Indeed, the sickest wish list ever.
The idea of going to the Guitar Center website and creating a wish list of things you want isn't, like, the worst idea for a musician, I guess. You probably want cooler vintage things from somewhere awesome and indie, but you have to face the fact that your grandma probably isn't driving out to Fork's for ya. But dropping those desired items into a pre-designed rock flier layout in "cool" styles like "punk" and "garage" and "hatch" and putting your name on it, and sending it around via Facebook or Twitter to tell all your buds what they can get you for Christmas? It's the sort of thing that raises new and troubling questions:
Like, does everyone always have to try to co-opt rock's DIY thrill? This is a music store, so can you co-opt yourself? Why must everyone be a rock star? Why can't a generation or two take it upon themselves to sit one out every now and then? Is anything less punk than a wish list from Guitar Center? What musician has the social network—because who needs to make this for their dad?—with the dough to drop the hundreds of dollars necessary to purchase most of these items? Do you need to design a whole poster to tell someone you're out of guitar strings? And to quote my colleague Adam Gold, "Can you imagine anyone you know who's a musician making one of these? Most of them are far too shiftless to put that much effort into designing something."
