St. Paul and Guitar Hero

I’m not a video game guy. I know many adults, all men, who spend an inordinate amount of time playing them. They get into it with a fascination I remember having for Atari 2600 when I was eleven, only with a more obsessive approach. When I was eleven, I didn’t have a salary that would buy me any game I wanted, nor did I play for eight hours a day like some kids I knew. Some of the grown men I know who indulge in video games seem so sad to me. They squander years of their lives with it, wasting away in virtual worlds, preferring to atrophy in the one in which they live. They have few strong relationships and seem to surround themselves with enough juvenile distractions to keep them from really looking themselves in the eye. It isn’t that I necessarily believe myself to be superior, since we all have our shortcomings, but I’m honestly glad I’m not one of them.

The latest game that some of my friends have embraced is one that many of them thought I would enjoy. It’s called Guitar Hero. You get to play this game, which is loaded with classic rock tunes, and pretend you’re playing guitar for points. I don’t know any more about the details, but it has been expanded to other instruments as well. They sell these plastic guitars that are used as controllers for the game. I saw a television commercial with a guy and his little toy fake guitar surrounded by chicks. (Trust me, chicks don’t even necessarily go for guys who really play guitar, let alone the sad little guys that pretend to…) As a guitar player, I have only one word for the whole thing. Lame. It’s just so lame. I spent a lot of time learning to play a number of instruments. Spending my leisure time doing the hi-tech equivalent of strumming a tennis racket like a five year old would be enough to give me pause about my life. It’s just so lame. I don’t see the value in perpetual adolescence, but our culture tends to encourage it. It sure makes some people a lot of bread. I think it has led to a generation of men who are very nearly spiritually bereft. It’s their own fault, since everyone has to decide what to do with his life, but it’s so awful to watch. There’s no power consumer quite like a complacent and spiritually bereft power consumer. How ugly.

I’m reminded of that bit Saint Paul wrote in Corinthians, which Todd Rundgren paraphrased in his lyric for “Real Man.”

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.”

I think Paul was onto something, but it wasn’t the true nature of man, at least not the true nature of man bereft of spirit.

In the earliest days of radio, someone got around to wondering how they were gonna pay for all of the programming they wanted to produce, if everyone could just tune in and listen for free. Someone had the idea of producing a commercial. It was here in New York. The commercial was for an appliance of some sort, I believe. The day after the commercial aired, orders and demand for the appliance exploded and the company couldn’t keep up. Soon everyone got in on the commercial idea and our system of commercial broadcast media was born. The inevitable saturation occurred and making your product stand out became more important than ever. The marketing approach that still applies developed. I don’t know who the quote was from, but it went something like this: Don’t sell them your product. Sell them their hopes, their dreams and their fears and they’ll buy whatever it is you’re selling.

Is anything more perfect than Guitar Hero to illustrate this point? You can pretend to be the star you’ll never be. You don’t even have to learn the guitar. You can pretend and even gain the accolades of your friends if you do well at the game. It’s brilliant and apocalyptic in an Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, rat-in-a-maze sort of way.

If you look at it like that…

But I don’t. Originally, I was repulsed by the idea of Guitar Hero. As a musician, I found it to be stupid, juvenile and like I said before, lame. I’ve discovered however, that it wasn’t my musicianship that was driving that impression at all. It was the personality trait that brought me to learn how to play guitar in the first place. I’m a dreamer. I poured my heart into something I believed in when I learned how to play an instrument, myself. It felt good to be able to make those sounds. When I played the bass or guitar, I felt unmistakably that it was what I was born to do and that I had been given a special gift. I wanted to be a star too. Still do. But no matter how well my records sell, I know myself and my life is richer for it.

Making music is something so wonderfully human. Requiring both the right and left sides of the brain to work together, playing music can tap the full essence of human potential. Maybe that’s why it makes me feel so alive. No video game can give you that. The way I see it, it can only take it away. No video game company can ever sell that to me. No one, I mean no one, gets to mess with that corner of my heart.

But Guitar Hero isn’t about music. It just amplifies the fantasy of rock stardom as an archetype. Guitar Hero isn’t the end of civilization or modern musicianship. Anyone I knew who picked up a guitar just to be a star never ended up playing very well anyway. The music, even though it’s been moved off the radio and handed to independent artists as an underground art, is safe. Guitar Hero has just made our musicians’ club even more exclusive. Maybe one day, music will come back to the forefront and a slightly wiser people will know the difference between musicianship and stardom. Who knows? It’s possible then that musicianship and stardom will actually cross paths again. Or not. I think both scenarios have their place.