Guitars Don't Make Heroes

By Broadside Life in A. Minor Columnist, Andy Minor. Photo courtesy of Flickr user nick kulas.

So this past week Activision released upon us yet another Guitar Hero game. Anyone wondering how I found the time to write this article, considering I have so many awesome rock hits to play through? Well, somehow I managed it, and I'll tell you how: Guitar Hero, along with Rock Band for that matter, bores me. A lot. And I'm not just saying this because I'm not very good at it, I'm saying it because it used to be fun and they ruined it. The first Guitar Hero was a thing to behold; a unique blend of music, video games, social activity and classic songs. The new guitar hero is an abysmal display of marketing and fad culture, showcasing what happens when excessive popularity is met by unreasonable amounts of money and fueled by competition from an equally despicable competitor.

Last season South Park had an episode where the kids become obsessed with Guitar Hero and looked like idiots because they put so much stress on being good at it. This episode pretty much illustrated my biggest problem with this game: if you're between the ages of 10 and 25, you're expected to be good at Guitar Hero. I've been the subject of ridicule because I can't play on hard, let alone expert. YouTube is littered with recordings of people showing off their epic run of “XYZ” on expert difficulty. I remember last semester in the Johnson Center I sat and ate dinner while a Guitar Hero competition was going on. People were growing sweaty in head-to-head matches, with choruses of cheers and boos emoting from the dense crowd as “notes” were missed and “solos” were nailed. There were tons of people watching, while at the frequent concerts in Harris Theater, the Bistro, Jazzman's and any of the other campus venues audiences remain sparse. It seemed as though the public would rather see average people play a fake instrument than extraordinary people play real ones.

Then we get to the songs themselves. I've watched the entire Guitar Hero enterprise move from classics like Jimi Hendrix's “Spanish Castle Magic” to Blink 182's “Dammit.” Unique classics like Judas Priest's “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'” got replaced with hackneyed hits like the Eagles' “Hotel California.” Songs that I discovered when I was 13 flood the playlists from these games, and I have to sit and listen to people adulate about “Carry on Wayward Son” and “Purple Haze.” These songs have been around for nearly 40 years; why did it take a video game to get people into them?

What boils my blood the hottest about this Guitar Hero/Rock Band pandemic are the recent releases of “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith” and “AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack.” Here are two bands, well past their prime, that have put up enough cash to get their names caught up in a blatant marketing stunt. Metallica is coming out with its own Guitar Hero sometime in 2009; I could think of nothing more detestable than knowing I am shoving money in Metallica's pocket by buying their horrible game. This is a band that has done nothing but ignore their fans for the past fifteen years, and yet people are going to pay good money for the petty sensation of clicking through their best songs with an overpriced video game controller.

Maybe this whole rant does nothing but prove that I was born 30 years too late, but do I not have a point that playing actual instruments is better than Guitar Hero? Am I wrong for thinking that Guitar Hero and Rock Band have turned into nothing more than a couple of marketing sluts who whore themselves out to the former giants of rock and roll? Should I not expect people to want to discover new music rather than click through the same list of hits over and over again? I know I'm probably more musically astute than the average listener, but I don't think money spent on Guitar Her or Rock Band is money well spent. I don't think time spent on either of the two is time well spent, either. This time and money would be more beneficial if it was spent going to concerts, supporting bands, buying new albums, buying and learning new instruments and being musical. Guitar Hero isn't music, Rock Band isn't music, stop giving it credit for being music.