I’ve got just a couple more Thin Lizzy songs I wanna lay on you. The ‘Liz have completely revived my faith in the redemptive power of the perfect riff. Someday soon I think I might do an extended series on the best riffs in the history of rock ‘n roll, from the early days of the Golden Age onwards. As I’ve started to take up the guitar myself over the past three or four months, I’ve become obsessed with the question of what it is that constitutes a great riff. What chords work well together, and what groupings of chords create this or that emotional landscape? But at the most basic level I find myself asking what it is that makes a riff a riff? Is it merely a grouping of chords or notes that have a kind of stickiness about them in the sense that they stay in your brain long after the needle has passed over the grooves? No, a riff is so much more than that, though catchiness is not something to be dismissed. A riff has to be catchy in order to be a riff, but it’s also a very definite statement. When you hear AC/DC’s Problem Child or Van Halen’s Mean Streets, for example, you experience the catharsis of unrestrained fury, and you come to realize how potent it can be, but also how rare. The riff in each case is an instance of pure id and represents a gap in society’s repressive mechanisms, moments in which the workings of the superego haven’t kicked in. …Contrast this unbridled pleasure principle with songs by U2, Coldplay, the Dave Matthews Band, or any other kind of grim corporate sounding music. The mere sound of Bono’s voice is an encapsulation of the reality principle, offering a depressing reminder that we don’t live in a world without rules, restraints, worries, and coercion. Mind you, not all riffs straddle the Angus and Malcolm Young/Eddie Van Halen divide between pleasure and violence, sex and death, but a riff is essentially a catchy, recurrent statement made with a guitar or guitars as the messenger. Sometimes the guitar is both the message and the messenger, a la Marshall McLuhan. Smoke on the Water and More than a Feeling come to mind immediately. But for me the most affecting riffs are ones that transcend the guitar itself and create a narrative, or make a philosophical statement, or engender some kind of deep primal feeling in the listener. And that’s what makes tonight’s riff so fantastic. It does everything a riff can do. It says something about the guitar itself, its metaphysics of pain and pleasure and its ability to transform the former into the latter; it sets a scene, one of danger, and destruction, and tragedy; but the riff doesn’t bum you out because it also lets you know that the protagonist in this story may go down in a ball of flames, but at least he’ll do it in a way that honors his manhood. He’s a loser this one final time, just as he’s been all his life, but he’s a beautiful one at that, and so he’s really a winner in the grand scheme of things…
I’ve got just a couple more Thin Lizzy songs I wanna lay on you. The ‘Liz have completely revived my faith in the redemptive power of the perfect riff. Someday soon I think I might do an extended series on the best riffs in the history of rock ‘n roll, from the early days of the Golden Age onwards. As I’ve started to take up the guitar myself over the past three or four months, I’ve become obsessed with the question of what it is that constitutes a great riff. What chords work well together, and what groupings of chords create this or that emotional landscape? But at the most basic level I find myself asking what it is that makes a riff a riff? Is it merely a grouping of chords or notes that have a kind of stickiness about them in the sense that they stay in your brain long after the needle has passed over the grooves? No, a riff is so much more than that, though catchiness is not something to be dismissed. A riff has to be catchy in order to be a riff, but it’s also a very definite statement. When you hear AC/DC’s Problem Child or Van Halen’s Mean Streets, for example, you experience the catharsis of unrestrained fury, and you come to realize how potent it can be, but also how rare. 
The riff in each case is an instance of pure id and represents a gap in society’s repressive mechanisms, moments in which the workings of the superego haven’t kicked in. …Contrast this unbridled pleasure principle with songs by U2, Coldplay, the Dave Matthews Band, or any other kind of grim corporate sounding music. The mere sound of Bono’s voice is an encapsulation of the reality principle, offering a depressing reminder that we don’t live in a world without rules, restraints, worries, and coercion. Mind you, not all riffs straddle the Angus and Malcolm Young/Eddie Van Halen divide between pleasure and violence, sex and death, but a riff is essentially a catchy, recurrent statement made with a guitar or guitars as the messenger. Sometimes the guitar is both the message and the messenger, a la Marshall McLuhan. Smoke on the Water and More than a Feeling come to mind immediately. But for me the most affecting riffs are ones that transcend the guitar itself and create a narrative, or make a philosophical statement, or engender some kind of deep primal feeling in the listener. And that’s what makes tonight’s riff so fantastic. It does everything a riff can do. It says something about the guitar itself, its metaphysics of pain and pleasure and its ability to transform the former into the latter; it sets a scene, one of danger, and destruction, and tragedy; but the riff doesn’t bum you out because it also lets you know that the protagonist in this story may go down in a ball of flames, but at least he’ll do it in a way that honors his manhood. He’s a loser this one final time, just as he’s been all his life, but he’s a beautiful one at that, and so he’s really a winner in the grand scheme of things…
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