Living the dream? Guitar Hero III
"This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band," fanzine Sideburns exhorted at the dawn of British punk in 76, above a crude diagram of some frets marked with what looked like squashed bugs. In reality, rather than making rock seem like a doddle, just looking at those pictures is enough to make your fingers ache. Who would want to thrash their way through a typical 30 minute punk set with their digits splayed uncomfortably like that? Maybe the squashed bugs were supposed to be blood splatters.
And yet the guitar has always had an allure that goes beyond that of other musical instruments. Freud might have attempted to hide his deep-rooted sexual issues by claiming that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but it would be hard to claim that a guitar is ever just a guitar. Generations of teenagers have been able to summon up something close to the same magic, without all that manual dexterity, just by waving their hands in the air.
Last year air guitar somehow managed to drag itself out of teen bedrooms and into the weekend supplements via the surprisingly funny Air Guitar Nation film. Arch-exponent and ex air guitar world champ Zac "The Magnet" Monro even claimed that air guitar had many advantages over the real thing, or "there guitar" as air guitarists sniffily call it.
"You can't steal an air guitar," he announced grandly. "There's no product, you can't own it, there's nothing to sell. An abstract idea is probably the strongest thing there is."
But he spoke too soon. The hugely popular Guitar Hero game, in which you press buttons on a toy guitar instead of plucking strings, has already blurred the boundaries between the two "disciplines". And it was announced last month that the makers of the Guitar Hero game have licensed their name to a toy called Guitar Hero Air Rocker.
Essentially it's just a magnetic guitar pick and a belt buckle with an amplifier. You move the pick past the buckle, just like in Air Guitar, but, unlike in Air Guitar it makes a noise. That's right - for $30 you can buy your own Air Guitar.
Isn't there something a bit tragic about this? When the developers came up with Guitar Hero they were gambling that a lot of people would prefer to spend their time pretending to play an instrument, rather than actually learning the instrument themselves. And they were right. Now they've decided that even the whole pressing buttons thing looks like far too much effort. Would the original punks, or at least those of them who are now dead, be turning in their graves?
Perhaps not. The Sex Pistols went into the studio last year for the first time in 30 years - in order to re-record Anarchy in the UK for Guitar Hero III. At a press conference to promote it John Lydon eagerly took the opportunity to bash the same musos he's been having a go at ever since that "I hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt. "I love air guitar," he smirked, "because it teaches you how not to play the guitar".
With Air Rocker this logic has surely reached its nihilistic end. With RockBand, a Guitar Hero-style game for bass and drums, too, coming out soon, is "real" music finally on the ropes? Or is this the future that the fanzines dreamed of where, truly, anyone can play guitar?
