Saxophone Graffiti/Urban Art

In my quest to find interesting saxophone graffiti/urban art, I happened across this shot on Flickr. It was shot in the Netherlands in 2008.

Hengelo 07

Photography by Bob Ramsak / piran café   Source: Flickr

If this doesn’t feed the stereotypes of sax vs. guitar players, I don’t know what does. Sax players (at least in the eyes of this artist) are seen as suit-wearing, white men with glasses, who suffer from male pattern baldness—likely due to middle age.

Guitar players on the other hand, while still white men, are younger (if their hair patterns are any indication), appear to wear some kind of stage outfit—this one seems to have spines running down this back—and play with a stoned look on their face. Mind you, this painting’s stereotyping would have been much more effective if the guitar in his hands had been electric, rather than acoustic.

To see how accurate this stereotype is, I did a Google image search for Guitar Player magazine. Here’s a screen shot of what I came up with today.

Yup, mostly white men. And while there is some male pattern baldness, there is also lots of hair there to cover it. 😈

I also did a search for the Saxophone Journal. These were the top search results…

You gotta’ give the Saxophone Journal credit, because at least they have more women on the cover. The (mostly white) men that do adorn the front page, do sport lots of male pattern baldness.

While there wasn’t a suit to be seen on the covers of Guitar Player, and the only glasses were sunglasses, the Saxophone Journal is peppered with suit-wearing horn players. And while the sax players wore no sunglasses, eye glasses were not uncommon.

Yup, let’s face it, when compared to guitar players, we sax players certainly appear more serious and studious. Furthermore, our instruments as a rule are associated with jazz, not with rock, which is what the electric guitar is associated with. Jazz is more the music of academics—read: “the older folks”—not the younger crowd, like rock is.

Am I over-thinking this? Perhaps. Or perhaps I’m not developing my argument enough. However you see it, stereotype theory is an interesting lens through which to view the above saxophone graffiti/urban art photo that Bob Ramsak took.