Phoebe Bridgers responds to online overreaction to her guitar smashing

Phoebe Bridgers
(Image credit: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

Maybe we're just extremely rock n' roll here but we're honestly surprised at the level of online brouhaha that followed musician Phoebe Bridgers smashing her Danelectro electric guitar over a speaker wedge during her Saturday Night live debut last week. Ok, we kind of added to it but we were just being a mirror for the musical community here, ok? Now Bridgers herself has commented on on the backlash.

“I’ve always wanted to do it,” Bridgers told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour regarding onstage guitar destruction in a new interview. “And when I mentioned it to the show, they were really excited and they built me this whole monitor that would look like it was exploded even if I wasn’t hitting it that hard. So yeah, just a bucket list thing.”

Fair enough – live music is entertainment, after all. And Bridgers herself added, "It was very fun". Are people like David Crosby getting a bit too po-faced about these things?

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But Bridgers made another valid point about those calling her out for planning such antics.

“People were saying it’s derived or corny,” Bridgers said with a laugh. “And I’m like ‘Well yeah, it’s derived and corny after the first time somebody did it. That’s the whole point.'"

Rob Laing
Guitars Editor, MusicRadar

I'm the Guitars Editor for MusicRadar, handling news, reviews, features, tuition, advice for the strings side of the site and everything in between. Before MusicRadar I worked on guitar magazines for 15 years, including Editor of Total Guitar in the UK. When I'm not rejigging pedalboards I'm usually thinking about rejigging pedalboards.