A question asked on Quora: "Kanye West has stated, “Music with guitars is inherently worse than music without guitars-- Do you agree?"
This is an interesting question about an interesting statement. We shouldn’t take anything he says at face value. He has the social capital to say just about anything with credibility. It’s an old artist trick.
Rick Beato did an episode on this a while back. He played possible guitar parts on some new top 40. The songs didn’t need guitar parts, and didn’t make them better in my opinion, any more than a violin part. But Kanye can turn around tomorrow and do songs with guitars on them. Whether they work is not the point. Again, it’s primarily artistic behavior: Shoot the arrow and paint the explanation for shooting it around it
Very often I put guitars on things and they don't work either for the songs, or a group of songs, but I can isolate and treat those tracks in a different way, give them a new title, and it's an entirely new piece.
But initially I never really know what music needs when I'm writing, improvising, or simply wood-shedding. Sometimes it takes a long time to "decorate" it in the proper way(s). We have to find out what the music needs.
What I've always liked to do is reverse-engineer the music to see if there's something in the original ideas which can be translated to become something completely different, such as solo piano music based on something originally electronic and had nothing to do with acoustic music--and perhaps even militates against it. Or the reverse: taking recordings of acoustic pieces and making them electronic.
There's an interesting corollary with what some people do with members of old buildings made from very old trees. It's a kind of "salvage" operation--or a form of "wood-shedding":
"New York City is a huge repository of old timbers, probably the biggest in the country. It's an amazing resource for science..These forests don't exist anymore--they're inside the buildings."
Inside every piece of art there are original essences or magic that has to be carved out.
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