I put two guitars through the same amp settings and couldn’t tell which was mahogany and which was alder. Can we stop pretending it makes a difference on electrics?

Guitars used to mean something. They were a middle finger to the world. Six strings screaming rebellion, pain, and truth. Hendrix set his on fire. Cobain smashed his to splinters. It was raw, ugly, alive. Now? You’re all just influencers with calluses, polishing your Strats for Instagram likes and TikTok loops. You don’t play guitar to say something. You play it to sell something. Your “brand,” your “vibe,” your sad little bedroom aesthetic. You’re not artists, you’re content creators with $5000 pedalboards you don’t even know how to use. The algorithm’s your god now, and it’s turned your “rebellion” into a 15-second clip with a lo-fi filter. The 60s and 90s weren’t perfect, but at least they had soul. Now? You’re too busy color-matching your amp to your wall art to notice your music sounds like a Spotify ad. You’re not dangerous. You’re not even interesting. You’re just another cog in the content machine, chasing clout while the guitar’s corpse rots in your hands. And don’t give me that “Gen Z is saving guitar” crap. Those kids are just aping your nostalgia, recycling riffs from bands you jerk off to on vinyl. The guitar isn’t dead—it’s worse. It’s a zombie, shambling through your curated feeds, and you’re too busy posing to notice the stench.

I've only seen Americans talking about it, but do people actually boil their guitar strings or is it just a joke?

Would he still play Stratocasters and burn them on stage or would he be live-looping on a Neural DSP Quad Cortex, blending trap beats with fuzzed-out octave riffs? Would his tone still come from a cranked Marshall, or from a DAW preset called "Electric Voodoo Child v7"? Would he be the GOAT of TikTok guitar or too weird to go viral? Would he collab with Billie Eilish? JPEGMAFIA? Yungblud? Or still be a lone wolf? Would the raw chaos of his sound even survive today's polished algorithms and taste-policing comment sections? Would Gen Z even care? Or would he be buried under the content avalanche, seen as "just another guy who plays guitar"? Drop your hottest takes.

We spend years chasing "the perfect tone". We debate pickups, wood, cables, string gauges, vintage vs. modern, analog vs. digital. But here's a question: What if tone is just a smokescreen for insecurity? What if it’s easier to tweak your EQ for 4 hours than to write 4 bars of music that actually matter? What if most tone debates are just musicians avoiding the terrifying truth that no one cares how good your tone is if you have nothing worth saying. We worship tone gods who barely write. We buy gear to sound like players who weren’t chasing tone, they were chasing meaning. Tone is real. But maybe tone obsession is just creative procrastination. So I’ll ask again: What if tone doesn’t matter?