The Ontology of the Dive-Bomb.

Boston has a lot of dive-bombs. You know what I'm talking about. It's that sound that a guitarist makes by scraping his pick along the length of the three bottom strings. Sounds like a jet engine. Do it with the right pick, the right strings, slap a little 'verb on it, and you'll have the Londoners running for the basement. Most electric guitar players have occasion to do one of these things every once in awhile. But Boston is loaded with 'em. "Peace of Mind", especially.

Now, I had endeavored to count the number of dive-bombs in this song, thinking it would be, oh, six or seven. But I was immediately struck, while listening, with the classic ontological problem. How does one individuate a dive-bomb? Especially with stereo sound, counting dive-bombs becomes tricky: does a single pick-scraping count as a dive-bomb, even when it's just part of a multi-dive-bomb stereo attack? Or is that whole package to be counted as a single dive-bomb?

So, like all good metaphysicians, I decided to multiply the number of entities in order to make individuation easier. I call an entity a "dive-bomb" when it is a single pick scraping across a set of strings, or the aural equivalent (so this could be the same pick-scraping as occurred earlier in the song, but copied-and-pasted; two dive bombs, one pick scraping, one aural equivalent to the earlier pick-scraping). I call something a "dive-bomb event" when one or more dive-bombs are used to achieve one coherent effect in the course of a song, say, when two stereo dive-bombs are used to signal the shift from verse to chorus. In "Peace of Mind", it's unclear whether most of the dive-bomb events cover two or three dive-bombs. For the sake of being conservative, I'll assume two. (Although I think there's a decent aural case to be made that the dive-bomb events go "L-R-L" rather than just "L-R".) In "Peace of Mind" I count five dive-bomb events, comprising a total of nine individual dive-bombs. There is one dive-bomb event that has me a little puzzled. It occurs at 2:48, and there are what sound like dueling guitars playing the main melody in thirds. But after this line it sounds as though both of the guitars do a dive bomb, one into the right, one into the left, which would be a two dive-bomb dive-bomb event. Nevertheless, they're in unison - and it's one of the characteristic features of this record that one part often sounds as though, rather than being focused in the center channel, it's coming out of both the left and right channel at the same time. So, again, for the sake of conservatism, I've counted it as a one dive-bomb dive-bomb event, although that could be altered. Without those conservative guesses, the grand dive-bomb total would rise to 14.

Which is a shitload of dive-bombs.