26 at 26: M for Music
A Love Letter to Rocking Out and Rhythm Gaming
Late last year, I turned 26. So, in the tradition of the great panel show QI, for the first half of 2014 I will be running through an alphabetical view on 26 things in my world so far.
I was at Universal Studios with my family, somewhere in the early/mid 2000s. An arcade in the park had a Dance Dance Revolution cabinet, and for whatever unknown or unspoken reason, I took a stab at it. I took a stab at a bunch of different arcade games, but it was the first arcade game I really got into that didn’t eventually spit out some tickets.
Flash back to home, where the mall nearby had an arcade which had both a DDR cabinet and Guitar Freaks in it. (It was mid-2000s; malls weren’t dying off much, some still had arcades, and Guitar Freaks… okay that was rare.) Something about that game, on top of DDR, really grabbed me. I’d play both every chance I could get. Racing games were alright, fighting games weren’t interesting, and shooters (which I’d play at home) weren’t really a broad enough arcade genre. At least in the arcades, rhythm games became my niche.
But it had to wait a while. I didn’t have a PlayStation 2, so I couldn’t pick up Frequency or Amplitude. I had to wait until I could pick up an XBox 360, and when I did, my first game for it was Guitar Hero 2. Not long after, I got Rock Band, with all the little toy instruments.
And not long after that, I got a real drum kit. Sure, it was a cheap travel/beginner’s kit, but it was real. It was more than plastic and wires; it had metal cymbals and wood shells and everything. And it felt awesome, banging out terrible attempts at REM songs all summer in a neglected basement somewhere in Rochester’s 19th Ward. I started calling myself a drummer and haven’t stopped since.
I’ve met a handful of other musicians who took up their instrument because of Rock Band. The bassist for Yesternight’s Decision immediately comes to mind; he was part of the reason I authored the band’s songs. It’s one of the great, strange legacies that the whole genre explosion left.
It was also, I hate to admit, my first exposure to a bunch of classic songs. The sorts of songs that every musician is supposed to just know.
Music was never a major thing in my family, growing up. We had a Yamaha keyboard that I’d poke at from time to time, but I never had piano lessons or anything like that. My parents listened to their favorite music (Don Henley, Genesis, Talking Heads, Billy Joel) through headphones, privately. Thanks to school, “music” meant singing to me, and I’m a terrible singer. So I pretty much avoided music.
Rhythm games brought music back for me. Putting music in the context of a game was apparently what it took for the whole idea to click. I stopped limiting myself to just what was playing on Top 40 radio and actually started investigating what songs fit my tastes. I dug into Radiohead, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, of Montreal. Weird stuff. I’d actually pay attention to what was happening in a song, how it was laid out, how the whole thing worked.
My roommate recently pointed out to me that I run on data. I’m only interested in things I can learn something from — hence the QI obsession. Rhythm games helped turn “listening to music” from a background activity into something that I could gather data from, which made it interesting. I can’t listen to, or even play, a song without seeing those little yellow hi-hat rectangles streaming down, without trying to visualize the structures and patterns that make the whole thing up.
In one way, I guess, Harmonix ruined music for me. I can’t just listen to music anymore; it’s always an active processing of data based on their Guitar Hero format. I even find myself looking at the drum parts I play on the real drums in terms of how they’d work in Rock Band. (Which worked okay for the alt-rock bands I was in back in New York, but is a little bit of a problem with my current post-rock project.)
But I wouldn’t be in those bands if it weren’t for Rock Band. I never would have thought I could play real music, in a real group, before Rock Band. And, in more than one sense, I wouldn’t have gone and started companies if it weren’t for Harmonix.
And I’m sure, from having met some of the people there, that they’d be pretty happy to be behind the whole weird cause-and-effect. Turning a dorky girl into someone resembling a rocker chick, that’s something not everyone can do.
Music has gone from being this uninteresting, background element of life to sort of becoming my domain. Not that I consider myself a brilliant musician (I’m a drummer, not a musician, as all the jokes go). And I’m hardly that much of a hipster, I swear.
But I have made a thing of digging up random music. I’ve been to shows at half a dozen different venues around Portland within months of moving here. And I felt deeply lacking in the months between selling off that old Pearl kit and finally grabbing my current Ludwig set.
So I feel like I should thank Konami, Harmonix, and everyone else that’s made the rhythm games I’ve enjoyed over the years. Music is such a potent thing that I’d been ignoring, just because of the unappealing contexts it’d been placed in throughout my childhood. In a weird way, putting something as ancient as music into something as modern as video games saved music for me.
Not the most typical way of getting into it, but I’ll take it.
And now, a moment of zen:
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
