In YngwieWorld, Yngwie is the boss. He’s like the boss at the end of the level, who breathes purple fire and executes devastatingly precise phrygian dominant runs. His very perm is deadly to behold. Can you beat him? Have you collected enough Spinning Medallions?

Yngwie’s stuff is bloody good fun to play, and great fun to imitate too (it doesn’t take long to get the gist). I don’t have a vibrato that wide, just like I don’t sit down on public benches with my legs at a 120 degree angle to each other (is this physically possible? in leather trousers?). There will never be an English Yngwie. There is undoubtedly already a Japanese Yngwie, however; and maybe an Indian Yngwie too.

Here are some reasons to celebrate Yngwie that have nothing to do with the vagaries of cool, or the recent fad for so bad it’s good inverted-inverted-snobbery:

• Melody. He writes a good ‘un. Quick, hum me a Greg Howe tune…
• Tone, clarity, emotion. As shredders go, Yngwie has always had a raw, present, exciting sound.
• There is more to Yngwie than the signature licks everyone copped off him in the eighties…
• …but he still plays those licks, because they’re still worth playing. You don’t complain when BB King plays something you’ve heard BB King play before, do you?
• Yngwie is actually a great improviser - the fact that he improvises within a fairly narrowly-defined musical space shouldn’t detract from this. A lot of jazz guys rely on a few basic harmonic rules of thumb to get around, too.
• Yngwie is still Yngwie - heroically undiscouraged, he’s never fallen into the trap of trying to make something his detractors will approve of.

So the short answer is: maybe he isn’t the Boss, but Yngwie is definitely Boss.