Lawrence.com

Some memes, unlike gerbils and pop stars, just won’t die. The shred video is such a meme. It overdubs over-serious rock stars with horrid covers of their work to create a crap casserole layered with irony, limp solos, and emasculated pomposity.

The shred video was pioneered by a gent from Finland who goes by StSanders. Way back in the Jesus riding a wooly mammoth days of 2007, he made a series of intentionally awful gee-tar solos that took the sturm und piss out of Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen and other such phallocentric ax spankers. Try to imagine Andy Rooney on mescaline attempting to play Guitar Hero (imagine it...do it! You know it makes sense on some instinctual level that frightens you), and you’ll get the idea.

Just like any good meme, it’s mutated and grown beyond its original trappings. The evolution of this winning formula has broadened out to embarrass every member of the band, not just the Malmsteens. Take it like a man, keytarist! Well, considering you have a Casio masculinity repellant strapped around your neck, take it like a genderless thing.

Here now are some of choicest chops from the shred slab.

Radiohead

Interpol

Ozzy (a StSanders original)

Danzig