What the American Guitar Press Actually Saw
I’ve been reading Guitar World since I found a battered copy at a used bookshop near Nakameguro, and one thing struck me early: when the magazine turned its attention toward Japanese players, the coverage was rarely neutral. It swung. Sometimes it landed on real insight. Other times it settled into a kind of soft exoticism that felt, from this side of the Pacific, like being observed through glass.
The hide coverage is probably the clearest example. As X Japan’s profile grew internationally, Western guitar press had to reckon with a player who genuinely didn’t fit any pre-existing frame. The technique was undeniable. The aesthetic — the color, the theatricality, the pink hair that wasn’t a costume so much as a philosophical position — gave American writers an easy angle, and too many of them took it. The guitar work sometimes got buried under the spectacle in the copy. You’d read a paragraph about the visual shock before you got a sentence about the actual playing. That ordering reveals something.
Marty Friedman’s tenure in Megadeth tells the other half of this story. Here was an American guitarist who had absorbed something real from Japanese music — not as a gimmick, but as a genuine shift in his melodic sensibility — and the American press, to its credit, did eventually notice. His later solo output, built almost entirely around Japanese musical ideas, got written up with something closer to curiosity than condescension. But the framing often positioned Japan as the exotic ingredient he had discovered, rather than a living tradition that existed fine without his passport. The subject of the piece would drift from the music itself toward his personal journey. Japan as backdrop. Japan as catalyst. Japan as the place that changed him — which is a story about Marty, not about Japan.
The Gap Between Technique and Context
What the American guitar press consistently got right was the technique. Nobody writing for Guitar World was going to pretend a Japanese player couldn’t play. The vocabulary of guitar proficiency is universal enough, and the players being covered were genuinely extraordinary. Ratings, rankings, “best of” features — in those contexts, Japanese guitarists held their own and the coverage reflected that honestly.
The gap showed up the moment context was required. The visual kei scene, for instance, is not reducible to “Japanese glam metal,” and any piece that reached for that comparison immediately lost something essential. The scene has its own internal logic, its own generational arguments, its own relationship to gender and performance that has almost nothing to do with Sunset Strip in the eighties. When Western writers mapped one onto the other, readers over here felt the flattening happen in real time.
Hide deserved — deserves — the kind of coverage that starts with the music and builds outward. The tunings, the unconventional structures, the way melody sits against distortion in his recordings. A writer who started there might still end up discussing the spectacle, but they’d arrive at it having earned the right. Too often the order was reversed.
To be real, some of this is structural. A monthly guitar magazine has column inches to fill and a readership that needs context. Shorthand is inevitable. I’m not calling anyone a bad journalist. What I am saying is that the shorthand chosen — exotic, eccentric, visually overwhelming — consistently prioritized the foreignness of Japanese players over their musicianship, and that habit compounded over decades into a portrait that was recognizable but incomplete.
Pick up hide’s catalog. Start anywhere. Let the guitar tracks run, and ask yourself whether “exotic” is the word that comes to mind.
