A argument has broken out on the internet, if you can believe such a thing. Even now, two sides are locked in a grim war of attrition. Accusations of sexual deviancy are their bullets. Insinuations of unchaste mothers are their bayonets. The disagreement is this: does wood make a difference in the tone of an electric guitar?

This has significant implications for the guitar industry, since apparently everyone believes that it does (and tonally “good” woods can be expensive and rare, like topcut Brazilian rosewood). Basswood sounds smooth and fat, ash sounds bright, and so on. This has long been noted in acoustic instruments. But an electric guitar is not an acoustic instrument. Can anyone hear the sound of wood in a vibrating metal string’s disturbance of a magnetic field? Or is it all a huge group delusion?

The “yes” camp is led by Rob Chapman, an affable gear enthusiast known for his product reviews. Everyone likes Chappers. The “no” crowd is led by Scott Groves, who is definitely the “heel” in this debate. Depending on who you ask, he’s either a jackass who makes things far more personal than they have to be, or a guy who wields the truth like a riot baton.

Some people are taking a physics-based approach, comparing transverse waves and that sort of thing. But that’s not really the point. We don’t care if there’s some slight difference when you compare two sounds with an oscilloscope. It has to be a difference that’s perceptible by the human ear. There’s slight waveform differences in a $15 HDMI cable versus a $150 Monster Cable…big fucking deal. NOBODY with human ears can tell these cables apart in a blind A/B test.

Chapman has a video of a swamp ash Chapman ML-1 demo’d against a mahogany Chapman ML-1, and yes, I can seem to hear a difference in tone. By itself, this only means so much. Is Chapman strumming as hard as The Captain? Is he hitting the bass and treble strings equally? We need a machine that can play guitar (wait, is Compressorhead still around?), so we can take the uncertainty introduced by humans out of these tests. If the difference remains, I’d be a tonewood believer in a second.

Groves (“if you still believe in tone wood after this, there’s a short bus ready to drop you off at Morontucky”) and his flunkies have hit back with videos of their own. Their position is that wood plays no part at all on an electric guitar. Your “tone” is a mixture of your amp, your pickups, and your playing style – your guitar can be made of cardboard for all that matters. The last video contains a demo of a fine piece of alder sounding exactly the same as a hunk of cheap fiberboard from a kitchen benchtop. Fascinating, but not conclusive.

Clearly, one side or the other is victim of a massive placebo effect. They wouldn’t be the first. I remember one time I was making some EQ changes to a track, I’d gotten it sounding pretty good…and then I realised that I’d had the EQ bypassed the whole time. The sound differences I was hearing were all in my head.

It reminds me of Prosper-René Blondlot, who “discovered” an exotic sort of radiation called N-Rays. Lots of other scientists backed up Blondlot’s findings, and the French Academy of Sciences granted him ?50,000 for his work.

N-Rays do not exist. One day, Blondlot conducted a successful “demonstration” of his discovery, oblivious to the fact that a scientist had sabotaged the machine that was supposedly producing the N-Rays.

The album sounds incredible. It has a cool, glassy, smooth aesthetic, like expensive vodka. The reality that it’s just The Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” repeated thirty six times takes a while to sink in.

The songs mostly suck – puffy, wearisome tracks that make you think one minute in “very good, boys. I’ve gotten the point”…and they continue for another four minutes. Then the next song starts, and it’s exactly the same thing. The whole enterprise drips with pretension. “Mensforth Hill” is literally just another song played backwards, and I think if you listen closely you can hear evil Satanic messages (“we used to play punk rock…“).

What’s the point of this? Was the goal to write so much bad reggae that there would be no more bad reggae left to write? And why is it so long? In order to win a dick measuring contest with Bruce Springsteen, they fluffed Sandinista! out into a monstrous triple album that runs longer than every previous Clash LP combined. It would have been better at just forty minutes, but then I probably would have forgotten about it completely by now.

“Did you ever notice, the only one in A Christmas Carol with any character is Scrooge? Marley is a whiner who fucked over the world and then hadn’t the spine to pay his dues quietly; Belle, Scrooge’s ex-girlfriend, deserted him when he needed her most; Bob Cratchit is a gutless toady without enough get-up-and-go to assert himself; and the less said about that little treacle-mouth, Tiny Tim, the better.” – Harlan Ellison

“Always winter but never Christmas.” – CS Lewis, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe

“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. For them there is no winter food problem. They have fires and warm clothes. The winter cannot hurt them and therefore increases their sense of cleverness and security. For birds and animals, as for poor men, winter is another matter.” – Richard Adams, Watership Down

“The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.” – Jay Leno

“Dear Winter Man, I hope this Chrimbus is a better Chrimbus for me than last Chrimbus” – Steve Brule, Tim and Eric: Awesome Show, Great Job!

“No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That’s the only way to keep the roads clear.” – Greg Kincaid

“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.” – George Carlin