i have no idea / what gender i am
A Progressive Guitarist post.
Someone hands your mate an acoustic guitar at a barbecue and asks for something gentle. He plays something gentle for eleven seconds, then the whole thing drops into a chug and the host takes the sausages inside. The band's first rehearsal has a setlist of four songs. All four have the same section in the middle, and nobody can say who wrote it. The drummer is the only one who checks the clock. You ask him to show you the riff he's been going on about for a month. He sends a screenshot of a tab, and it is the same fret nine times. He insists the feel is what matters. At the pub quiz, the music round plays a pop song from 2004. He says he can hear how it would sound with the strings tuned down three steps and a scream in the second chorus. Nobody asked. **Why it caught on:** the picture shows a young man with a side-swept fringe and a tattooed chest, in a black T-shirt beside a black electric guitar on a green geometric background. People captioned it with the stereotype of the metalcore-and-technical-metal guitarist: breakdowns in every song, genre names ending in "-core", Guitar Hero bragging and showy stage moves covering for shaky playing. It spread because anyone who has been near a rehearsal room or a guitar forum has met that player, and the captions needed only a riff and a punchline.