By the time you pick up this paper (or read it online), millions of children, adolescents, adults, and seniors worldwide will have congregated in dens, dorms, living rooms, and basements for one shared purpose: to play Beatles songs. This past Wednesday (09/09/09) marks the release of The Beatles: Rock Band—the first music-based simulator to feature tracks from the Liverpudlians’ illustrious discography—as well as both mono and stereo CD remasters of the Beatles entire oeuvre. Needless to say, the event serves as yet another victory lap for the most popular band in America (one of the top four favorites in all age groups according to the latest Pew Research Center findings), and many organizations—Capitol/EMI, Harmonix, and the Beatles themselves—are poised to amass lucrative sums of money thanks to widespread nostalgia, audiophilia, and, in Rock Band’s case, a love for vicarious entertainment.
Granted, Guitar Hero may have broken the dam in the music-meets-gaming market (the series has sold over 29 million copies), but Rock Band has now seemingly laid the golden egg of button-mashing, karaoke, and cross-generational appeal. Who cares if your Mom has no hand-eye coordination? All she has to do is carry the tune of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and she becomes an instant participant in the Rock Band fantasy. Just imagine: You, your sister, Dad, and neighbor each taking on the epic solos of “The End” this Thanksgiving, while your Mom, brother, and aunt all sing along in perfect three-part harmony, cooing that wonderful adage: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
Yes, it’s pretty easy to scoff at the idea. After all, no one’s actually playing music, right? Mute the television, and suddenly, “Back in the USSR” devolves into rapid-fire rat-tat-tats of plastic and an overzealous Paul McCartney impersonator struggling to find the right key. Surely this time could be better spent learning to play a real instrument rather than staring glassy-eyed at a bunch of digital avatars, no?
Maybe. Long before Simon Cowell made America feel too self-conscious about its ability to sing, there was a time when families would gather around a piano (or the banjo) to sing songs together on a regular basis. In 1906, when the phonograph was still emerging as an affordable household fixture, the famous D.C. march composer John Philip Sousa wrote an essay entitled “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” protesting the machine’s ascendance:
“When music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic [sic], it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely,” he wrote. “Under such conditions … there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant.”
Indeed, Sousa foresaw an indelible effect of recorded music: the enormous rift that separates the “professional executant” and the listener. And the Beatles, for their own part, only added to that rift during their careers.
So don’t knock The Beatles: Rock Band, since it can only serve to lessen the gap. Think of it as a new form of musical amateurism—the game may not teach chords or scales, but it will teach guitarists and drummers about rhythm and singers about pitch. It’s also a chance for families and friends to enjoy each other’s company through communal performance, a practice that’s far less common than it should be.
In the words of Dexter Holland, “The world needs wannabes.” So instead of spending $299 on a box set of mono remasters, why not spend $60 to buy The Beatles: Rock Band? At the very worst, that still leaves $239 to go out and buy your first guitar.
Relive the glory days; email Dan at dcook@georgetownvoice.com.
