Guitar Hero: An Interview With Marc Ribot

Marc Ribot has spent more than four decades moving fluidly across the boundaries that ordinarily organize musical life: between downtown experiment and popular song, between sideman and bandleader, between art as formal inquiry and art as political intervention. But what makes his work so compelling is not simply its range. Again and again, Ribot has returned to larger questions about music’s social consequences: what it means for sound to carry political force, how genre can function as both resource and constraint, and what artistic freedom looks like under the economic pressures of the contemporary music industry.