Gary Clark, Jr.

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I still don't see any Eddie Van Halens or David Gilmours, Jimmy Pages or Ace Frehelys...

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That is because the music has changed from the hard rock blues driven guitar of the seventies. Bands like Radiohead and Arcade Fire don't focus on the "guitar god." Still have Jack White and J. Mascis though.

Kingfish is amazing

Gary Clark is not an especially technically gifted guitar player. He plays tastefully, with lots of feeling, usually over simple derivative progressions with a nice groove to it. It ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He puts out some excellent old school blues rock, but to act like he’s some kind of “god” tier player is just too much.

There’s a lot of insanely great guitarists playing metal right now. Rock n roll just isn’t mainstream music anymore. Mainstream rock/pop is no longer guitar driven, and that which is is rarely very “shreddy”. As such, there’s no media made guitar “rock stars” anymore, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t just insane shredders all over the place.

Check out bands like Polyphia, Coheed & Cambria, Dragon Force, the L.A. Maybe, Protest the Hero, Avenged Sevenfold, etc.

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but live he's a different animal

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Fact

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There’s a lot of insanely great guitarists playing metal right now. Rock n roll just isn’t mainstream music anymore. Mainstream rock/pop is no longer guitar driven, and that which is is rarely very “shreddy”. As such, there’s no media made guitar “rock stars” anymore, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t just insane shredders all over the place.

Check out bands like Polyphia, Coheed & Cambria, Dragon Force, the L.A. Maybe, Protest the Hero, Avenged Sevenfold, etc.

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well put.

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Agreed for studio stuff, but live he's a different animal. He is nowhere near as tame as he is in studio. Maybe not on a god tier, but pretty damn close.

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I saw Gary live in New Orleans last year. He puts on a good show, but I can tell he's not doing anything particularly complicated (he's a heck of a lot better than me, but I, admittedly, suck at guitar ). I have seen Clapton, Yngwie, Paul Gilbert, etc and Gary is like a couple steps above Chris Leblanc as far as the difficulty of what he's playing. I would put Gary below guys like Sonny Landreth and Kenny Neal. Probably more on par with Anders Osborne.

Granted, not one of the guitarists I mentioned suck. They all put on great performances. I can just recognize technique verses tastefulness, and while Gary is a very tasteful and emotive guitar player, he's just an above average technical player. Which is fine, because you don't have to be a God to make awesome sounding music, and most of the best technical guitarists tend to make really dumb and inaccessible music because they're so consumed by asking if they could that they never stop to wonder if they should. Gary only plays the notes he should, which makes him an excellent artist, but he's an overrated instrumentalist.

He's very talented.

I like a few of his songs, but in the grand scheme of guitar driven music, he's kinda boring when it comes to songwriting.

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but gcjr shits all over anders guitar playing abilities. They arent even in the same stratosphere.

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Wouldn’t it be great if we could all be winners by watching them duke it out in an old fashioned guitar duel?

You know, I think what I'm referring to with the "guitar god" term is a player that makes a kid want to pick up the guitar and play, the player on a poster in some kids's bedroom.

Warren Haynes