Sick Guitar Solos vs. Dunking Effortlessly: An Exploration
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.
During the filter-in of Wednesday's Ricky pod, Spike posed that timelessly relevant question to Mike and CJ: Would you rather be able to dunk effortlessly or to rip off sick guitar solos? Like all truly great dilemmas, the answers were passionately split: Mike dismissed the notion that sick guitar solos could offer him anywhere near the personal satisfaction of effortless dunks, while CJ defended the practical benefits one could be afforded by sick guitar soloing.
The debate waxed and waned from there -- at one point the solos were replaced by riffs, then reverted to solos -- and somehow we ended in a theoretical place where CJ would be serenading the Wells Fargo Center with some six-string symphonies in the middle of a crucial late-game possession during Game 7 of the inevitable Celtics-Sixers Eastern Conference Finals. (Spike may have been loopy on painkillers and/or just up way past his bedtime. I’m off painkillers, I was just ‘overtired’ as my mom would say. - Spike)
Anyway, this is obviously a question that demanded further and deeper analysis than the podcast format could reasonably provide, so I decided to invest all the resources of this week's If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders in a full scientific exploration of all facets to this age-old debate. Here's how we broke it down:
Which is more easily demonstrated?
Random elite skills are great and all, but being the world's most graceful cave diver won't win you a ton of points with friends and neighbors if you live in the suburbs. On those grounds, being able to dunk effortlessly is great: All you need is a basketball and a hoop. Sick guitar solos, on the other hand, not only require a guitar, an amp, a proper performance space and possibly even some effects pedals depending on the degree of sickness, but they also need a full band -- or at least a full backing track -- to give proper context to your sick soloing. Truly solo solos may be technically awe-inspiring for a few seconds, but unless you're a fully erupting Eddie Van Halen, eventually they just make you sound like a dick.
Advantage: Dunking Effortlessly
Which is more viscerally impressive?
Not everyone you encounter is going to have proper artistic or cultural context for either your dunking or your soloing; to get the maximum social benefit, you want a skill whose majesty is self-evident, requiring no further explanation. Guitar soloing can get you there if you get into speed-demon picking or two-finger tapping or what have you, but if you're just kinda generally wailing, you may end up being subject to certain vagaries of taste, and what's stunning to some may be merely self-indulgent to others. Everyone can kinda understand a ball being slammed into a net at full-force though. Takes a lot less time, too.
Advantage: Dunking Effortleslsy
Which puts you in rarer company?
Certainly neither is something that a large percentage of the population can do. I was trying to roughly calculate the number of people with the technical skill, artistic temperament and sheer desire to become sick guitar soloists vs. the number of people with the sheer physical gifts to dunk effortlessly, and I wasn't able to come up with anything terribly coherent. All I can offer is that there are over 1400 colleges with men's basketball teams playing on some organized level in the U.S., and there are only 305 Guitar Center locations.
Advantage: Sick Guitar Solos
Which is more likely to be financially lucrative?
Obviously we are not at a particular high point in 2023 for the culture's valuing of the sick guitar solo -- trends in genre, song length and general instrumentation have all shifted away from it, at least at the mainstream level -- but nonetheless, there will always be opportunities of some sort available in live performance and session work for the truly sick soloists out there. I'm not sure there are a lot of professional or semi-professional basketball leagues out there that will give you a roster spot merely based on your ability to forcibly drop the ball through the net from directly on top of it.
Advantage: Sick Guitar Solos
Which is part of a prouder Philadelphia legacy?
Philly is a great music city, but historically more for soul, hip-hop, disco and indie rock than anything traditionally built around sick guitar soloing. There's Kurt Vile, certainly, and perhaps LL can fill me in about some local classic rockers who I am failing to give their propers here. But Philly claims two of the all-time 10 most iconic rim-rockers in Daryl Dawkins and Dr. J, as well as later greats of the form like Andre Iguodala, Mac McClung, young Charles Barkley and that one JaVale McGee dunk from 2014. Not a particularly fair fight.
Advantage: Dunking Effortlessly
Which is more likely to get the ladies to throw their underwear at you?
I do not speak for the ladies.
Advantage: Draw
Which is more likely to provide continual artistic self-stimulation?
Sick guitar soloing is endlessly renewable as an artform; if it wasn't, the Grateful Dead wouldn't still be selling out arenas in their various post-prime incarnations over a half-century after their peak. On the other hand, we watch sick dunking solely as an artistic endeavor for exactly one hour every year in mid-February, and more often than not we're complaining about it being boring and redundant by the end of it. You could probably find ways to amuse yourself for a little longer with it, but maybe not much.
Advantage: Sick Guitar Soloing
Which one has already had a successful video game franchise launched on its promise of such wish fulfillment?
I'll tell you, it wasn't a PS2 game called Dunk Hero that turned my entire fucking life upside down when I was 18.
Advantage: Sick Guitar Soloing
Which remains more impressive as you get older?
No stipulation was made about a window of opportunity when Spike asked about sick guitar soloing vs. effortless dunking, so we have to assume that whatever skill one opts for here is a power one will possess for all time. Being able to tear off sick guitar solos into your 70s and 80s would be impressive but not necessarily jaw-dropping; you figure a guy like J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr will likely be winning friends at the nursing home well into his retirement years with his six-string slinging. Dunking past the age of 45, on the other hand, basically makes you a superhero; do it once and they'll probably give you your own line of Just for Men products on the spot.
Advantage: Dunking Effortlessly
Which is more universally joyous?
Both sick guitar solos and effortless dunks are unquestionably great things. But when applied in their most natural settings -- in a live band performance and in the middle of a five-on-five basketball game, respectively -- only one of them makes everyone happy. Dunks, life-affirming as they may be in a vacuum, in real life are always inevitably at the expense of another team and their fans, if not of one particular defender misguided enough to try to get in the way. A sick guitar solo has no victims; a sick guitar solo is truly for everyone.
Advantage: Sick Guitar Solos