If you were playing Rock band, but as an actual rock band, are you a Rock Band rock band or just a rock band?
Yes, it’s an obsequious sentence. But the meta-reality of the meta experience is actually very real.
Accompanied on fake guitars and drums by three Web programmers who drove in from the refinery-dotted coastal suburb of El Segundo, Hsuan launches in as a smoke machine puffs nearby.
Well, smoke machines are pretty hackneyed. But
Concert tracking magazine Pollstar said 2,900 fans paid $25 to $36 each to rock the Event Center at San Jose State University on Oct. 11, one stop on a 26-stop tour by four bands — Panic at the Disco, Dashboard Confessional, the Plain White Ts and The Cab — who performed between renditions of songs played by local “Rock Band” contest winners.
So it’s worth real actual money. Really?
More after the break.
Personally, I like video game music, not music video games. The typical Gen-X guy who gets misty-eyed at a concert band Mario Brothers performance, or who laugh/cries at hearing Tetris (the original, from Mir, on the Mac Plus version) theme songs as non-diegetic music in feature films.
Electronic virtual controller drums? Wireless pretend electric guitars!? When I watch friends playing these games, they have the glazed-eye look of…real actual rockers with a glazed-eye gaze.
…hang on, where does the real rockstar begin and the Rock Star end? I have this horrible suspicion it’s a scam: that yet again, big bad music industryâ„¢ has found a way to eke more dollars out of the consumer to prop up a 1930s-era business model.
But they’re not. The artist is, somewhat, fighting back. With the help of the game-coder companies and all-walks-of-life gamers.
Do you play e-music games? What platforms do you play them on? Leave a comment about the most incongruous locale in which you’ve ever played Tetris, and you’ll win a cool CD.
There’re many reasons why I’m probably not qualified to comment (not sure what the rules say about winning more than once – radio industry has a term for it though… “Prize Pig”).
Probably not *really* qualified to comment, being not more than a casual gamer at best and having never *actually* played one of these (as I affectionately refer to them) ‘pretend music’ games. But I *have* been a rock star. Of sorts. Come to think of it, my rock star past likely has more Rock Star than I would care to admit. I earned a fairly respectable living, for over half a decade, playing… in a covers band. And not just any covers band – a *two-piece* covers band. That is, anything that the pair of us couldn’t physically play live, was pre-programmed (“sequenced”) and played out of a machine. Oh, *I* did the programming (drums, bass, strings, Clav, B3, EP, M-O-U-S-E), but at the end of the day (or drunken punter’s night) we were more like Rock Stars than rock stars.
But we were paid (in those days, handsomely) for it. *We* were the stars, not the machine playing the vast majority of what was emanating from the hired P.A. system. It’s about the people, people! If you can believe it – you can become it. Like all good covers bands (and originals for that matter) – start in the comfort of your own living room. Then take it beyond your residential confines into the public arena. If you’re sufficiently entertaining, eventually you’ll be able to convince someone to pay you for it. I did.
As for Tetris and the incongruity of player locale… I’m not *really* qualified to comment. ;-)