It's been 3 days after the release of the track, weeks after the announcement, and years after work on it started, and still, not a single guitar YouTuber mentioned Mark's "historic recording" even though it involved a lot of musicians people like to obsess over on YouTube save maybe for John Mayer. It looks like nobody even had it in the pipeline.
Each one of these YouTubers released a video right after Rolling Stone's mess of 250 best guitar players list was dropped without warning, making pretty much every guitarist on Earth know about this stupid list and giving them millions of views. I wonder who will be the first to break the mould and finally talk about Mark as the guy is seemingly blacklisted in the multi-million guitar YouTubers clique.
As somebody who's checking the pulse of this rather obnoxious YouTube guitar community pretty often, I am astonished at how criminally underrated Mark still is. Wake up, people.
Mark is not underrated. Everywhere I look he's highly praised as a guitar player with an exceptional touch and taste. The problem is that he hasn't really brought anything exciting to the table in terms of guitar playing for the last 30+ years. Which is by choice. The most interesting stuff guitarwise happened during the first four DS albums, and that has been discussed to death long time ago. A steadily decreasing emphasis on the guitar and a string of solo albums that are very similar; not exactly suprising why Mark isn't a hot topic in the YouTube community. Even as a long time fan, I can barely maintain interest myself.
Yes, "by choice" is a good way to put it, "underrated" is bad. Mark is definitely happy to be less prominent and discussed, this I understand, but people's choice of not featuring his music more often I honestly do not understand sometimes. You can say this thing of "not bringing anything exciting and new to the table" about a lot of artists, but it doesn't stop everybody from talking about them, whether the artists themselves want it or not.
Mark, on the other hand, for most people is just "The Dire Straits guy who played this riff". And the riff in question is either 'Sultans Of Swing' or 'Money For Nothing', without exception, sometimes comically so. Even Rick Beato's latest video on Mark to date, which got over a million views, by the way, was exactly about this. It was titled "Did Dire Straits Create the Coolest Riff Ever?". Dire Straits, not even Mark Knopfler! LOL!
I find Mark's post-DS guitar work more soulful, intricate, interesting, sophisticated and refined, he grows as a songwriter and as a guitar player all the time. And you'd be hard-pressed to find an artist who's as consistent, as prolific and as successful of a songwriter ON TOP of a great guitar player as he is. Heck, Mark's body of work is enough on its own to keep somebody like me going for son-to-be 10 years on YouTube, it's a treasure trove of fun.
Songs like 'Postcards From Paraguay', 'Sailing To Philadelphia', 'Baloney Again', 'Privateering', 'Get Lucky', 'The Ragpicker's Dream' and many others are amazingly well-written, shockingly beautiful, extremely interesting guitar-wise AND provide a great listening experience, cherished by a lot of people evidently by Mark's success of playing it live. And all this while completely blinding most people with the flashy guitar playing in early Dire Straits.
