I came across this while browsing though YouTube, bouncing from one classical guitar piece to another. Leo Brouwer, the Cuban composer, is one of my all-time favorites, but his pieces tend to be either hit or miss for me. “El Decameron Negro” is one of my all-time favorites, for example, ever, but some of his other, more dissonant compositions (“Canticum” comes to mind) don’t appeal to me much at all.

And now onto my rant. The principal flaw with this piece may be that it is a little too self-consciously pretty. It is, perhaps, trying a little too hard to be noticed, liked, wanted. Indeed, the first time I heard it was in this ridiculous video by Tatyana Ryzhkova. Don’t get me wrong—she plays very well indeed—but it’s hard not to laugh at the soft focus lens, the bedroom eyes, the fire in the fireplace, the rustic cottage, the makeup and hair. The video is a fairly transparent attempt at seduction, and there are a ton of similar videos out there, forming a weird kind of YouTube fetish video: pretty women playing classical guitar. As my examples show, these women come predominantly, but not exclusively, from the Slavic world. And it’s clear that there is a substantial audience for this kind of “guitar porn.”

To be totally clear, some of these players are the very best out there—Ana Vidovic, for example, is one of the very best players in the world. And good-looking players, both men and women, quite correctly try to capitalize on their looks to find success, and I can’t really blame them. Most of the videos above are fine, but some enter some pretty silly, over the top terrain (Ryzhkova, Lykhacheva). Silly enough where I can’t really watch or listen, because I’m too appalled by the fact that the video (Beneke) includes shots of the guitarist in tight jeans at the farmer’s market, bending over to pick out fruit, for literally no reason whatsoever.

Anyway, I blame Liona Boyd for all of this. I had long found the album above, from 1990, one of the most ridiculous and vaguely offensive classical music album covers—the f***ing white horse, the field of flowers, the flowing hair, the flimsy, translucent shift about to fall off, and most of all, the gratuitously extended leg. I am pleased to announce, however, that the Millennium Collection re-issue of the same album found an even more gratuitous picture from the same photo shoot, one that was no doubt rejected initially because her entire left boob is visible. Way to go, CBS! Sideboob! W00t!

This doesn’t have much to do with the Brouwer piece, which is pretty, and nice, and kind of a guaranteed crowd pleaser, but is perhaps trying a little too hard to be noticed.