Musicology has frequently taken an organological view of African music. While many Westerners associate African music with “the drum,” its instrumentation is incredibly diverse, as detailed by several African scholars.⁴ The diversity of string instruments in particular (lutes, zithers, harps) is enormous and varied. As a late arrival, the guitar did not square with established narratives of local organological development, but both the guitar’s capacity for expressing a mix of complex rhythmic and melodic counterpoint and its similarity to locally played instruments made for easy adoption and adaptation into regional aesthetic and practice. We can see similarities in construction and technique in such geographically diffuse instruments as the oud, ngoni, kora, and sintir. While its design and tuning present an inherent disposition to certain types of harmony and voicing, there are examples of the guitar’s adaptation—new tuning systems in the guitare sèche of the Copper Belt, and microtonal fret alteration in Mauritania, for example. The earliest history of guitar in Africa is syncretic—blending Western harmony with indigenous song forms and melodic and rhythmic vocabularies.

While the African story is more one of movement, contact, and exchange, generalizations have been made in the Western academic approach to African music and territoriality, which either elide an incredible diversity of cultures or lock cultural identity within modern state borders. Either of these impulses can enable essentialist readings: that of “African music” as a single unified practice, or alternatively one that fetishizes ethnicity and isolation. Similarly, there is the recurring separation of artistic practice into separate categories of the “traditional” vs the “modern”—a binary that enables a dialectic narrative of “development,” and which carries the heavy baggage of teleological colonial projects. An important variant on this is the division of African arts between the “traditional” (often coded as rural), the “elite” (i.e. adopted Western forms), and the “popular” (often coded as urban).⁵ Further, the traditional arts (also coded as pure, local, “authentic,” or essential) are often positioned as in conflict with the modern (the impure, the imported, the hybridized). Being a relatively new instrument to the continent, the guitar—electric and acoustic—has often triggered these musicological tropes. However, with early examples such as the adoption of the seprewa harp by the Akan from the Mande, and in countless other examples that preceded it, musical practice in Africa has always been one of contact, movement, and exchange—the foundation of what Achille Mbembe calls Afropolitanism.⁶ African guitar is positioned within diverse networks of style and repertoire, making many points of contact and exchange with regional and cosmopolitan musics. If we understand that music everywhere has always been built from a mix of custom, invention, and influence, we get a clearer picture of how the guitar has been working. As Nketia argued, traditional music has always embraced an aesthetic and ethic of change and dynamism rather than of stasis.⁷ Further, if we consider how circulation—the movement of people and instruments in and out of the continent, and back again—influences musical culture, a different but related narrative can emerge.

The history of the guitar’s arrival in Africa is undocumented. It arrived as a folk instrument, and until the birth of commercial recording in the late 1920s, its story was recorded primarily through anecdote, performative tradition, and oral folklore. The guitar is believed to have arrived in Africa with the Portuguese as they sought trading prospects along the coasts of West Africa. These encounters began in the fifteenth century, long predating the modern version of the instrument. European economic and social relations continued with coastal Africans for hundreds of years, as these zones acted as transaction points for a trade in raw materials.⁸ The earliest guitar music is associated with the Kru, a sea-faring people from regions in contemporary Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Kru are noted for their sailing partnership with European ships, traveling as far as the Caribbean and Europe as well as along the Atlantic coast of Africa. According to lore, it was the Kru who spread the instrument among West African ports. A collection of song forms and hybridized instrumental methods would coalesce in a set of styles, notably osibisaaba or palmwine music in the Fante port of Cape Coast in the colonial Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana).⁹ Many players utilized a thumb-index fingerstyle counterpoint of harmonies in sixths and triadic chords, frequently out of the C position, and accompanied by small local percussion. As bands expanded, they frequently included other Western instruments such as the concertina, the African American banjo, the prempensua (a version of the Caribbean rumba box), and the mandolin (often with a banjo head construction).

Ghanaians were principally responsible for spreading the guitar as far as Central Africa. Specifically, the Ghanaian “coastmen” were known in the Belgian Congo for introducing their idiomatic harmonic vocabulary.¹⁰ This earliest music was almost entirely coastal, and there was often more music exchange happening between port cities on this part of the continent than there was with communities in the interior. In fact, the guitar scarcely appeared far inland on much of the continent until after the Second World War, when many Africans returned from military service in Asia and Europe. In his study of Mande music, Eric Charry documents the first appearances of any guitars among the Malian jeli in the 1940s.¹¹ Notably, Mali’s first internationally renowned guitarist, Ali Farka Toure, wrote the piece “Cinquante Six” as a recollection of first seeing a guitar on television in 1956, in the hands of Fodeba Keita, a composer from the coastal country of Guinée. This is striking when we consider how globally dominant Malian guitar would become in the twenty-first century.

While guitar music had initially thrived in ports, it solidified as these towns grew into large colonial capitals in the early twentieth century. These growing urban spaces offered nightclubs where bands could play and people could dance, increased access to imported instruments, and supplied electricity to power amplifiers. As always, the music changed. This era was ruled by highlife dance bands—large groups that used horns, electric guitars, and percussion to combine local vernaculars with rhythms from the Americas to play a repertoire of palmwine, Caribbean, and jazz. This new sound developed in part through the circulation of recordings but also happened as people moved from the diaspora back to Africa, and as Afrodescendants from the Caribbean and Africa met in the metropoles of London, Paris, and Liverpool. As of 1957, African countries were winning their independent statehood, and these bands provided a soundtrack to liberation, sometimes traveling on state visits, as Ghana’s Starlighters and Tempos bands did with Kwame Nkrumah. Groups from across Africa would tour the continent, spreading the influence of their local styles and collecting new ideas. For example, the Congolese Docteur Nico had an incredible impact on players in West Africa. While the sound of Congolese rumba reverberates in repertoires from as far away as Senegal, Nico himself picked up the Ghana palmwine classic, “Yaa Amponsah,” in the 1960s and recorded it as “Afrique de l’Ouest.” The same song appears in Guinée in Bembeya Jazz’s 1974 “Mami Wata.”¹² Through highlife and rumba’s embrace of music from the Americas and other parts of the continent, we see musicians’ and listeners’ desire to take part in larger conversations—conversations that would continue to push the music outward in new directions. In the 1970s, many bands in Africa had dropped the horns and further showcased the stylistic invention of the guitar players, a change that came from the limited availability of instruments in economically challenging times as much as from aesthetics. Many musicians had maintained close relationships with political leaders during the early postcolonial years only to find themselves in conflict with African regimes in the 1970s and 1980s (Fela Kuti in Nigeria, Franco Luambo in Zaire, Thomas Mapfumo in Zimbabwe, to name just a few).

Gerhard Kubik proposes three “stylistic super-regions of popular music” in Africa, but acknowledges that “from the late 1960s onwards, boundaries became increasingly blurred because the mass media began to cover the entire continent.”¹³ It is true about the importance of media, particularly of state and regional radio broadcasts, but the movement of people and their instruments is documented in the songs—Dr Nico’s “Nakeyi Abidjan (I have gone to Abidjan)” and OK Jazz’s “Sentiment Poto-Poto” (Mpoto being the Lingala word for Europe), to name just two. Kubik’s three super regions are highlife West Africa, Congolese rumba, and South African guitar. Certainly, this is useful but fails to identify other important areas of African guitar work, notably the Mande zone, including both Malian griots and Guinéen orchestres, the Swahili coast, Lusophone Angola, and most recently, the ever-flowing world of the Sahel, which developed its guitar music less in cities than in temporary gatherings on the edges of the Sahara.

Further, we can look at the unique relationships (commercial and cultural) within communities of Francophone and Anglophone nations. We can organize our understanding of the music through these networks, with a first wave of guitar music beginning in transnational port communities, which would soon grow into cosmopolitan colonial centers. A later generation of guitar music developed in cities of the interior, and in rural communities to which many coastal musicians had traveled. I do not propose a unitary theory, but it is useful to think about how these trade circuits operated and how guitar fits into and, in some ways, helps to clarify these economies.

In this section, I have recounted elements of the established narrative of the history of the guitar in Africa, as well as some earlier problems in musicology, while trying to offer some new tools for thinking about music in a way that is connected and constantly changing but is neither totalizing nor teleological. I have opted not to discuss the adaptation of traditional techniques or repertoires to the guitar (the mbira patterns of chimurenga, the ngoni ornaments of griots, to name two). What I have omitted could fill books—and does, though there are countless more to be written. Here, as on other continents, the history of the guitar is written and preserved “in the street” rather than in the archive.¹⁴ In the following sections, I offer two brief ethnographies of African players whose musical lives span multiple eras and territories, and through whom we can think about the materiality of musical things, and the circulation of musicians and their tools through local and global systems.

Anthony Akablay

Anthony Akablay¹⁶ (Figure 16.1) is a Ghanaian guitarist with whom I have worked since 2008, and this section draws upon our many years of conversations. Ghana’s popular music follows the trajectory discussed above. It begins with early palmwine guitar music, emerges during the colonial era as urban highlife dance band music, and solidifies a Pan-African sound in the early days of independent statehood and postcolonial optimism. The contemporary soundscape is as full of these echoes as it is of contemporary gospel, electronic afrobeats, and a hybrid of highlife and hip hop known as hiplife. Akablay is a virtuoso guitarist whose musical vocabulary spans this inventory of traditional and modern Ghanaian repertoire, drawing heavily upon the fingerstyle rhythms of the coast’s earliest players, the electric highlife that so influenced the development of afrobeat, the Lydian ruminations of the Akan style known as Kwaw, and a mix of smooth jazz and continental African styles. While the palmwine song forms and fingerstyle technique reference tradition for Ghanaians today,¹⁷ Aka’s breadth and experience are cosmopolitan. He has played on countless recording sessions of every genre and performed across Africa and Europe as a leader and sideman.

Figure 16.1 Anthony Akablay in a promotional photo for Western Diamonds, 1992

Aka came of age in the 1980s and rose through Jewel Ackah’s band to start the Western Diamonds, a group that would dominate the country’s music scene in the 1990s. Aka’s style is rooted in his knowledge of regional players. Ghana’s acoustic guitar era was followed in the 1950s by the twin strands of large band highlife and smaller groups known as “guitar bands,” and much of the repertoire and instrumental approach were retained even as guitars were electrified.¹⁸ The 1960s postcolonial era was characterized by the presence of cultural practices and institutional structures from both the colonial years and new systems of Pan-Africanism and the nation state. In the following decades, the national economy continued to change in response to the influence of global capitalist networks located in new technologies, such as the cassette, and new industries, such as the West African oil rush. During the 1970s, Ghana’s electric bands thrived in boom towns such as Tema and Takoradi, which were Ghana’s two deep-water ports. Concurrently, touring concert parties—ubiquitous traveling troupes presenting an evening program of familiar and innovative music, theater, and comedy—continued a performance practice from earlier in the century while actively circulating a mix of classic and contemporary music and musicians through networks of loosely connected villages in the rural zones. It is Akablay’s generation who experienced all these transitions and laid the foundation for contemporary hybridities.

Aka comes from the Nzema ethnic group who inhabit a region straddling Ghana’s coastal Western Region and the Comoé district of Côte d’Ivoire. He grew up on his grandparents’ coconut farm in the village of Anokyi. As a child, Aka did not have an instrument, but in the opening quote of this section, he describes his early attraction to music and his drive to build his own equipment. The guitarists whom the nine-year-old Aka emulated were the performers passing through to play funerals and concert parties in Anokyi. Specifically, he recalls Dr. F. Kenya’s highlife band as well as an itinerant guitarist named Safohene Djeni: “I said to myself I would want to do exactly what he was doing, and that motivated me to create the guitar.” Aka’s homemade guitar was what Kubik calls an “age-set instrument”¹⁹—not a toy, but an age-appropriate training device that instructs the process of construction and maintenance as much as creative invention and embodied knowledge. Though guitar music was extremely popular, there was no local production industry, and the instrument’s scarcity drove such innovation for many young players. Access to instruments and training within the tradition of local guitar forms would define much of Akablay’s future work.

As a teen, Aka’s first professional gig was working as a drummer and then guitarist²⁰ in the HM Band—named for the band owner Hammond Mensah—at the Princess Cinema in the closest large city, Takoradi. Like most musicians of the time, Aka did not own his instrument. Instruments and amplifiers were the property of band owners—businessmen who acted as impresarios, investing in bands and venues. Musicians would gather at the performance space to practice on the instruments there. For other musicians, this meant becoming involved in church music. Smart Nkansah, the leader of the 1970s group Sweet Talks, described to me sneaking into a local church in the small town of Begoro in the Eastern Region to learn the guitar parts he had heard on his father’s records.²¹ After HM Band, the eighteen-year-old Akablay joined a touring concert party group run by F. Micah, where he had a crucial apprenticeship in the Ghana rhythms upon which he still draws today. Notably, Akablay’s huge 2015 hit “Take Away” draws upon the 1980s performance of an elderly comedian in F. Micah’s concert party. At that time, Aka was still playing band owners’ instruments, but when he was twenty-one, he made a break, buying his first guitar (a Fender Stratocaster) and an amplifier (a Roland JC120),²² and starting the group that would launch him on the national scene, the Western Diamonds. As with Nkrumah and the early highlife bands, the Diamonds would accompany President Jerry Rawlings when he traveled outside Ghana. The promotional photo of Akablay in Figure 16.1 is from the band’s heyday, and we see that he chooses to appear in a modern cut of traditional cloth and hold not his Stratocaster but rather the palmwine musician’s nylon-string guitar, signifying his position on a continuum of tradition and contemporaneity.

The availability of instruments determined much of the social and economic structures of music making in postcolonial Ghanaian music. Instrument scarcity, while a limitation, made clubs and churches crucial points of congregation for musicians where the young could be trained in the vernacular repertoires and lore unique to the region. Several musicians in Ghana have noted that this changed significantly in 2010²³ when the government of Atta Mills removed an import excise tax on musical instruments. Now, guitars and basses are relatively plentiful, and many young players own an instrument, which is already impacting the way that musicians are able to organize themselves.

After the Western Diamonds ended, Aka became one of the most active gigging and recording musicians on the Accra scene. Preserving a Ghanaian pedagogy of guitar has been a concurrent project for him. In the late 1990s, he handwrote a method book of palmwine and other rhythms. His text follows the format of Western method books but recreates the orality and personal mentorship that were such a part of his own learning. Retaining this tone and historical contextualization provides a sense of cultural continuity for Ghana guitarists.²⁴ While the original manuscript was lost (I have a photocopy from 2008), learning and communication modalities have changed significantly since it was written. In 2018, Aka started a WhatsApp group for young Ghana musicians where he answers questions and posts lesson videos. He explained the group this way:

The development of the guitarscape in Ghana has centered around the circulation of both musicians and instruments through rural and urban spaces, and now through mobile data networks. Aka’s is but one story from West Africa which demonstrates the changing networks of both material instruments and cultural knowledge.

Jeannot Bel Musumbu

Jeannot Bel Musumbu (Figure 16.2) is a Congolese guitarist who has lived in England since the early 2000s. He sat with me for a lengthy Zoom interview in 2023 and recounted his path in music.²⁶ We discussed the position of guitars within his home city of Kinshasa, how they circulate, and how the discourse and pedagogy of guitar move both orally and materially. Bel is a working musician, both appearing on stage with famous Congo artists and working busily in the background on projects that navigate the particularities of genre, mediated sound, and material economies. Bel pioneered a field of African guitar pedagogy within a globalized digital economy, where discrete instrumental styles assume broad marketability. Like many Congo guitarists, he broadly identifies the style as rumba, a name that originates with the bands of the 1950s but which also includes soukous, the style that emerged in the Paris-based diasporic Congo community in the 1980s. Multiple generations of rumba dominated the sound of African popular music for decades. In 2021, UNESCO granted Congolese rumba protection as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.”

Figure 16.2 Jeannot Bel performing at a club in Kinshasa, 1986

Bel’s journey in Kinshasa and the diaspora is similar to many Congolese musicians. While Bel did not discuss with me any specific political structures, his move into music coincided with the final decade of the Mobutu dictatorship and the hardships of those years’ economic contraction, associated in equal parts with the collapse of the copper market and the kleptocratic mismanagement of state and private resources. His exit from the DRC coincided with the ousting of Mobutu by Laurent Kabila in the mid 1990s, a time of transition and difficulty for musicians.²⁷ Much of the history of music in sub-Saharan Africa is tied to the political and economic structures of the decolonial state. In Ghana, this relationship was between Nkrumah and highlife bands. In the DRC/Zaire, it had been between Mobutu and many groups, notably Franco Luambo Makiadi and TPOK Jazz.

Bel identifies three crucial moments of his youth in the Matete district of Kinshasa that set him on the path to becoming a musician and guitarist. The first came in the city’s churches—holdovers of European and American colonial projects. His mother was a Catholic, and as a youth, Bel sang the European hymn-based music of the choir. As a sixteen-year-old, Bel was invited by his friend, René, to a Protestant church, and he became enthralled by the guitar-based foundations of the repertoire. René was brought to the US for training as part of the church’s religious outreach. He was gifted a nylon-string guitar and taught a repertoire of I–IV–V songs in open position, which he brought back and taught to the congregation. Further, René’s father was a pilot for the national airline and would bring back additional guitars for use in his church. Youths like Jeannot had a chance to learn some basics, but the instruments remained on site, and the repertoire was circumscribed, consisting of religious songs and simple strumming.

Second, Bel encountered a local youth band practicing near his home, and he was able to pay the guitarist of the band to give him lessons in the modern style. Congolese soukous music also worked on I–IV–V harmonic structures, though guitarists employed a vocabulary of arpeggiations, thirds, sixths, tenths, and octaves in multiple positions up the neck to create densely interwoven rhythms. Jeannot made progress, but he was hindered by unpredictable time to practice with an instrument. The group with whom he was understudying would have to hire equipment for their gigs, and when Jeannot made his own debut with them on national television in 1986, it was on rented gear, just as we see in the picture of him in Figure 16.2, from the same year. The third significant moment in his progression came when another friend in Kinshasa decided to abandon music and make a career in the Zairian army, giving his collection of guitar theory books to Jeannot—“when he gave me the books, I saw the chords!” This confluence of personal relationships and both ad hoc and formal pedagogy is an important theme in Bel’s later impact as a global musician. The availability of theory books and instruments demonstrates the importance of networks of circulation in Kinshasa music making.

Bel partnered with a friend to acquire their first instrument, sharing it back and forth each day: “Then we bought our first guitar! A proper guitar. I was so happy! It was an artisanal—it’s not like the acoustic René used to have, a proper one. Acoustic guitar, but this one is HOME MADE.” This is the instrument described at the opening of this section, with brake wires for strings. While not claiming the refinement of a Spanish lutherie nor the consistency of mass-produced guitars, these instruments boast a forceful tone and striking visual impact now sought out by European and African players and seen in internationally touring groups such as Jupiter & Okwess and Staff Benda Bilili. These rough-hewn instruments equip players with the skill to play their music on a variety of instruments. The familiar guitars that many Westerners may consider to be entry-level (such as the Squier Strat in the photo) were unavailable to young players due to their scarcity—a problem of circulation networks. “A majority of people couldn’t afford electric guitar Fender—it’s made in America. One of them is like 1500 dollars! We couldn’t afford it! It’s too much money for a child or a teenager to buy this one.” It is important for readers in the Global North to consider how economic and currency inequivalences mean that certain expenses may be lower in local economies (rent, food, clothing) and gauged appropriately to local currencies. Imported goods, however, retain a price pegged to foreign economic systems and accrue the additional cost of importation, keeping them out of the reach of many.

Jeannot continued his work in bands and pursued tertiary education, but life in Kinshasa and the country more broadly was destabilized by the collapse of the Mobutu government and its networks of patronage. The incoming president, Laurent Kabila, from the Swahili-speaking East, was reputed to be unsympathetic to the Lingala-speaking musicians from the capital and their relationship with the Mobutu regime.²⁸ Bel left the country to play music in neighboring countries as many Congo musicians had done, landing in Cameroon and eventually England, where he bought the first electric guitar he would own. “In London, I was walking in the street first time; I see this shop that’s selling a second-hand guitar. I went there, I give the deposit. I think it was like 30 dollars or something like that, I give a deposit, then I start paying slowly, slowly, then I bought this guitar!”

In London, Jeannot played in a Congolese church where he became known for his ability as a player, and it was here that he came to the attention of the Europe-based soukous star, Kanda Bongo Man. Beginning in 2007, Bel toured the world as a member of Kanda’s band, playing in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. During this time, Jeannot continued graduate studies at the University of West London—first in computer programming, then film production and sound engineering, and music industry management and copyright. With these skills, he built a recording studio, and as a final academic project, he unified these skills in the production of a video in which he taught the principles of Congo guitar. This video, The Roots of Congolese Rumba Guitar (2010), would become the first pedagogical DVD Bel published through his new business, ProSmart Studio. Bel began placing it in London markets and music stores, and it sold out rapidly and consistently. He further realized the potential of online marketing for ProSmart and used the rapidly expanding YouTube platform to promote his growing library of DVD lessons. ProSmart was soon shipping DVDs to fans of Congolese music all over the world—Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Soon, he was producing videos by star players from Zaiko Langa Langa, OK Jazz, and Wenge Musica:

Bel combined his fluency in a regional musical vernacular with an ability in emerging technologies to center his work within a mediated digital network via YouTube videos and DVDs, as well as within a transnational guitarscape of global music genres. With the decline in DVD sales and of physical media generally, Bel has made all the ProSmart tutorials available as digital downloads, though he still considers Facebook and YouTube to be his principal platforms of audience engagement. I note that these are two platforms with tremendous international reach, particularly as high-quality mobile data becomes increasingly available in all parts of the globe. Bel started his YouTube channel, Soukous Congo, in 2006 and has 46.6k subscribers as of March 2023. Since the launch of his first video, ProSmart has dominated this online world of African guitar pedagogy for an international audience. In recent years, another London-based company has entered the market of organized and downloadable international guitar pedagogies. World Music Method is run by the English bass guitarist Edd Bateman and features musicians from many global musics, including Jeannot as one of two Congo specialists. Unlike the DVD business and YouTube, data-heavy streaming and download formats are less popular in sub-Saharan Africa, where mobile apps such as WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, and (to a lesser extent, as of this writing) TikTok, are the favored modes of networked connectivity. On these apps, you can see many young Congolese in Kinshasa and the diaspora posting videos, playing their favorite guitar leads and creating some of their own. So much is changing, however, that it is difficult to predict the reach of this new technology in diverse global markets.

On these platforms, we see the popularity of BC Rich and other brands typically associated with hard rock music. There is some cognitive dissonance for the Westerner when watching a video of a young African with an instrument associated with 1980s West Coast metal, and playing intricate major key arpeggiations with clear, bell-like tones.²⁹ Bel observes that “the way Congolese music was developing, they like guitar with long, long, long, long frets. Like twenty-four frets.” The adaptability of the BC Rich is clear, and its popularity further reflects the circulation of these guitars as they entered into economies of mass production and distribution. Watching these videos, it is clear that many amateur musicians now own their instruments, but I asked Bel for his perspective on the change.

Jeannot’s observations of guitar availability, and the affordances and constraints of both local and global production, reflect his formative experiences growing up in the late years of Mobutu’s Zaire as well as his contemporary reality of movement between life in the diaspora and the bustling music scene of Kinshasa. Further, his groundbreaking work in the digital mediation of African music stakes out significant claims for regional style within the global guitar discourse.

Conclusion

We have looked at the experiences of one player from Congo and one from Ghana to see how their relationship to music—as well as their impact upon music—has been shaped by economies and networks of musicians, guitars, and their peripherals such as books and amplifiers. Equally important is the circulation of method and genre as manifested in models of guitar pedagogy. As outside observers of any music scene, it is important to remember that music is something that people are doing rather than a stable thing, solidified by a few recordings that are available to a global audience. In Aka’s story, we get a single—though emblematic—narrative of the way in which musicians and instruments have circulated in Anglophone West Africa. In Bel’s story, we see a different set of networks at play in Francophone Central Africa and in the diaspora. In each case, we see networks that move people, instruments, and pedagogical information—the material and the social. The electric guitar came to Africa and absorbed local musical practices, as seen in the mbira music of the Shona, the likembe of the Kasai, or the ngoni and balafon of the Mande. Simultaneously, the electric guitar has influenced the work of Africans on traditional instruments, be it the electrification and use of effects pedals on the jeli’s ngoni (Bassekou Kouyate), the use of electromagnetic pickups on lamellophones to accompany traditional funeral music (Konono No. 1), or the sheer volume and distortion of amplified talking drums that accompany Dambe wrestling. Rather than an instrument of colonization or “modernization,” as once critiqued, we can see how the African electric guitar maps local, continental, and global networks of style and sociability.

Introduction

This chapter foregrounds the roles of the electric guitar in Anglo-Caribbean popular music with particular reference to reggae and the instrument’s culturally marginal position. It highlights the guitar’s subordinate status in both recorded and live performance contexts, examining its functions as an almost subliminal kinetic force. The analysis primarily focuses on the global impact of reggae icons Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, both during their time in The Wailers and as solo artists, while also examining the career of Eddy Grant, whose eclectic commercial presence has remained guitar-centered. These analyses address the symbolic, cultural, and occasionally political roles of the electric guitar in Anglo-Caribbean performance, with emphasis on its international influence.

In the late 1950s, ska emerged in Jamaica, integrating indigenous, jazz, and R&B influences that foregrounded Afrocentric artistic expression after centuries of restrictive British colonialism. Jamaica’s attainment of political independence from Britain in 1962 further ignited a flourish of creative activity through which the country’s musical identity began to assume more distinct aural forms, with ska’s high-tempo rhythmic intensity reflecting a burst of cultural confidence and national optimism.

Post-Second World War migration of West Indians to Britain created a niche international market for the local music, which almost imperceptibly mutated into the generally slower, more reflective rocksteady by the mid 1960s and then shortly thereafter into the first stages of reggae. Those Jamaican styles filtered beyond Britain’s West Indian music underground, reaching marginal white audiences and gaining a limited mainstream singles chart foothold before the international emergence of The Wailers in the 1970s on the Island Records label as an album-oriented reggae group, leading to Bob Marley’s stature as the genre’s guitar-playing figurehead.

Historical analyses of Caribbean popular music have frequently overlooked the contributions of musicians from other former colonial Caribbean islands, thus despite this chapter’s emphasis on Jamaican music and influence, it will also incorporate references to artists from elsewhere in the region.

The history of the electric guitar in Anglo-Caribbean popular music assumes particular significance in the 1960s with the emergence of Jamaican Ernest Ranglin and Trinidad’s Lynn Taitt (d. 2010) on a series of influential ska, rocksteady, and reggae hit recordings that largely defined the rhythmic and stylistic contours of the genres. Unfortunately, few interviews and commentaries discuss the moments of historical transition among the key players in Jamaica from mainly acoustic to primarily electric performance. It has been noted, for example, that while Jamaica produced a string of exceptional horn players (including Tommy McCook, Roland Alphonso, Johnny Moore, Baba Brooks, Don Drummond, and Rico Rodriguez), no such guitar legacy exists, with most performing secondary rhythmic roles.¹ Despite such anomalies, this chapter will demonstrate that the electric guitar has been both culturally and commercially significant in the growth and development of Anglo-Caribbean popular music, though its relevance and visibility have arguably receded significantly with the advance of digital music technologies since the 1980s. In particular, the chapter focuses on the stylistic developments evident on recordings in the 1970s and 1980s that reached international audiences.

Ernest Ranglin

A self-taught player, Ranglin recalls that legendary guitarists Charlie Christian (d. 1942), Django Reinhardt (d. 1953), and Les Paul (d. 2009) were among his earliest influences, with jazz as his creative root and extra artistic motivation provided by the bebop explorations of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.² Ranglin was already performing in bands by age fifteen,³ and numerous hotel gigs and recording studio sessions later followed his first stint at the radio studios of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) that began in 1958. Besides his jazz performances, he played in the calypso-related folk style of mento before crucially contributing to the emergence of ska in the late 1950s, innovating with an offbeat staccato strum that soon defined the genre, especially through his work in the famed Skatalites band.⁴

Soon invited to work with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell during his JBC years while also functioning as Island’s A&R man, Ranglin recorded one side of the label’s debut album release (by pianist Lance Haywood) in 1959.⁵ Blackwell encouraged Ranglin to move to England, and Island Records released his internationally available solo albums in 1964, including Wranglin’ and Reflections. Notably, the band on his 1964 EP Ernest Ranglin and the G.B.’s (on the Black Swan imprint, an Island subsidiary) included bassist Jack Bruce, a future member of the legendary British rock trio Cream.⁶ Ranglin’s relocation to England led to his pop-ska arrangement and performance on the million-selling international Millie Small hit single version of the American R&B song “My Boy Lollipop” (1964, credited to “Millie”), recorded in London. Though purportedly a ska record, “My Boy Lollipop” was recorded with British musicians, and the overall rigidity of the rendition, despite Ranglin’s involvement, made it more overtly pop-oriented. That ironically contributed to the record’s commercial success at a time when mainstream international audiences and radio were less familiar with West Indian rhythms.⁷ Accompanying this commercial success credited with raising the profile of Jamaican music, Ranglin’s credibility was greatly enhanced by his spell at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, resulting in acclaim in the Melody Maker 1964 readers’ poll as the jazz guitarist of the year.⁸

Ultimately, Ranglin’s work with key Jamaican producers and sound system operators, including Coxsone Dodd of Studio One, Duke Reid of Treasure Isle, Prince Buster, and the pioneering female producer Sonia Pottinger, made his electric guitar’s sonic imprint integral to the sound of Jamaican popular music in its many shifting guises from ska through to reggae as it began developing international audiences. Those sessions included work with The Wailers and a very young Bob Marley.⁹ Consistently retaining a jazz-styled warm, round, and soft electric tone often played on Gibson guitars,¹⁰ stylistically comparable to his American contemporaries, Ranglin’s vocabulary and musicianship helped set the standard for performance among Anglo-Caribbean guitarists. Apart from his pioneering work in ska and the transitional mid 1960s rocksteady style, Ranglin is considered one of the key participants in the invention of reggae,¹¹ although identification of any singular point of origin is usually historically contested. He recalls that his conflicting contractual obligations with Jamaican labels often meant that he could not play solos on recordings, forcing him to regularly revert to rhythm and bass guitar, frequently backing Lynn Taitt on lead guitar.¹² His influential engagement with Jamaican popular music was extended when he backed singer Jimmy Cliff during an Africa tour in 1976.¹³ Despite his stylistic eclecticism, Ranglin’s catalog of recordings sustains the resonances of his Jamaican genesis, fusing such components with jazz elements. Aside from his work on Millie’s 1964 global hit “My Boy Lollipop” and numerous recordings by the seminal Skatalites, Ranglin played on the crucial instrumental proto-ska record “Shufflin’ Jug” by Clue J and His Blues Blasters (circa 1959); Theophilus Beckford’s “Easy Snapping” (circa 1959), considered by many to be the first definitive ska record; and The Wailers’ Jamaican debut hit single “Simmer Down” (1963). Among his many solo albums, the 1996 release Below the Bassline and 1997’s Memories of Barber Mack are especially demonstrative of the ways in which his lyrical jazz performative style—derived from big band apprenticeships—successfully fuses with reggae rhythms.

Nerlynn (Lynn) Taitt

Nerlynn Taitt, best known as Lynn Taitt (d. 2010 at age 75), was born in Trinidad, where he developed his rhythmic skills as both a guitarist and a renowned steelpan performer before being brought to Jamaica in 1962 by bandleader Byron Lee.¹⁴ He was initially hired as a backing musician for calypsonians, and Taitt’s steel pan articulation of rhythm directly informed his syntactical execution on the electric guitar, propelling the music with a pulsating, heavily punctuated style.¹⁵ On his journey toward becoming one of the most influential guitarists in Jamaican popular music, he occasionally played in the famous Skatalites before establishing himself as a mainstay in The Comets (circa 1964), The Jets (circa 1966), the All Stars, and The Supersonics session band for producer Duke Reid.¹⁶ His first hit recording performance is thought to be on Baba Brooks’ horn-driven 1965 instrumental single “Shank I Sheck,” during which Taitt confidently takes a melodic solo. In the same year, he appeared on The Skatalites’ “Guns of Navarone” that belatedly entered the British singles chart in April 1967, bubbling in the underground after its original release by Island Records. Taitt is, in fact, credited as one of rocksteady’s innovators,¹⁷ having made a crucial suggestion during a recording session to a keyboard player to slow down the ska tempo, resulting in the landmark Hopeton Lewis single “Take It Easy” (released in 1966, but recorded in 1965) tracked at Kingston’s Federal Studios. Taitt’s dry, unprocessed tone proved to be an ideal component of the post-ska reduction in rhythmic intensity, both coinciding with and propelling the rise of rocksteady, leading into the reggae era that has no fixed definitive starting date, but which occurs around 1967.

More importantly, Taitt’s performances on several major international pop hit singles reinforced the imprint of his guitar style on the newly emergent reggae. His impact on Jamaica produced innumerable sessions, including work for prolific producer Lee Perry (d. 2021), but wider record distribution projected the sound of Taitt’s performances into major music markets. Desmond Dekker’s “007 (Shanty Town)” hit the British charts peaking at number 14 in the summer of 1967, and Taitt’s introductory rhythm guitar licks establish the record’s sonic identity. Dekker’s “Israelites” (1968) became a transatlantic Top 10 hit in 1969, perhaps surprisingly given the singer’s use of unfamiliar Jamaican patois and Taitt’s idiosyncratic yet complementary rhythmic phrasing, both decidedly uncommon on mainstream pop records. As one of the best-known Jamaican-produced hit singles of the late 1960s, it presents Taitt’s electric guitar voice as simultaneously widely heard yet paradoxically underrecognized as a key kinetic force in reggae. By the time of his departure for Canada in 1968, Taitt had already made his mark on Jamaican popular music with his guitar work as one of the key instrumental participants in the 1960s transitions from ska to rocksteady to reggae.¹⁸

Those Desmond Dekker hits occurred either side of Taitt’s international chart presence on the Johnny Nash single “Hold Me Tight” that peaked at number 5 in both Britain and America in 1968. Lyrically and vocally more accessible to mainstream audiences, with Nash as an American singer rendering the song in a soulful pop style, it might be argued that “Hold Me Tight” outflanked cultural resistance and projected Taitt’s propulsive playing and the reggae genre into commercial prominence more quickly than might otherwise have been the case. With reggae in its commercial infancy in the 1960s, Taitt’s percolating staccato guitar lines helped to establish the genre’s rhythmic template, both in Jamaica and internationally. Notably, some sessions involved multitracked guitar parts that enhanced the sonic texture of the recordings,¹⁹ despite limited overdubbing options due to the dominance of four-track machines in Jamaica in that era. While lesser-known session players helped shape the spaces occupied by the guitar in reggae, the global reach of Taitt’s recorded performances makes him especially notable.

Bob Marley & The Wailers

Prior to the release of The Wailers’ Catch a Fire album in 1973 by Island Records, reggae guitar reveled in its secondary rhythmic role, serving either percussive functions or lightly toned melodic accentuation as demonstrated by the sophisticated articulation of Ernest Ranglin and Lynn Taitt. By the 1970s, the intersection of postcolonial political consciousness influenced by historical and contemporary Black civil rights movements and Rastafarianism foregrounded lyrics challenging the brutalities of Western capitalism with appropriate accompanying instrumental intensity. Catch a Fire still employed the usually scratchy rhythm electric guitar as performed by both Bob Marley and Peter Tosh (whose solo contributions are discussed later), but it also introduced a harder-edged blues-rock tonal sensibility to the material, serving Island’s rock market crossover imperatives in the process. The production approach of label head Chris Blackwell was directly informed by a commercial motivation to break into American college radio airplay to build a broader audience base receptive to the new aural and visual presentation of reggae.²⁰ The guitar artistry of Ranglin and Taitt stylistically advanced the music but did not alter the perception of reggae as a novelty singles-centered genre, lacking the credibility and suitability for the wider, whiter album-buying youth market. As Blackwell sought to establish a Black rock group identity for The Wailers, he supplemented the Jamaican recordings made for Catch a Fire with rock-inflected overdubs in London, notably featuring the blues rock guitar of American player Wayne Perkins. In 1972, American singer Johnny Nash had produced Marley’s commercially unsuccessful solo single “Reggae on Broadway” for CBS, characterized by a growling recurrent fuzz guitar rock riff. However, apart from its tonal peculiarity within an ostensible reggae track, that performance served a supporting role without including any solos. In contrast, the opening track on Catch a Fire, “Concrete Jungle,” featured a brightly foregrounded sixteen-bar guitar solo played by Perkins for which tape-edited space was especially created, while the song was interspersed with his rock guitar phrases employing an incisive tone alien to the era’s other reggae records.²¹

That song and album harnessed the electric guitar in a manner signifying a directional shift in the globalization of reggae whereby the album format (with accompanying rock-styled cover art and packaging) highlighted self-contained group identity and songwriting as the audiovisual hallmarks of the new phase. Ironically, Perkins’ distinct unfamiliarity with reggae prior to the London overdub sessions in 1972 became the commercial conduit for audiences similarly unacquainted with the genre’s idiosyncrasies that had frequently provoked resistance from mainstream radio on both sides of the Atlantic. As demonstrated later in this chapter, Marley subsequently expanded this dimension of the band’s sound by supplementing the lineup, sometimes with two guitarists, for both studio and live purposes. Nonetheless, launching The Wailers into the international album market with the solo performances of an uncredited blues rock guitarist raises questions regarding authenticity and the manner in which the electric guitar was used to combat cultural bias at the potential expense of the group’s identity. Chris Blackwell mentions a long-held audience assumption that the “Concrete Jungle” solo and accompanying melodic guitar work had been performed by Peter Tosh,²² but the stylistic syntax and tonalities immediately suggest a player with a blues rock vocabulary developed beyond the realm of reggae.

The chart-topping 1974 pop cover version of the Marley composition “I Shot the Sheriff” by rock guitar icon Eric Clapton (originally released on The Wailers’ second Island album Burnin’ in 1973) provided a vehicle whereby reggae was more widely legitimized in the rock world. Although Clapton’s rendition smoothed out the abrasive percussive edges of the original version and did not include any solos, the mere association of such a highly regarded rock guitar figure with a hit reggae song from a still relatively unknown writer helped alter the genre’s mainstream public profile. “I Shot the Sheriff” transported reggae—albeit in heavily diluted form—to wider audiences, and Clapton’s inextricable association with lead electric guitar infused the record with a rock aura despite his guitar’s confinement to rhythmic roles on his version (echoing its function on The Wailers’ original recording).

Following the international ascent of Bob Marley & The Wailers (as the unit was once again known from the end of 1974), the 1977 Exodus LP confirmed Marley’s superstar status. That album, acclaimed by Time magazine in 1999 as the album of the century, included its share of lead guitar, although the performances were usually embedded within the mix rather than assuming unambiguously foregrounded sonic positions. The record’s revolutionary tone was captured on “The Heathen,” which featured a sonically outstanding eight-bar solo (performed by Julian “Junior” Marvin) immersed in delay and reverb. However, when the album was reissued as part of the three-disc Exodus Fortieth Anniversary Edition in 2017, the remixed version stripped the song of its original sonic treatments and “ethereal mystique.”²³ While in both instances, the lead electric guitar served commercial purposes, the 2017 mix created “a potential rupture in popular music’s historical narrative” by representing a key work from a major album in a manner disconnected from its forty-year-old sonic imprint.²⁴

Peter Tosh

As a singer and rhythm guitarist in The Wailers, Peter Tosh was always likely to need more expressive space than the group afforded him. Reggae historian and Tosh’s former manager Herbie Miller describes him as having “a very personal, indelible rhythmic concept, tone, texture, sound” that helped to distinguish him from his contemporaries.²⁵ In a 1981 High Times magazine interview, Tosh even suggested that he was one of the originators of the reggae rhythm guitar style during his time with The Wailers.²⁶ Collaborator and musician Lee Jaffe, who also wrote the liner notes for the Deluxe Edition reissue of Legalize It (2011, originally issued in 1976), affirms Tosh’s contention and, in describing his playing, said, “It’s so powerful. His rhythm is so percussive and it’s so distinctive.”²⁷ Miller’s analysis also highlights specific facets of Tosh’s technique and expressive vocabulary: “It’s identified by the rapid rhythms he plays within the space … and also how he heard rhythm. His guitar playing and the tone and the texture was very much like when he would play the clavinet which he loved in his music. It still had that biting, caustic, grabbing sound.”²⁸

Whereas many rhythm players blend into the sonic fabric of a band to the point of anonymity, Tosh’s playing was an extension of his forceful personality, demanding to be heard as a primary participant. Hints of his lead melodic identity can be heard in the 2021 archival CD/DVD release The Capitol Session ’73, capturing the transitional post-Burnin’ LP Wailers lineup. Apart from Tosh’s roles in accentuating the rhythmic grit and tension on the first two Wailers albums for Island Records, Catch a Fire and Burnin’ (both 1973), there is also much to be said about a pair of 1975 collaborations that ultimately influenced his own perceptions of the electric guitar and demonstrated his versatility on the instrument. Tosh’s work with American jazz guitarist Eric Gale²⁹ (d. 1994 at age fifty-five) has largely escaped critical examination. The quintessential reggae guitar album, Negril, was recorded by Gale (not to be confused with the Jimi Hendrix-influenced blues rock American guitarist, Eric Gales) while he was living in Jamaica, and he was familiar with the skills of particular local musicians.³⁰ Tosh appears on lead and rhythm guitar on tracks such as the remarkable “East Side West Side” that elegantly fuses jazz and reggae without compromising either genre, retaining a distinct rhythmic vitality and energy.³¹ Tosh’s performance here foreshadows one of his key solo album operational modes as he contributes to creating a solid foundation for Gale’s lead guitar explorations.

Also in 1975, Tosh recorded with rock guitar legend Eric Clapton during the Jamaica sessions for the latter’s album There’s One In Every Crowd, though it appears that none of Tosh’s guitar contributions made the final mix.³² Nonetheless, Herbie Miller suggests that this first-hand exposure to such renowned lead guitar players as Gale and Clapton helped guide Tosh’s choices for the types of guitarist with whom he would subsequently record and tour in his solo career, while those encounters also influenced his own rhythm style. Interestingly, two Black American blues/rock guitarists, Al Anderson and Donald Kinsey, both of whom also played with Bob Marley & The Wailers at various times, practically defined the lead guitar role for Tosh’s solo work, both appearing on the solo debut, Legalize It (1976). In a decision that was unusual for a reggae act at the time, Tosh decided to use both lead guitarists in his live show. Miller suggests that Tosh advocated “hearty conversation” between his band members, and this concept probably informed his thinking: “That’s what makes Peter Tosh great as a bandleader: the confidence to let his lead guitarists in particular go, [while he would] submerge himself in the rhythm section. And in particular on talking drum or repeater drum, and seldom on rhythm guitar at that point – he makes both of them have that conversation.”³³

On Legalize It, Kinsey’s blues background emerges clearly on “Till Your Well Runs Dry” in his softer-toned fluid phrasing, typifying the integration of blues/rock guitar performance into the mix of the album’s tracks. The 1977 Tosh follow-up Equal Rights is helmed by Al Anderson’s rock-influenced lead licks, although they too are positioned well within the mix, contrasting the unrestrained expressive roles granted to both Kinsey and Anderson (and other guitarists with Tosh) in the live environment. In the 1984 concert video Peter Tosh: Captured Live, Kinsey takes multiple solo spots, unleashing his blues rock vocabulary far more freely than recording studio circumstances usually allow on another artist’s songs.

Tosh’s M16 machine-gun-shaped guitar, introduced during his 1983 European tour,³⁴ symbolized the revolutionary rebellion and the antiestablishment ideological polarization embedded in his own music, as well as reggae in general. Here, the electric guitar was a political weapon, both sonically and in its physical representation. However, Tosh’s delegation of live and studio lead guitar duties to others meant that he primarily articulated his personal electric instrumental resistance through rhythm guitar, at the core of the rhythmic friction and broadsides against the agents of “downpression” (inverted Rasta-speak for “oppression”). Jaffe comments that “His signature rhythm guitar was an interminable force creating both a percussive and lyrical sound.”³⁵

Donald Kinsey

Guitarist Donald Kinsey came from a background steeped in blues, growing up surrounded by veteran musicians with the same cultural influences, including his famous guitarist and harmonica-playing father known as Big Daddy Kinsey. His arrival in the reggae world was accidental following the formation of the incendiary Black trio White Lightnin’ and the recording of a lone self-titled album released by Island Records in the summer of 1975. The record, which only reached number 205 on the Billboard chart, was produced by Felix Pappalardi, who had previously produced British trio Cream and played in the American hard rock group Mountain. On this unambiguous funk rock LP laced with aggressive blues licks (said to have influenced Vernon Reid of Living Colour), Kinsey’s performance clearly capitalized on his unimpeachable credentials earned from playing with blues legend Albert King at the age of seventeen.

Signing with Island led to a connection with Lee Jaffe, subsequent recordings with Peter Tosh on his Legalize It album, and completing a tour with Tosh before being hired by Bob Marley for the Rastaman Vibration LP sessions that took place at Criteria Studios in Florida. Kinsey instructed producer Chris Blackwell to run the tape to allow him to “get a vibe” for his overdubs, unaware that all of his exploratory moments were already being recorded and would become the takes used on the 1976 album.³⁶ On that record, Kinsey’s contributions consist mainly of bluesy fills, accentuating the lyrical and rhythmic content of the songs, as opposed to his later role with Peter Tosh, arranging his rootsy remake of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (1983), which also created a platform for his outrageous lengthy live solos.³⁷ This reinterpretation of the archetypal rock electric guitar text extended direct and oblique references to Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix, who both also performed the song regularly. However, Tosh’s recording of the song does not place the guitar at the sonic center, as opposed to the live performances on which Kinsey was granted enormous expressive space to demonstrate his capabilities. Ultimately, despite his prior unfamiliarity with the genre, Kinsey says the spirituality of reggae music provided an easy transition because “there were a lot of similarities in their vocal melodies that were like gospel and the Pentecostal church and also in a lot of blues.”³⁸

Tosh’s adoption by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, evidenced by his 1978 signing to their fledgling eponymous label, signified a recognition of reggae’s crossover potential, with the guitar spearheading the instrumental charge toward commercial success. Although the pop, reggae, and punk fusions of the late 1970s promised much, innate polarizations within the industry and fractures between Tosh and his rock patrons meant that his prospects were never quite fulfilled despite the guitar’s sonic presence in his music.

Eddy Grant

Eddy Grant is one of pop’s unheralded riff masters. Known primarily for his 1983 international hit single “Electric Avenue” and the transatlantic Top 10 album from which it came, Killer on The Rampage, he is the only Caribbean musician to achieve major commercial success on records featuring his own solo and rhythm-based guitar performances. Not even the globally acclaimed Bob Marley possessed that degree of solo vocabulary,³⁹ as evidenced by the series of lead guitarists featured throughout The Wailers’ existence, as noted previously. However, Grant’s 1980s international mainstream breakthrough was preceded by a series of iconic hits as a member of The Equals and in his earlier years as a solo artist, all featuring the electric guitar and thereby making the instrument sonically and symbolically central in his career.

The seminal catalytic guitar moment in Eddy Grant’s life occurred in 1964 on May 9 when he witnessed the British debut of Black rock legend Chuck Berry performing at the Finsbury Park Astoria in north London. Having migrated to England from Guyana in December 1960, Grant says that there was “no real guitar influence as such” on him before this, although his trumpet-playing father also influenced his solo performance capability. Grant emphasized that Berry was an accomplished rhythm player as well as a soloist, noting that such rhythmic capability is foundational for developing meaningful solo skills. He points to the melodic characteristics of calypso as a major influence on his solo phrasing and correctly observes that “there were no rock guitar soloists out of the Caribbean historically.”⁴⁰

The resonance of Grant’s approach to the electric guitar during his time with The Equals (among the first successful multiracial pop groups) is evident in the many cover versions of “Baby Come Back” (first released as a B-side in 1967, reaching number 1 in Britain as an A-side in 1968) and the similarly primal power of “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys” (1970, number 9, UK). “Baby Come Back” featured tremolo-toned guitar melodies throughout the record, while “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys” harnessed a rougher tone in a pulsating Afro-rock framework. “Police On My Back,” recorded by The Equals in 1967 and famously covered by The Clash on the gold Sandinista! album (1980), provides further emphatic testament to Grant’s songwriting and the critical role of the electric guitar in his music. The latter song translated the oppositional, mainly Afro-Caribbean angst and anxiety in dealing with the British police into a wider statement of youth disaffection with law enforcement authorities. Notably, in each one of his many appearances on the BBC’s Top of The Pops TV show, including The Equals’ Top 20 hits as well as his solo work, Grant performs with his electric guitar. Following his departure from The Equals after heart problems arose in 1971, his guitar became a primary vehicle for his creative liberation and the artistic independence through which he projected the dimensions of his individual musical identity.

First issued in 1982, “Electric Avenue” achieved hit single status in 1983 as the music industry searched for the next Caribbean superstar in the wake of Bob Marley’s demise in 1981. His 1978 single “Walking on Sunshine” was a club hit in America, and an extended 12-inch version included a lengthy guitar solo. Recalling the attitude of American media gatekeepers and the contrast between the record’s club success and mainstream radio indifference, he noted that “When they saw me they couldn’t hear my music, they could only see my face. I’m black and from the Caribbean. But my music is not R&B and not reggae.”⁴¹ With the cross-cultural marketing challenges he faced in the music industry, his use of the electric guitar became an artistic and commercial bridge that facilitated movement beyond reflexive categorization, though not without resistance. While Grant’s original version of “Walking on Sunshine” failed to crack the upper reaches of either the British or American charts, American dance act Rocker’s Revenge peaked at number 4 in Britain with its guitar-free version in mid 1982, perhaps partially presaging Grant’s imminent global commercial explosion. Rather ironically, the original version was the B-side on the British single release of the massive hit “Electric Avenue.” Multi-instrumentalist Grant survived the UK’s post-punk pop era with massive reggae-inflected hits such as 1979’s “Living on The Frontline” (number 11, UK) and “Do You Feel My Love” in 1980 (number 8, UK), and his music videos for those songs highlighted his close performative and compositional relationships with the electric guitar. His eight-bar solo on “Living on The Frontline” is the instrument’s only overt presence on the recording, yet it appears as a central prop in the video before its sound is ever heard. Those vital eight rock lead-guitar bars prominently placed in the mix arguably ensured the record’s pop crossover appeal and presented the uncommon spectacle of a featured Black musician taking his lead electric guitar to the heights of the pop charts, even as Prince was just beginning his superstar ascent.

An aggressively toned rock riff provides the central instrumental introduction and chorus hooks in “Do You Feel My Love,” which also incorporates the eight-bar solo strategy (with an additional screaming note afterwards), collectively making the instrument more intrinsic to the sound and energy of that record than its predecessor. The lead British single from Killer on The Rampage, “I Don’t Wanna Dance”—which made its chart debut in October 1982 (number 1, UK)—similarly featured an eight-bar radio-friendly electric guitar solo that also accentuated the protagonist’s emotional angst and disillusionment with a lover. The British success of the track effectively opened the doorway for “Electric Avenue,” with the latter record making it difficult for the American market to ignore his presence.

After entering the Billboard Hot 100 on April 16, 1983, peaking at number 2 and eventually reaching platinum status, “Electric Avenue” became Grant’s biggest-ever solo hit with its chorus driven by a single repeated electric guitar rock chord, without any solo work whatsoever, and synthesizers providing bass and melodic accentuation applying the methodologies of his earlier hits in that era. Although ostensibly a tribute to the actual Brixton street location of Electric Avenue in London and the Black British cultural frontline pitted against oppressive sociopolitical forces during the riots of 1981,⁴² in the context of Grant’s career, the song title is emblematic of the creative path he has traveled, principally fueled and inspired by the power of the electric guitar. That record is certainly the best-known international hit single by a featured Caribbean artist playing lead guitar, and its central hook was even included in BMW’s 2022 American Super Bowl TV commercial promoting an all-electric SUV.

As Grant is himself readily aware, his 1980s hits have a strong underlying digital framework and presence, and yet the drum programming and synth interjections usually set the stage for guitar-centered statements utilizing both rock-flavored riffs and solos with edges designed to slice into the pop market alongside his emphatic vocal presence. However, it is important to note that the story of Grant’s relationship with the electric guitar certainly does not end with “Electric Avenue” and its global hit status.

Though not a reggae artist, Grant has harnessed every musical aspect of his Afro-Caribbean background on his recordings, and the 1983 single “War Party” (number 42, UK), also from the Killer on The Rampage album, employs distinctly reggae-styled rhythm guitar and a full-frontal seven bars of guitar solo. I actually witnessed Grant recording some of this song’s guitar tracks at his Blue Wave Studio complex in Barbados in 1982, as he spent hours ensuring that the often elusive “feel” of the recording truly fulfilled his creative intent. With its lyrics critiquing histories of imperialist involvement in exploiting military and political conflict, in conjunction with the guitar-laced instrumental text, “War Party” allowed Grant to negotiate a complicated commercial pathway between roots credibility and pop pragmatism along which many other Caribbean artists have attempted to journey, with few succeeding to the same extent.

Following the success of “Electric Avenue” and its accompanying album, Grant’s Going For Broke LP (1984) featured “Romancing the Stone,” a theme song titled after the Hollywood movie starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner that it was intended to help promote.⁴³ In the music video interspersed with movie footage, Grant was filmed on a tropical hillside ripping through another eight-bar solo, ensuring that the track’s dance appeal was suitably complemented by a radio-friendly rock guitar edge. Although the single barely cracked the Top 30 in America, it consolidated Grant’s image as a guitar-wielding Black artist when few were visible on the pop charts. The album’s next track and single, “Boys in the Street,” defied commercial logic by failing to achieve any chart traction in America or Britain whatsoever despite its undiluted inclusion of overdubbed rock guitar riffs (reminiscent of Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones),⁴⁴ fluid fills, and a generous ten-bar electric lead solo.⁴⁵

The paradoxes of “Electric Avenue” and Grant’s Afrocentric pop identities were forcefully foregrounded by his decision to title his 1988 album File Under Rock “to combatively address the cultural reflex of trapping dreadlocks solely within reggae’s stereotypical contexts.”⁴⁶ His appearance on the album cover in a purposefully blurred shot in which the guitar he plays is more visible than his dreadlocks strikes a distorted chord against the reluctance of radio and retailers to embrace the totality of Grant’s musicianship and the perceived genre contradictions inhering in his rock dimensions:

The album’s character was typified by the rock and reggae fusion of the powerful single “Harmless Piece of Fun.” Grant stated that “they [the industry gatekeepers] haven’t given it a chance,” and consequently, the record remained virtually unknown.⁴⁸ Throughout his music video, Grant is constantly framed with his guitar, effectively making his persona inseparable from it.⁴⁹ The rhythm guitar-driven anti-apartheid hit “Gimme Hope Jo’Anna” (number 7, UK), originally included on the British version of the same album, reaped commercial success employing a highly danceable Afrocentric highlife rhythm that was more easily accepted by resistant industry forces. Despite industry impulses to marginalize the role of rock guitar in Black popular music, Grant has persisted in retaining the instrument as a key component of his sound, as evidenced on his 2017 album Plaisance (named after his Guyanese hometown) on the track “Up Against the Wall.” The electric guitar avenue that he has traversed in over fifty years in the music business has been contiguous with a vast series of changes in Anglo-Caribbean popular music, yet the axe has remained a constant feature in his sound and image construction.

Orange Sky

Though rock inflections and adaptations have been previously discussed in this chapter, the emergence of Trinidad’s Orange Sky in the 1990s and 2000s represents an undisguised adoption of heavy metal-based rock aesthetics in a band that also boldly incorporates its Caribbean identity into its sound. In fact, their fusion of local, regional, and global influences has been described in one article as “reggae rock,”⁵⁰ underlining the ease with which Orange Sky interconnects the genres in a manner decidedly uncommon for typical rock groups of other geographical and cultural origins.

Breaking into the rock mainstream poses colossal challenges for Black artists in general, and even more so for Black Caribbean acts, plagued by the weight of cultural stereotypes, some of which this chapter has discussed in relation to Eddy Grant: Orange Sky has included various dreadlocked members across numerous personnel changes. The band celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary in 2021, and the years of global touring with key sponsorship deals⁵¹ but without a major commercial breakthrough are highlighted by two albums. Upstairs (2005),⁵² released in America, and the independently issued Dat Iz Voodoo (2008) capture Orange Sky’s electric guitar-centered intensity and dimension, emphatically distinguishing them from other Caribbean artists venturing into the international market in the twenty-first century. The group prioritizes its rock credentials, accentuating its instrumental and lyrical expression with Caribbean flavors, as exemplified on their effortless reggae cover of the 1971 Cat Stevens song “Peace Train” and their own explosive rock-underpinned “Real Love,” both from the Upstairs album. Their unapologetic presence as a rock act with some substantial long-term local support signifies a limited degree of movement for the electric guitar from its subordinate role in Anglo-Caribbean music. Orange Sky’s origins in Trinidad also highlight the sonic subservience of the electric guitar in that island’s native calypso and soca music traditions, an area requiring a separate analysis alongside discussion of the instrument’s role in the marginal (and quite separate) spouge genre popular in Barbados in the 1970s.

Conclusion: Extra Riffs

The spatial limitations of this chapter have meant that the survey of guitarists worthy of analysis has been limited to a mere handful. The contributions of Trinidad’s jazz guitarist Fitzroy Coleman (d. 2016) were crucial in supporting calypso’s postwar presence in Britain on the recordings of Lord Kitchener, and his multitracked early 1960s singles mirrored aspects of the production style of American guitarist and innovator Les Paul. Others such as Cat Coore, the immensely versatile member of the veteran Jamaican band Third World, and Barbados’ Jimmy Haynes, producer of the 1985 Grammy-winning Steel Pulse album Babylon the Bandit, are among many key figures meriting further consideration.

It is also worth noting the extent to which the guitar aesthetics and influence of artists discussed in this chapter have impacted on international acts. One example is Circus Money (2008), the second solo album by guitarist Walter Becker (d. 2017), formerly one half of the eclectic Steely Dan. In two 2008 interviews promoting the record, he emphasized the evident Jamaican influences, with one writer noting that the album “is the result of a conscious effort to integrate reggae and dub” into his musical universe.⁵³ This is especially apparent on two tracks, “Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore” and the Japanese edition recording, “Dark Horse Dub.” In both instances, the rhythmic electric guitar articulation established by such players as Ernest Ranglin comes full circle.

The Afro-Caribbean electric guitar articulation swept across the rock world in the 1970s, with this influence symbolically reclaiming an instrument that has been persistently disassociated from Black music, even by Black audiences. This reclamation impulse inspired Eddy Grant to exclaim, “I would stand up anywhere in the world, including Memphis, Tennessee, and say that Chuck Berry is the King of Rock & Roll.”⁵⁴ This underscores the critical need to challenge perceptions intrinsically linking the electric guitar to tropes of whiteness and white performativity, and the importance of expanding the soundscapes of cultural authenticity within and beyond the Anglo-Caribbean space. In the twenty-first century, the role of the guitar has become muted and confined by severely limiting preconceptions about its sonic roles pervading the diverse branches of Caribbean popular music, to the extent that it has little real presence in the digital era despite the critical role it has played in nurturing the region’s musical development.

Introduction

Wherever in the world the electric guitar has traveled—and it has certainly traveled widely, to nearly every country and territory on the planet—it has provoked the most extraordinary innovations in the globally circulating genres of rock, metal, blues, jazz, reggae, and their many subgenres. In Southeast Asia, the electric guitar shaped and inspired new regional and national musics of deep social, cultural, and political significance to specific people and places. In Cambodian psychedelic rock and Pinoy jazz, rock, punk, metal, and reggae, Thai wong shadow, Indonesian dangdut, and Malaysian kumpulan gitar rancak (lively guitar groups), this once-new technology for manipulating, signaling, and amplifying tones and distortions has become as essential and localized as the region’s countless lute antecedents, from the Bornean sape to the Vietnamese đàn tỳ bà.

Even a broad-stroke chronicle of the history and diversity of electric guitar music in Southeast Asia would fill an entire book. While this chapter will only attempt to narrow the knowledge gap on music technologies and popular music innovations in Southeast Asia, it will also explore the cultural, political, and mediatic forces that have shaped electric guitar music and the lives, livelihoods, and aesthetics of electric guitar players and their audiences. Much as Jeremy Wallach has described postcolonial rock music in the Global South, for nearly seven decades the electric guitar in Southeast Asia has been an agent of transformation for musicians, audiences, and even nations.¹ This chapter will tell the story of the electric guitar’s serpentine path through Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Myanmar, Philippines, Vietnam, and the rest of the region through its cultural contexts and consequences.² The instrument has attended to colliding epochs of decolonization, nation-building, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism. It has inspired youth reverie and dissent, and censorship and oppression. It has been a maligned symbol of Western imperialism and an essential tool of expressive freedom.

This chapter is executed with a debt to the small number of existing surveys, monographic, and edited volume publications examining Southeast Asian popular music and cited heavily throughout.³ One chapter cannot sufficiently document every context with the care and acuity that a scholar or musician focusing on the particular electric guitar traditions of these specific places could. Therefore, it is grounded in the author’s greater familiarity with Indonesia, as an ethnomusicologist, popular music scholar, and former professional in band management, festival production, and arts administration in Jakarta and Bali, roles that all called for close contact with electric guitarists, collectors, and luthiers.

Travel, Trade, and the Dawn of Southeast Asian Rock

The electric guitar’s predecessor in Southeast Asia is, of course, the acoustic guitar, which traveled to Southeast Asia with European imperialists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the dawn of the twentieth century, cultural exchange was an aim rather than a consequence of trade and conquest in Southeast Asia. Traveling vaudeville troupes, orchestras, and operas ushered in the first intraregional popular musics, featuring creative collaborations between artists from the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Booming colonial economies opened the Southeast Asian market to American and European record companies, who promoted their catalogs of Western recording artists and helped to popularize jazz, rumba, and Hawaiian music across the region.⁴ Hawaiian music was particularly popular in Burma, Malaya, the Philippines, and Indonesia, thanks to dance and music troupes from the islands who toured the region between the 1910s and 1930s. These troupes introduced the region to another lute innovation that remains popular today: the Hawaiian lap steel guitar.⁵

The 1940s and 1950s marked a period of accelerated decolonization in Southeast Asia. The Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Cambodia all gained their independence from the United States, the British Empire, the Netherlands, and France, though the cultural influence of their former colonizers remained. Beginning in the Second World War and throughout the Cold War and Vietnam War, US influence also spread through military bases, alliances, and US film and army radio broadcasts, creating what Barendregt, Keppy, and Schulte Nordholt describe as a “breeding ground for a hybrid popular culture,” and for the birth of Southeast Asian rock ’n’ roll.⁶

Much as it remains today—and despite its prevalence in jazz, blues, and numerous regional genres—the electric guitar became synonymous with rock ’n’ roll in Southeast Asia. This is due in no small part to its ubiquity in film, which provided most Southeast Asians with their first taste of rock music from the United States, United Kingdom, and France. The popularity of film—and musicians on film—established what Johan and Santaella call a decades-long “symbiotic relationship” between film and popular music.⁷ Films such as Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don’t Knock the Rock (1957), featuring American rock innovators such as Bill Haley and Chuck Berry, were major box office hits in Singapore and Indonesia, as was The Young Ones (1961) starring Cliff Richard in formerly French-controlled Cambodia and Singapore.⁸ By the 1950s, Southeast Asian nations were producing their own rock-centric films featuring local-language actors and musicians. The electric guitar became a mainstay in the film studio orchestras of countries like Malaysia.⁹ In Singapore, two releases, Muda Mudi (a literal translation of “The Young Ones”) in 1965 and A-Go-Go ’67, were exported to Malaysia and Indonesia, the region’s other Malay-speaking nations, kicking off an intraregional film industry that traced the same music and theatre trade routes of decades past, and an intraregional obsession with rock ’n’ roll.¹⁰

Beyond film, radio broadcasts and playback technologies—first, the transistor radio, and later the audio cassette—were key to the wide circulation of rock music across Southeast Asia, and beyond the cities playing host to the cinema. The American Forces Vietnam Network, first established in 1962 to entertain American soldiers, launched a powerful 50 kilowatt AM transmitter in Saigon that could be picked up throughout Southeast Asia via transistor radios, bringing everything from American rock ’n’ roll to the Top 40 to new Southeast Asian audiences.¹¹ In due time, The Beatles, Cliff Richard, The Monkees, The Archies, and Peter, Paul, and Mary became mainstays on Thailand’s own FM radio.¹² The Burma Broadcasting System, which mandated English-language broadcasting, all but ensured that US and UK rock bands dominated the airwaves.

With decolonization came a period of nation-building that inspired a rejection of Western cultural domination, at least among political elites. Many radio stations were ordered to prioritize regional acts—the first airwave quotas of the region. Burmese radio subsequently became an early exemplar of radio support for local rock music, playing equal parts broadcaster and promoter: the station aired a weekly amateur talent hour, during which local bands were invited to play live on air.¹³ In the Philippines, the rise of Pinoy rock is often credited to legendary rock deejay Ramon “RJ” Jacinto, whose station, Radio DZRJ 100.3, began broadcasting in 1963.¹⁴ Similarly in Indonesia, the widespread popularization of rock ’n’ roll was triggered by Denny Sabrie, who founded Aktuil, the nation’s first pop music magazine, as a forum for rock criticism. The magazine was published between 1967 and 1984, hitting a peak circulation of 126,000 in the early 1970s.¹⁵

The Electric Guitar in Postcolonial Southeast Asia

Following decolonization, much of Southeast Asia experienced a mass internal migration, as the promise of education and wage-based employment lured young people from the villages to the cities. The cities, thus, birthed the first generation of a postcolonial urban middle class ripe and ready for the mass consumption of popular music. As Barendregt, Keppy, and Schulte Nordholt have noted, for the first time, a minority of young people “could afford to buy gramophone records, a radio set, some electric guitars, and travel to distant places for dancing contests,” a popular form of social entertainment throughout much of Southeast Asia.¹⁶ Cities granted rising guitarists access to clubs and other performance spaces, record labels and distribution outlets, terrestrial radio, television broadcasts, and paying audiences. In Phnom Penh, Yangon, Bandung, Manila, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and on the island of Penang, the first generation of guitar-centric bands had access to all the resources needed to nurture Southeast Asia’s first local rock music scenes and recording industries. By the late twentieth century, the countries of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, which all shared the Malay language and geographic proximity, also fostered the cross-pollination of Melayu rock and heavy metal scenes.¹⁷

While cities connected artists to audiences, this did not immediately resolve the challenge of accessing instruments. Electric guitar manufacturing in Asia dates to the 1960s in Japan, but it largely focused on exports to Western nations. For decades, the only available electric guitars were imported and prohibitively expensive to own for all but the most successful musicians. Resourceful artists such as Mol Kagmol, one of the founders of Cambodia’s first “guitar band,” Baksey Chamkrong, resolved this problem by building their own electric guitars. Kagmol based his instrument on a magazine photograph of a Gibson.¹⁸ Other instrumentalists, including some of the most successful rock bands today, overcame this resource gap by borrowing guitars from friends or neighbors for rehearsals and performances or sharing the cost of purchase among multiple players.¹⁹ As Emma Baulch has noted of the elusive double pedal in Bali’s early heavy metal scene, a culture of borrowing helped to strengthen social ties, supported artists’ skill-building, and inspired creative collaborations within local scenes.²⁰ Eventually, affordable brands such as Yamaha put up a shingle in most city centers, as did local small-scale luthiers and large-scale manufacturers. In the last thirty years, local manufacturing and expanding trade partnerships have made the electric guitar more accessible to burgeoning artists in Southeast Asia. Additionally, though far from ubiquitous, media deregulation and an expansion of information and communications technologies have eased access to both regional and international electric guitar musics.

In an assessment of postcolonial rock music in the Global South, Wallach articulates a “four-phase trajectory” for the absorption of rock music by the formerly colonized nations. This model is useful for understanding the electric guitar’s assimilation into local, widely variant cultures.²¹ It all begins with initial exposure to Western artists through film and radio, the catalyst for budding guitarists to teach themselves by imitating what they hear. Wallach calls this the phase of “precise replication.” Singapore’s “beat bands,” such as Beatles cover bands of the 1960s, were part of this first phase, as were the Balinese heavy metal progenitors Baulch documented in the 1990s, who began by imitating the songs of their favorite death and thrash acts.²²

During a period of “linguistic hybridity,” performers utilize their first language, either by translating existing popular songs, writing new lyrics for foreign songs, or, in the later stages, writing original songs in local languages, but with most of the stylistic and instrumental trappings commonly associated with Western rock originators. Most Southeast Asian rock acts who started out in the 1960s and 1970s—Koes Plus, Indonesia’s earliest commercially successful rock band, comes to mind—would fall predominantly into this category, as would the countless current rock, punk, metal, and experimental jazz acts active today, from Indonesian grunge-psychedelic rock band Navicula to Vietnam’s popular punk trio 7Uppercuts.

During the third phase, which Wallach calls “musical hybridity,” bands begin to incorporate local musical elements into performance, including tunings, rhythmic patterns, vocal timbres, or ornamentation, or dance styles that would be quite familiar to local audiences and largely foreign to Western rock’s first generation. Prudente cites, as an example, Filipino rock musicians who incorporated instruments such as the kulintang, an instrument made up of horizontally laid, suspended gongs, and the kubing, a bamboo jaw harp, into rock performance. Balinese electric guitarist I Made Balawan has incorporated the Indonesian gamelan’s instrumentation, tunings, and interlocking patterns in his compositions. All four of the albums he released with his band Batuan Ethnic Fusion illustrate his gamelan experimentation and prowess in the touch-tapping technique he adapted from artists Eddie Van Halen and Stanley Jordan.²³ His contemporary, Dewa Budjana, equally renowned as the electric guitarist for Indonesian rock act Gigi and an experimental jazz artist, also cites his Balinese heritage as an important influence on his playing style, and several of his solo instrumental albums feature song titles referencing Balinese Hindu cosmology, culture, and ecology.²⁴

Of course, musical hybridization is not unique to rock music or accelerated decolonization: in Southeast Asia, it is as old as seafaring and trade. Said Abdullah Bamazham presents an early twentieth-century case for this: the composer combined Indonesian keroncong with jazz, rumba, Hawaiian music, the tango, and the Arabic gambus (lute) in the 1920s.²⁵ Further, phases may overlap; certain phases may be truncated, elongated, or wholly absent; and new genres and new bands will likely start the process from imitation to innovation all over again. Malay pop yeh-yeh, for example, originated in Singapore and Malaysia in the early 1960s through bands covering The Beatles and Cliff Richard and the Shadows. It gained wider favor after bands such as M. Osman and The Clans began incorporating Malay lyrics and melodies.²⁶ Phnom Penh’s Baksey Cham Krong began in the mid 1950s by closely imitating Cliff Richard, before moving on to perform traditional Cambodian songs with Western instrumentation, and, finally, writing their own Khmer lyrics delivered with a distinctively Cambodian vocal style in timbre and ornamentation.²⁷ These bands all moved from precise replication to musical hybridity throughout their careers.

By contrast, Koes Plus began writing Indonesian-language songs in the early 1960s, although heavy metal bands did not begin to compose Indonesian-language songs until the 1990s, preferring instead the English language of their Western rock heroes. Sundanese artist Rhoma Irama introduced his prized Fender Stratocaster to the lineup of his orkes melayu ensemble in the early part of his career, and later into dangdut, along with the synthesizer and drum kit, helping to transform the regional genre into the nation’s most beloved popular music.²⁸ Qasidah, a broad category of Islamic devotional songs, became qasidah moderen (modern qasidah) when artists adopted the stylings of pop and jazz, eventually adding Western popular music instrumentation including the keyboard, synthesizers, and electric guitar. The all-female and multigenerational qasidah group Nasida Ria is an outstanding example: active since 1975 and famous for their large ensemble (with up to twelve members) and matching Javanese attire and hijabs, they include the electric guitar, bass, and keyboard, alongside the tabla and suling (flute) in their accompaniment. Each of these examples illustrates that while phases of musical replication and hybridization are neither predictable nor entirely linear, they are commonplace and help trace the aesthetic and technological innovations inspired by the electric guitar’s pathways through Southeast Asia.

Equally commonplace, and key to understanding the electric guitar as an indigenized musical technology—and not a Western import to Southeast Asian popular music—is the assimilative naming of genres and music ensembles in which it features. In Malaysia, the term kumpulan gitar rancak (lively guitar group) or kugiran, for short, dates to the pop yeh-yeh groups of the 1960s and refers to any band featuring an electric lead and rhythm guitar and electric bass.²⁹ Thai wong shadow, named after Cliff Richard’s influential band, initially combined Cuban cha-cha-cha and rumba rhythms with Thai percussive ornamentation and instrumentation, and would later include any Thai music based on rock music’s standard four-part band.³⁰ In Burma, the genre “stereo” derived its name from the dual-track tape decks used in recording. Stereo originally referred to any Burmese-made pop, rock, R&B, disco, or country music, and now refers more narrowly to Burmese psychedelic rock.³¹ The term “Pinoy” began as a derogatory term for Filipinos migrating to the United States before the Second World War but evolved into an endearing form of self-reference, attached to musical styles as early as the 1970s—music was performed by Pinoy artists, for Pinoy audiences. While today’s Pinoy pop, Pinoy rock, Pinoy folk, Pinoy punk, and Pinoy hardcore may appear to carry no trace of indigenous aesthetics in terms of musical style, instrumentation, or even language, each of these genres has been explicitly named and claimed as an integral component of Filipino culture. As Prudente succinctly explains, “American and British bands served as models and became a springboard in the creation of local rock music.”³² Then, local artists did as artists have always done; they created something new with deep meaning and cultural significance in both the local context and the Pinoy diaspora.

The Electric Guitar, Politicized

For nearly seventy years, the electric guitar has played a transformative role in Southeast Asian cultures, inspiring musicians and audiences, genres and scenes, and instrument manufacturing and trade. As an instrument requiring a cultural reorientation toward “sound and noise,” the electric guitar has also been polarizing, pitting young people against their parents, tradition against modernity, and West against East.³³ The governments of Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam have each, at pivotal moments, attempted to “stifle rock and roll influence” and its instrumentation as a tool of Western imperialism.³⁴ Foreign rock and pop were banned in Burma by the Burmese Socialist Programme Party in the 1960s and for the better part of the country’s fifty years of military rule.³⁵ Singapore’s infamous 1967 ban on the Beatles songs “Yellow Submarine,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “With a Little Help from My Friends,” due to their perceived glorification of drug use, was not lifted until 1993, and the state-run Media Development Authority continues to monitor and censor film, art, broadcasting, publications, and music recordings deemed inappropriate for Singaporean citizens.

Cambodia’s electric guitar story presents an exceptional case of government intervention in popular music, including chapters on active endorsement and brutal suppression.³⁶ Following independence from France, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a leader with xenophilic tendencies and a penchant for European jazz, rock, and pop, actively supported the development of Cambodia’s own versions of these genres. He viewed European influence not as a threat to Cambodia’s nation-building but as a pathway to its modernity and participation on the global cultural and political stages. By the 1960s, hard rock, psychedelic rock, soul, and funk all thrived in Cambodia, finding ample support for recording and live performance in the vibrant metropolis of Phnom Penh.³⁷

Between 1969 and 1973, the political landscape—and popular music—shifted dramatically in response to the United States’ catastrophic military operations. Officially launched to drive out the North Vietnamese and protect Cambodia’s borders, the United States campaign of carpet bombing left nearly half a million Cambodians dead. A military coup, a common phenomenon under the politically destabilizing conditions of decolonization, placed blame on Prince Sihanouk for the Vietnamese invasion and triggered his overthrow. The military regime also censored much popular music: rock music was pulled from the radio, nightclubs were only permitted to operate during the safer daylight hours when bombings were easier to avoid, and musicians were informed they would only be permitted to record and perform nationalistic songs.

When the Khmer Rouge seized control of Phnom Penh in 1975, the new regime took even swifter and deadlier measures to eliminate “Western decadence and urban perversity.”³⁸ The Khmer Rouge took over national radio, destroyed vinyl records and cassettes, closed all night clubs, and banned any music other than what it explicitly commissioned. The city of Phnom Penh was emptied, and the entire country was transformed into a prison farm, with everyone, including musicians, laboring for the state. Seen as threats to Cambodian subservience and loyalty, the Khmer Rouge murdered or disappeared an estimated 90 percent of the country’s artists and entertainers, including both traditional and popular music performers. In a period of less than four years, Cambodia’s love affair with the electric guitar and rock music came to a tragic and bloody end.

Soekarno, Indonesia’s first president following independence from the Dutch Empire, publicly vilified the electric guitar and the music and dance of rock ’n’ roll as signs of both Western imperialism and cultural degradation. In 1957, the state-owned Radio Republik Indonesia temporarily removed rock music from the airwaves, and municipal authorities banned public dancing to rock ’n’ roll.³⁹ On August 17, 1959, to commemorate Indonesia’s independence, President Soekarno delivered his notorious Political Manifesto (Manipol) speech, equating economic imperialism with cultural imperialism and urging young people to reject the West’s neocolonialist agenda, advanced through the cultural products of music and dance.⁴⁰ He said, “And you, young men and women, who certainly oppose economic and political imperialism, why are there many among you who do not oppose cultural imperialism? Why are there so many among you who still like to rock ’n’ roll, dance the cha-cha-cha, and listen to this crazy-style [ngak-ngik-ngok] music?”⁴¹ Soekarno’s declaration caused the public burning of rock records and a second ban on radio broadcasts of rock music.

As Sen and Hill have noted, “official censure turned rock into a symbol of defiance against state authority.”⁴² Foreign albums were accessed on the black market and via radio broadcasts by overseas stations (accessible through shortwave radios), and the nation’s earliest electric guitarists thrived, despite Soekarno’s rock condemnations. The Koes Bros (later, Koes Bersaudara and, most famously, Koes Plus) first formed in the early 1960s as a tribute band for The Everly Brothers and The Beatles, before developing their own sound and earning a reputation as Indonesia’s first commercially successful rock band. In 1965, the bandmates were detained by authorities for three months for playing “ngak-ngik-ngok” music. But arrest only solidified their reputation as rock music rebels and accelerated their successful careers through the 1960s and 1970s.

While the West often figured as the spectral threat of neo-imperialism and cultural demise in Southeast Asia, the true target of state censorship has more often been the dissenting citizenry, particularly young organizers and student organizations who were active in the anticolonial struggle and remained committed to protesting corruption and oppression following independence. Conversely, Soeharto, Indonesia’s second president, was not averse to Western influence: he even secured an American alliance to help achieve his political agenda. He also seized power through a deadly coup and genocide, and orchestrated the government’s militarization, the state’s control of all broadcast media, and the brutal oppression of his opponents, including artists, novelists, and poets, alongside teachers and journalists. Yet the New Order regime, as Soeharto called his administration, also defined a new era of Indonesian cosmopolitanism that enabled Western rock music to circulate widely, both through the reentry of Western music labels and the circulation of pirated cassettes. Unlike his predecessor, Soeharto was unconcerned about Western influences like rock ’n’ roll. Indonesian rock bands such as The Rollies and God Bless flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Rock musicians recorded and performed relatively free from state censorship, despite penning songs that overtly criticized the New Order. Several artists were even involved in the mass student protests that catalyzed Soeharto’s downfall in 1998.

The New Order was not entirely free from intervention in rock music subcultures, however. Baulch has documented how metal and punk fans in the 1980s were at high risk of being labeled preman, underclass gangsters who were targeted for police brutality, imprisonment, and even execution.⁴³ As part of a secretive campaign dubbed the mysterious shootings (penembak misterius), the Indonesian Army undertook the targeted detainment and extrajudicial execution of young men whose visible tattoos and mohawk hairstyles supposedly signified their criminality. These men were often blamed for public disturbances and riots, which occurred with increasing frequency in the tumultuous final years of the Soeharto regime and often coincided with large public gatherings, such as open-air rock concerts. Rioting followed Mick Jagger’s Bandung performance in 1988, local folk rock legend Iwan Fals’s performances in Jakarta in 1989 and 1992, and most notoriously, Metallica’s stadium performance in Jakarta in 1993. Iwan Fals was subsequently banned from public performance for years, as were all heavy metal bands following the riot on the night of Metallica’s show.

The last decade has marked a reversal of fortune for the electric guitar in Indonesian national politics. Perhaps no Southeast Asian leader since Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk has more enthusiastically or publicly embraced rock music than President Joko Widodo. Jokowi, as he is affectionately known, has spoken publicly about his love of international metal bands such as Metallica, Megadeth, Lamb of God, and Slayer. He was photographed alongside other metal fans during Metallica’s second concert in Jakarta in 2013, sporting a Napalm Death t-shirt and gesturing with the devil-horn metal salute. He celebrated his inauguration at a rock concert organized in his honor featuring local rock giants Slank and British band Arkana. Jokowi was even embroiled in political controversy resulting from his love for metal: first in 2013, as Jakarta’s governor and a presidential hopeful, when he was gifted a bass guitar by Metallica’s Robert Trujillo, and then in 2017, when he received a limited-edition box set of Master of Puppets from the Danish Prime Minister. The gifts were viewed by anti-corruption investigators as unlawful bribes. The bass was ultimately sold at auction, and the president paid a reported 11 million rupiah (USD $800) to keep the box set.

The Electric Guitar, the Metropoles, and the Internet

In the final phase of postcolonial rock’s expansion, described by Wallach as a rare occurrence, “the periphery influences the metropoles.”⁴⁴ In other words, songs, genres, and instrumentalists from the postcolonial world reach audiences in the formerly colonizing nations. A recent example is the female metal trio Voice of Baceprot (VoB) from Sunda, West Java, who have attracted worldwide news coverage, earned a spot at the preeminent Wacken Open Air rock music festival in 2022, and staged their first US tour in August 2023. VoB’s success has greatly expanded awareness of Indonesian metal beyond diehard metal fans. Notwithstanding their clear talent as players, their global stardom may have something to do with the exoticism imposed on young female rockers donning hijabs. Earlier Indonesian metal acts who made Wacken appearances and toured internationally—metal band Burgerkill played Wacken in 2015 and 2022 and toured the US and Canada in 2019, delivering sixteen shows in sixteen days—have received far fewer international media mentions or critical accolades than the West Java metal trio. Other electric guitar-wielding punk, rock, metal, reggae, and rockabilly bands from Indonesia have staged world tours, performed at South by Southwest, and, in the case of Bali’s psychedelic grunge outfit Navicula, even recorded in the hallowed halls of Los Angeles’s Record Plant. By and large, however, reception in the West for Southeast Asian electric guitar music has been warm but short-lived, and the strongest fanbases are still found closer to home.

Only a few electric guitarists from Southeast Asia have been afforded the freedom of travel (beyond humanitarian crisis) or global attention (except for a handful of outliers). But electric guitar fans in the region have greatly influenced the global touring industry, keen to corner an enthusiastic and lucrative touring market for the world’s biggest rock acts. More than thirty years before Metallica’s 1993 performance in Jakarta, Cliff Richard gave a blockbuster performance in Singapore in 1961. Deep Purple played for audiences of more than 100,000 for two consecutive nights in Jakarta in 1975. Green Day, Iron Maiden, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lamb of God, and many others have followed in their footsteps, connecting European and US acts with a fanbase of millions across the region.

Generally, when Southeast Asian guitar-centric music has traveled abroad and planted roots elsewhere, it has done so by following the waves of postcolonial, accelerative immigration, joining the soundscapes of the diaspora. In the United States, the quadrupling of the Filipino population since 1980 has created an audience for Pinoy rock, particularly in the greater Los Angeles area. Long Beach, California, boasts a neighborhood called Little Phnom Phen, an official business corridor that highlights the large number of Cambodian retailers in the area. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the United States’ global influence and the relative ease with which many Americans travel abroad, the first band to bring widespread attention to Cambodia’s rock ’n’ roll history after the fall of the Khmer Rouge was started by a white American keyboardist, who learned about Cambodian psychedelic rock while traveling through country in the 1990s. He formed the Los Angeles-based band Dengue Fever and invited Cambodian singer Chhom Nimol to front the band after holding auditions in Little Phnom Penh.

Eventually, the electric guitar’s Cambodian story would be rediscovered by the children of refugees, who would lead a renaissance for Cambodian rock ’n’ roll, thanks in large part to user-uploaded audio tracks on YouTube featuring the best-known performers of the 1960s. While the near-total severing of the nation’s citizens from their rock music past is unusual, most Southeast Asian nations have struggled to preserve their rock music legacies through war, military coups, and economic crises. But the internet has enabled the rediscovery of some of their earliest electric guitar players. For example, a YouTube clip posted in 2010 of the Indonesian-Dutch Tielman Brothers, who fled Surabaya to avoid racial persecution and eventually settled in the Netherlands, adjusted the Indonesian rock timeline back from the formation of the Koes Brothers in the 1960s to a start date in the mid 1950s. Compilation albums, such as Those Shocking Shaking Days: Indonesian Hard, Psychedelic, Progressive Rock and Funk 1970–1978 by Now Again Records (2011), Thai Beat A Go-Go released by Subliminal Sounds (2004), and Cambodian Rocks by Parallel Worlds (1996), were all promoted to a Western audience, but ultimately renewed widespread interest in Southeast Asia’s rock music history, including at home. Cambodian Rocks, a literal bootleg compiled by an American tourist from tapes he purchased in Siem Reap, also sparked an important debate about intellectual property and cultural extractivism: the first release failed to name the featured performers or even the song titles. In a critical album review for Far East Audio Reviews, Mack Hagood described the album as “an early example of the anonymous-Whitey-finds-weird-Asian-music phenomenon.”⁴⁵ Song credits were eventually crowdsourced from Cambodian listeners and now feature on the album’s digital version.

In the last fifteen years, several Southeast Asian artists and music industry insiders have taken on the mammoth task of archiving the region’s rock music history, both through the digitization of audio recordings and the establishment of physical archives and museums. Irama Nusantara, for example, was started by David Tarigan, a cofounder of the Indonesian independent label Aksara Records, with a mission to digitally archive as many commercially released Indonesian albums as possible.⁴⁶ The archive’s foundation has collaborated with the Ministry of Education and Culture to accelerate this digitization project. With initial support from the State Museum of Penang and a shoestring budget, Malaysian music industry veteran Paul Augustin, in partnership with British expatriate and social policy planner James Lochhead, established the Penang House of Music (PHoM). Through its museum, archives, black box events space, and research center, PHoM has helped to preserve the relics of Penang’s unique musical heritage—including several vintage electric guitars owned by Malaysian artists active in the 1970s—and educate artists, scholars, and audiences about the long history of Penang radio, music venues, and commercial recording industry.⁴⁷ PHoM’s exhibitions pay tribute to Penang’s many beloved electric guitarists, such as Akashah Ismail of the Falcons and New Faces and Ernest ‘Boy’ Barnabas: both were active in the 1960s and regionally popular, thanks to Shah’s Singapore and Vietnam performances and Boy’s extended residence in Thailand. The museum also honors the diverse cultural influences of Malaysia’s ethnic communities on Penang’s popular music, such as Indonesian and Malay traditions like ronggeng and joget, Chinese opera, and Indian instrumentation, including the tabla and sitar.

Minding the Knowledge Gap: Southeast Asia’s Unseen Players and Luthiers

Despite the valiant efforts of self-made archivists such as Tarigan, Augustin, and online music fans, and the considerable contributions of Southeast Asian electric guitarists to the dynamism and ingenuity of postcolonial rock, all of these important players remain overshadowed by the English-speaking instrumentalists and luthiers, mostly white and mostly men, who have failed to look beyond the United States and United Kingdom for great instruments and players. As a result, the best-selling white male US and UK performers remain the primary influencers on burgeoning players in Southeast Asia. Much as in the US and UK, the electric guitar’s earliest Black innovators, from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Muddy Waters, remain largely unheard by Southeast Asians.

There is work to be done to render this history visible to Southeast Asian guitarists. It is also important to grant Southeast Asian guitarists pride of place on the global stage, both for where they come from and the excellent music they make. When asked to name the most prolific and influential players worldwide, guitarists from the US to Indonesia will likely place Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Eddie Van Halen high on the list. But Indonesians will likely point with pride to Van Halen’s Indonesian heritage: his mother was from Rangkasbitung, West Java. His parents moved to the Netherlands after Indonesian independence, though a combination of anti-Asian racism and his father’s enlistment in the US Air Force would eventually bring the family to Pasadena, California.⁴⁸ Notable Indonesian guitar players who match in creative prowess and technical virtuosity the best Western guitarists include Bali’s Balawan, who rose to fame for his eight-finger tapping technique on a custom double-neck guitar; Ian Antono, lead guitarist for God Bless since 1974; Abdee Negara, lead guitarist of rock band Slank, and active since the 1980s; and Dewa Budjana, founder of the rock band Gigi and a prolific jazz guitarist with an international reputation in the global experimental jazz scene. Further, almost every band formed from the 1990s onward will cite homegrown acts as primary influences on their style. Koes Plus always earns a mention among Indonesian rock bands, as does God Bless, who formed in 1967 and remains active today, even collaborating on albums and performances with the current generation of rockers.

Southeast Asian luthiers and guitar manufacturers also deserve the attention and praise afforded to companies in the United States and Western Europe for high-quality electric guitar craftsmanship. Yet one need only spend a few minutes browsing electric guitar blogs and forums to recognize a widespread fetishization of American-made Gibsons and Fenders, and derision for Asian-made electric guitars of any ilk—apart from Japanese manufacturer Ibanez. This is due, in part, to the provenance of instrumental innovations, dating to Fender’s Telecaster and Stratocaster in the 1950s, which contributed the “blueprint” for the modern solid-bodied electric guitar.⁴⁹ However, as early as the 1960s, Japanese luthiers were producing excellent copies of American brands. Yamaha released its first electric guitars in April 1966, and by the 1970s, several Japanese companies were established to satisfy a regional market. By the 1980s, as production costs soared in the United States, several American makers partially moved production to Asia: first to Japan and, after costs rose there, to Korea and Taiwan. In the 1990s, Harmony, Gibson, and Fender each moved production for at least one of their guitar lines to Southeast Asia.⁵⁰ Several Fender Squier Strats have been jointly manufactured in China and Indonesia since 1998, and PRS Guitars now exclusively manufactures its PRS SE, designed with Carlos Santana, at its Surabaya factory. Yet despite a long history of production outsourcing by US and European companies to Asian countries, especially for entry- and mid-level lines, the value hierarchy still tends to place US-made instruments at the top and ranks Asian-made instruments by the degree of perceived economic and technological “development” of their countries of origin. Japan tends to get high marks, Korea comes in second, and Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian-made instruments rank lowest for craftmanship.⁵¹ Unfortunately, the hierarchy is often adopted within Southeast Asian contexts, creating a class divide between the wealthiest instrument collectors and players, who can acquire US-made Fenders and Gibsons, and most guitarists who depend upon the availability of more affordable, entry-level Yamahas and local brands.

During the 2000s, a sea change in attitudes toward local guitar-making was set in motion by a “buy local” movement in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Today, local luthiers boast a solid market of new and experienced players passionate about Indonesian-made custom guitars. Radix Guitars has been the most successful, securing design collaborations with recording artists such as Gede Robi Supriyanto from Navicula and Edwin Marshall Sjarief from the Bandung rock band Cokelat. Supriyanto even brought his custom-made Radix Jarvis Telemaster on his Central European tour with Navicula in 2018. Havoc Guitars bill themselves as “the darkside of radix guitars” [sic], specializing in Flying V and Warbird designs based on models by Gibson and ESP Guitars, respectively, and popular among heavy metal guitarists. A notable trend in custom guitar-making across acoustic, resonator, and electric guitar models is the feature of custom woodcarving and paintwork, evoking Indonesian visual arts, puppet theatre, and textiles. Ivan Mulia, luthier and owner of iVee Guitars, is a blues guitarist who etches well-known batik and songket patterns onto his handmade resonator guitars. For decades, Dewa Budjana has collected guitars hand painted by artists specializing in sacred painting, depicting characters from the Balinese iterations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Budjana has also commissioned several guitars featuring figures from shadow puppetry and Javanese and Balinese cosmology from luthier and master woodcarver Wayan Tuges. Before turning his attention to guitars, Tuges grew up and trained in traditional Balinese woodcarving, which transforms local teak, hibiscus, and crocodile wood into sacred statues, wall reliefs, and musical instruments. He brings that same craftsmanship to his handmade instruments, produced and released by Blueberry Guitars. In 2015, Budjana announced plans to open Museum Gitarku (My Guitar Museum), a museum dedicated to the electric guitar’s history in Indonesia, to feature his own collection of more than 200 pieces as well as instruments autographed and donated by international stars such as Peter Frampton and Carlos Santana.⁵²

Despite these many exciting innovations in guitar music and lutherie in Indonesia alone, few music researchers have attempted to address the knowledge gap on guitar-centric music in Southeast Asia. Most popular music researchers tend to direct their intellectual energies toward studying US and UK popular music, while ethnomusicologists, who are more likely to take an interest in Global South musics, have tended to favor so-called traditional musics for much of our history. Anything considered derivative or tainted by Western encounters has been largely dismissed until relatively recently. The proof is in the published word: Jaap Kunst, the Dutch researcher credited with giving ethnomusicology its name, published De Toonkunst van Bali with his wife, Katy Kunst-van Wely, in 1924, focusing on the classical music-dance-theatre complex. Countless books, research papers, articles, and dissertations written by scholars, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and practitioners that delve into various aspects of the Indonesian gamelan have followed, well into the twenty-first century. Yet the first book covering Indonesian rock music was not published until 1998,⁵³ and very few books on Indonesian popular music and culture have followed. Wallach, one of the earliest American scholars of Southeast Asian popular music, provides important context for this research gap: “popular music scholarship has underemphasized the socio-political impact of rock music in the decolonized world, due to outright ethnocentrism, misguided preoccupations with cultural authenticity, and the outmoded ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis.”⁵⁴ Unfortunately, as this chapter has illustrated, the cultural imperialism thesis was also adopted by authoritarian leaders to characterize rock music as an imposition of Western musical traditions and a threat to national identity.

The current generation of Southeast Asian music scholars is correcting this narrative however, both by promoting and reclaiming the study of popular musics of the region, and asserting that globally circulating genres such as rock, punk, and metal are fully assimilated local “traditions” that have played a crucial part in shaping national and regional identities. This is evidenced by the establishment of the Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies Group (1982), the Indonesian Chapter of the Punk Scholars Network (2020), and the Southeast Asian Chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (2019), as well as the 2021 publication of Made in Nusantara: Studies in Popular Music, which convenes authors from the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia to examine the popular musics of nations and regions long connected through maritime trade.

Conclusion

This chapter has introduced the electric guitar in Southeast Asia through its history, cultural and political significance, and signature within locally popular genres of music. As the instrument made its way around the world through film, records, radio broadcasts, and instrument manufacturing, it has nourished both popular music’s globalization and an emergent youth culture and market. It has been a technology for aesthetic innovation and cultural exchange, inspiring new genres and intraregional scenes, and new playing techniques, instrumentation, and instruments.

The electric guitar has also witnessed the turbulence of decolonization, nation-building, and ensuing political instability and cultural identity crisis. In postcolonial Southeast Asia, the electric guitar has armed an emerging youth culture seeking independence both from colonial-era subservience and the previous subjugated generation. It has also been a target of political strategy for the region’s bloodiest dictators and most progressive presidents in their efforts to define sovereignty, progress, and national identity.

In the various nations of Southeast Asia, the electric guitar’s legacy and resonance have been determined by the Southeast Asian players, makers, documentarians, archivists, and fans who have transmitted and transformed it—in performances, recordings, film, YouTube videos, and luthier workshops—and who have preserved it through instrument collections, archives, and research texts. The electric guitar has much to tell us about what Steve Waksman calls “a deeper shift in the cultural disposition toward sound” and noise, as Southeast Asian guitarists have broadened their tonal and timbral palettes with new possibilities in electronic signaling, amplification, and distortion.⁵⁵ But it has an equally important role in helping us understand the residual impacts of cultural contacts, the rise of nations and youth cultures, and the past, present, and future of Southeast Asia. It will be up to the next generation of Southeast Asian scholars to continue to seek out the electric guitar’s serpentine path.