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 industry™ 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.
