If Everyone Is A Guitar Hero, Who Could Be A Legend?

By Tim Peterson: 2008-06-20 22:52:17

Let’s take a minute to talk about the youth of America and the future of rock music; the two go hand-in-hand. A giant majority of today’s youth know as much about the history of rock as they do about the history of the electoral system. For all of you government majors that means come November some of them still won’t know the difference between Osama and Obama. But, the problem is worse, horridly, horribly worse. Most do not care to know the history of music. A guitar-thrashing friend of mine, who was lured into playing guitar by the majestic stylings of Tom DeLonge of Blink 182 fame, only knows Bo Diddley as “that guy who died a couple weeks ago, right?”

Now, let’s take into account that come the time you cash your first Social Security check, my friend’s children may not be able to distinguish between a Fender and a Gibson, a Bonham solo and a drum machine loop, acoustic and electric. With the proliferation of today’s computerized music a la Garage Band and ProTools, tomorrow’s Americans may surpass the electronic dependency of today’s artists like Trent Reznor and Kanye West. To quote the bumper sticker found on many a senior’s Civic when I was only a freshman in high school: “Drum machines have no soul.”

Argue, if you wish, for the merit of Reznor and West in the arena of music in the computerized era, I will not fight you, I could not hope to. I will, however, retort that the popularity of video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band will one day lead to the extinction of organic music, that one day, perhaps before the end of the oil crisis, all music will merely be a series of preconfigured sounds customized to one’s ear, that one day Tony Iommi will flip us the bird from his grave as Hendrix rolls over, turning his back to the world. Take for example the upcoming installment in the Guitar Hero franchise, Guitar Hero: World Edition will not only feature Linkin Park but also will allow for the creation of original music using pre-made bass and drum loops and, of course, those damn four Technicolor buttons that will never truly replicate chords and scales. With such “innovations,” will one day every musician be a descendant of Moby? Is that an age you would wish your poor, helpless children to inherit?

RELATED: kanye west, led zeppelin, john bonham, tony iommi, trent reznor, linkin park, moby

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