When a major artist gets spotted with a guitar, the guitar is usually expensive. A limited run. A signature model with her face laser-etched on the headstock and a retail price that makes you put your own guitar down and go lie on the floor for a minute.
Janelle Monáe went a different direction. Teasing her new musical era, she's been photographed with an Epiphone Les Paul SL — one of the most affordable guitars Epiphone makes, retailing around $149. Bolt-on neck, two single-coil pickups, the absolute minimum of control hardware. It is, by any measure, a beginner guitar.
Good.
The cult of expensive gear is exhausting. It tells beginners that they need a $2,000 guitar to be taken seriously, and it tells everyone else that whatever they're already playing isn't quite enough. It is, when you step back, a deeply stupid story to keep telling — and a Grammy-nominated artist using a $149 Epiphone to announce her next chapter is a quiet middle finger to the whole thing. Monáe is a multi-instrumentalist, the choice is clearly intentional, and "intentional" with a budget guitar is way more interesting than "default" with an expensive one.
The Les Paul SL has been around in various forms since the late 1980s. It doesn't do everything a full-fat Les Paul does — the pickups are single-coil, there's no set neck, the resonance is what it is. But it sounds like a guitar. It plays like a guitar. A cheap guitar with a well-chosen pick and a thoughtful approach to tone can do more than most people expect. Monáe, apparently, knows this.
The new era framing is still vague — no album title, no release date, just images. But she picked her props deliberately, and the guitar in her hands is not an accident. Epiphone was founded in 1873 and became a Gibson subsidiary in 1957. They've spent decades making playable instruments accessible to people who can't or won't spend Gibson prices. Nice to see that ethos get a moment in the spotlight.
If you've been waiting for permission to start on a budget guitar: a Grammy-nominated artist just gave it to you. Your barre chords will still suck regardless of what the headstock says. Might as well suck on something affordable while you fix them.