i'm just stumbling upon this now.

the list is clearly written as a reaction against your average best guitarist list, which prominently features all kinds of showy 70s players and 80s hair metal guys that were very one dimensional. the focus here is on the guitar as a creative tool, rather than as an olympic sport. it's an argument i've been having for as long as i can remember, and i'm on spin's side in terms of the general debate. i fully support some (but not all) of your oddball choices.

however, the list has overcompensated in a roughly equivalent manner. if you're going to criticize van halen for being one dimensional, exactly the same criticism applies to johnny ramone. you're consequently reducing the question to a generational concern, or a genre preference, rather than a really serious analysis, and falling into what is more or less the same trap.

the reason hendrix continues to be so widely revered is not that he was a technical genius. he wasn't. it was that he was a creative genius. if you're going to focus on creativity, he should be near the top of the list. that he's not demonstrates that generational disconnect, which is exactly the same reason older guitarists look down on kevin shields and kurt cobain.

by including a lot of marginal players that happen to be popular at the moment, you're taking away space from some of the real creative guitar geniuses of the past - al di meola, brian may, steve hackett, lenny breau. what's the use of carrying on the generational biases? can we not do better than that?

without drawing too much attention to the gender, i'm also going to point out that ranking pj harvey as a better _guitar player_ than annie clark is not an argument that can be taken seriously. that alone demonstrates that there were very few (if any) guitarists involved in the creation of this list.

you've also missed some obvious choices that otherwise fit well into the list, such as mike keneally and robert smith.

so, you need to take out some of the one-dimensional post-punk players that you used to replace one-dimensional classic rock players in order to make some more space for some more creative ones, both new and old. that's exactly the same problem with all the other lists, up to the nature of the one-dimensional players. you can and ought to do better than this.

but, i want to reiterate that i'm in agreement with the shift in mindset. it's true that if you're going to enumerate a list of guitarists, you're going to have to eventually get to people like jimmy page, eric clapton, richie blackmore, yngwie malmsteen, steve vai, van halen, etc. but, none of them are or were particularly creative players and they need to be worked much further down the list to account for that, and to provide space for players that are or were legitimately creative.

but, you went too far and in the process converted a good idea into a bad joke.

i've thought about this a little more and the more i think about it the less sense it makes.

i've pointed out the creativity of hendrix, but it was more than that. hendrix was the first guitarist to make a prominent use of various effects pedals, and that had a gigantic influence on the entire concept of using guitars to make noise. it makes absolutely no sense to exclude him on the basis of focusing on noisy players. without hendrix, noise rock would not exist! and, if you had done your research, you'd realize that plenty of punks in the 70s gave him the credit he deserves for it.

it's also patently ridiculous to derive punk rock entirely from the velvets. if you ask any punk guitarist in the 70s who their primary influence was, almost all of them will tell you it was pete townsend. a very large percentage of what you've got on here would simply not exist if it weren't for townsend's chaotic live performances - including nirvana.

to get that noisy punk sound, you have to take the sum of hendrix, townsend, barrett, reed/morrison and ronson. you're really painting a very incomplete picture with this.

further, you're not taking into account the fact that a lot of what defined sonic youth's sound was the type of guitar they used. those jazzmasters didn't come out of nowhere, they were used in a lot of surf music. and, the guy that you HAVE to mention in that context (as well as being the ultimate purveyor of the kind of riffing that somebody like buzz osbourne developed) is dick dale. dale was also important in developing various effects approaches.

so, this thing really reduces to a total generational fail. it reads off as a list thrown together by a lot of ignorant gen xers that think music started in 1976 and have no understanding of where punk came from, which you basically admit to in your opening paragraph.

www.spin.com/2012/05/spins-100-greatest-guitarists-all-time/?page=9