Usually I don’t do clickbait headlines, but in this case, I did. Actually, I’m a big fan of both Sweetwater and Premier Guitar. But let me tell you about what I saw recently on their respective YouTube channels.
Premier Guitar – There’s a trend right now among big channels like Fender, Gibson, and Premier Guitar to feature women guitar players. I salute the trend because there’s a lot of sexism among guitar players. There’s a lot of everything-ism, which includes age, body types, etc and so on. The comments sections of many guitar-related channels are lousy with assholes. See, I can say assholes here, because it’s my site. Ahem.
Anyway, in a recent video featuring a female guitar player, the trolls were up in arms because they didn’t like her style of playing. That’s typical, because I envision most of the commenters as teenagers who haven’t matured yet, or older dudes who still think it’s 1980. It’s OK to not like something. But there were also some sexist comments. Premier Guitar doesn’t normally get involved in the comments section – they don’t actually want a dialog. That’s their decision. So when someone posts something sexist, well, they just leave it up. You can’t have it both ways, Premier Guitar! You can’t feature women guitar players and then ignore blatant sexism in the comments section.
Then again, if Premier Guitar pisses off every sexist guitar player who visits the channel, half their audience is gone. Sigh. Maybe I’m being too hard on Premier Guitar.
Sweetwater – But maybe not. In a recent video on Sweetwater’s channel, they featured a very heavy black female guitar player. Some of the comments were typical “this sucks, she can’t play” teenage immaturity. But one comment talked about her being too fat. Guess what? Sweetwater took the comment down!
If you’re one of those people who loves to leave negative comments on videos featuring other guitar players, I was once just like you. A jerk. At 19, I thought I knew everything and I loved to make fun of everyone else, and if I didn’t like music it was bad. But I grew up. Everyone who puts their music out there deserves a minimum amount of respect. You don’t have to like their music. I usually don’t. But I respect the effort and I know that different people have different tastes in music, and that’s the way it should be. And guess what? Now I’m way, way happier.
