Why Rock Band matters

I know a lot of people reading this blog don’t care about video games, but you might find this interesting

My copy of Beatles Rock Band arrived today, to go with the dirt-cheap 360 I got yesterday. Don’t care overly for The Beatles but it’s the only way to get the far superior Rock Band 2 drums in the UK at the moment. I loved Guitar Hero on the PS2. I remember loving it as a concept with Guitar Freaks on the PS1, where all you could play was bizarre j-pop on import. It’s a fun party game, and I’m not going to deny I’ll happily spend an hour of the evening playing it on my own to try get five stars on some song or other. But there’s more to it than that.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been huge success, especially with the ‘youth’ of today, and that’s something that really matters and is really worth thinking about. It’s generalising for sure, but young people today engage with music differently to even my generation. It started with Napster, it currently ends now with Spotify and Bittorrent: there’s so much music out there, legally or otherwise, that the music collections of young people today are ridiculously huge. I’ve spoken to people that download every top 40 album, most get listened to once, if that, but they have a massive archive just sitting there. People will listen to random playlists on Spotify instead of the radio. Taken together with the loss of Top Of The Pops and Later turning shit, this has an interesting effect. Young people, these days, are exposed to far more music than we ever were. In some ways, this is a great thing. But it’s also a great loss. Remember those ‘difficult’ albums? You bought them as you loved that one single but really didn’t get the rest of the songs on the CD? But dammit we paid £12.99 for it we’re going to listen to it at least nine more times. Sometimes it turned out that it was shit all along, but many times the songs were hiding their true beauty and brilliance behind an off-putting façade that you had to work past.

But would we have done all that if we didn’t pay for it and every other song ever released was available to us? And so many young people today exist in this world of ephemeral musical tourism, never listening to a song more than once, letting the music wash over and through them but never truly engaging with it. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs to be honest.

But on the other hand, there is Rock Band.

Rock Band says “you’re not going to pass this song on Hard on the first go, you’ll need at least three. And if you’re even thinking of getting five stars on it be ready to spend at least half an hour playing it over and over again.”
And suddenly these people that wouldn’t normally listen to a song twice are listening to a single track on repeat for ages in an attempt to master playing the guitar solo on a plastic instrument. They’re listening to it. They’re engaging with it. And what’s more they’re even more engaged with it than we were. When you’re playing Rock Band, it’s just you and the music. You can’t play Rock Band and cook dinner, or play Rock Band and browse the web. On harder songs it’s difficult to play Rock Band and have a conversation. All those usual distractions when you put a CD on are gone, the game demands you engage with the music.

And of course, what you are doing in the game impacts upon the music itself. Unless you’re a musician, there’ll be certain things in songs you just don’t pick up on. You won’t realise how elegant a certain guitar solo is, or spot a lovely bit of symmetry between two riffs, or a strangely different drum beat. But the Rock Band player will. Because he has to learn how to play them, albeit in an abstracted way. He’s not only now paying attention to the song, but also to it’s structure, it’s form.

I really wish I was a massive Beatles fan because if I were, Beatles Rock Band might be the single greatest thing ever. I’d be happy for years if a James Rock Band was ever released.

Yes, Rock Band is a fun game, and a laugh with mates. But it’s also an entirely new way of experiencing music, and one that stands apart from MTV-isation of modern music, of it’s relegation into a background track for our lives, one that says “no, you will fucking pay attention to these songs because music fucking well matters”.

Dean Love : 29 Oct 2009 23:29 |  Tags: Games Music |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem