The Fake Band Game

Rock Band is coming for Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 by year's end, and a thousand fake bands will soon spring up along side the thousands of shitty real ones.

Building on the success of Guitar Hero, Viacom, the new owner of game creator Harmonix, will partner its MTV brand with game industry juggernaut Electronic Arts to distribute the game. Along with its four peripherals, it will retail for $200. Start saving, suckers.

Employees and marketing stooges say, "I've always wanted to be in a rock band. Now I am." almost in the same breath as "playing music is one of the most blissful feelings life has to offer, but it's too hard to learn how." I guess we should be thanking them for the opportunity to hit buttons rhythmically, which is far more rewarding than actually playing music. And what's better is the soft sales the game will incur. Over the next year, MTV will make hundreds of additional tunes available for purchase and download — hit singles, obscure cuts, and sometimes entire albums to add to the game. Now the kitsch factor is endless!

Harmonix exec Alex Rigopulos thinks it could help to introduce new artists, the way MTV did in its heyday. "Sitting down and watching music was a new thing — it changed the mass market's notion of what music entertainment was," he says. "The instruments reprogram you. The urge you're going to feel when the Killers release a new album is the urge to feel the songs as a player. In five years, this is how people are going to consume the music they love."

Are you fucking high?

Playing a guitar shaped version of Simon doesn't make you a musician. And when an 8 year old smoked the guitarist from Mastodon in Guitar Hero, you have to see that gamesmanship and musicianship are not even remotely the same. Plastic controllers are never going to "reprogram" you or your ability to enjoy music, and mashing buttons will never equal the impact of hearing and feeling a song. And the other major factor missing in the whole thing is that music is about creation and creativity. The expression of writing or playing a song is nothing like tapping out cues in sync to cartoony animation on the screen, because it's actually something.

Congrats to all the nerds and dorks who have neither the patience or skill to really learn an instrument who will now think they know what it's like to fill a van full of equipment and drive to San Francisco for a gig, or to cram four guys into an 8x13 converted garage in the middle of summer to practice.