There's A Rock Band Playing?
No silly, it’s Rock Band the Video Game.
One of the bars in my neighborhood has installed the video game and lets people play on Tuesday nights. It used to be karaoke. People got tired of karaoke, the staff more than anyone, I’m guessing. Two things worry me about this game.
First, it’s similar to the nostalgic exercise of playing old ‘hit’ songs to evoke a golden past. Just as with karaoke, you align yourself with the pleasant memory and live vicariously through the cultural product of the recorded song. Not all of this is a bad thing. But, I’m beginning to sense the pathos of it: People taking excessive association with a life they never lived, instead of doing something new, creative, and possibly just as fun. By this method we abdicate. The future is less rich. I don’t worry too much though - I imagine future teenage rebellions to invigorate culture in our wake. This is another wave of the stultifying effects of reproduction on our relationship to the works of art.
Second, and more disturbing is the bad feeling I get from all of the members of this video game family: “Dance, Dance Revolution” and “Guitar Hero” have been popular in Japan first. The games had to be ‘localized’ for American shores by stocking them with the pop songs from our charts. Every one of these games operates on the same basic principle: Simon Says. When I was a kid, we had the electronic Simon game with the four big buttons that lit up in a sequence that you had to repeat… In my mind, all the fancy guitar and drum controllers and the silly rock avatars playing on their virtual stage on the monitor do not change the basic principle at work here: You do what the machine tells you. Your score quantifies how well you obey. Is this the future? People sure look like they’re having fun doing it. “The first Matrix was designed to be a perfect world - Where everyone would be happy…”
And, the funny thing about the songs themselves: They’re not all necessarily popular hits - they’re specifically considered ‘hard rock’. This makes sense with the Black Sabbath or Soundgarden. But then you get to the grey areas - Weezer makes some sense, but R.E.M.? I could go on. We all have our personal favorites. I suspect there is some interest in crushing this out of us, though. Marketing is certainly much easier if we all like the same stuff for the same reasons.
Well, I’ve never played. My friends have tried to push me into it. It probably is fun, I won’t doubt that. Most nights when I’ve seen it, I get a real serious craving to go home and play my real guitar. I’ve even said it out loud. My reclusive habits are not the issue. It would be fun to jam with some people on other real instruments. I’m just not sure I know many people who do play. The game has levels you can set individually for the four players. It simplifies the task by presenting more or less decimated ‘fake-book’ sequences you have to match. The microphone checks your pitch and ‘gate times’ to score. There are bonuses for improv in clearly marked sections.
Posted by Evan Bittner Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:53:00 GMT
