Home Rhythm Action Is Killing Music

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/complete_contro_1.php

Also the PopMatters piece it's linking to.

This article made me a bit cross and I don't even LIKE GH.

Comments

[infov0re.livejournal.com]

Ugh, this is stupid, but Nick Carr is known for stupidity. This arugment seems to have legs and it gets more idiotic every single time.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

surely every time someone raises this argument one just has to show them the south park ep about guitar hero...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

true revolutionaries never practice their scales!

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Three chords and the Truth!

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Playing Guitar Hero-style games (DDR, whatever) uses different bits of your brane than actually learning and playing real guitar.

[koganbot]

I haven't even figured out what Guitar Hero is. (Well, I mean, I know it's a video game where you're hearing songs and doing something with a guitar-like something (or a keyb-type something that connects to an onscreen guitar-like something, or something) by which you score points by... something. I'd guess the appeal has to do with combining music and the thrill of competition, the capacity to tally up points.)

Carr seems to be waving his hand at what could potentially be ideas without actually stating any ideas (which of course is a complaint I have about lots of people who are better thinkers than Carr seems to be), thinks his and Elster's and Horning's buzzwords ("diversity," "distraction," "consumerism," "pure merchandise") take care of themselves, somehow, as if those words created an argument all by themselves. Consumerism fosters diversity how? Diversity is tied to distraction how? How does consumerism prevent someone from following through and "getting into the later and more rewarding stage" (as in, e.g., sequels, themes and variations, series, etc.)? Seems to me that Carr does an excellent job of evading getting into a later and more rewarding stage of thinking, the one where you actually form arguments and test them. But the piece wasn't written with the idea of exploring the phenomenon (Guitar Hero or whatever). Carr already knew the outcome of his analysis before he undertook it.

By the way, in my teens in the late '60s "youth" was constantly being berated for its irresponsibility and its penchant for immediate gratification,* which is all Carr's argument is doing, when you strip it of its pseudo-Marxist apparel.

*or conversely was being extolled for its spontaneity and its freedom, depending on whether the adult was projecting his fears or his hopes.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I know it's a video game where you're hearing songs and doing something with a guitar-like something (or a keyb-type something that connects to an onscreen guitar-like something, or something) by which you score points by... something.

Frank OTM :)

Mobile what now?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

(NB: this is 10x better than anything I could have come up with. Long live the Luddite wing of poptimists!)

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

so, you have a plastic guitar and it has four buttons on the neck, corresponding to four lines on the screen and you have to press the buttons to match the pattern on the screen. there is also a little uppy downy switch where you'd strum the strings if it had any that you have to move in time with the pressing of the fret buttons.

if you get it right you score points and you need a certain number of points to get to the next verse/bit of the song.

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

I think if you told him his ideas were underdeveloped in the essay, though, he'd probably reespond with an already-thought-through set of ideas about how consumerism, diversity, and distraction all tie together--and he'd also tell you that he didn't develop them more thoroughly in the article because he just assumed his audience would understand those relationships, perhaps through intuition or experience or (I think more likely) the ambient absorption of thinkpiece boilerplate.

LOL at "Marx must have had something to say about this."--this in the middle of his complains about GH and the internet fostering pseudo-mastery.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that Carr does an excellent job of evading getting into a later and more rewarding stage of thinking, the one where you actually form arguments and test them.

*applause*

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

ARGH ARGH I WANT TO KILL THINGS. This is *so* reminiscent of an article I remember from Melody Maker, in, what, 1994, about how the CD was diminishing our relationship with music by allowing us to skip the "difficult" tracks that we would have learned to love if we'd just given them enough time.

He continues: "I can’t help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty."

Yeah yeah, hand-wringing wank riddled with intellectual pretension. How about, it's a fun thing and people enjoy fun?

Marx must have had something to say about this.

At this point, I was waiting for him to say *what* Marx would have had to say, and then realised that he hadn't actually read enough Marx to know, but just wanted to wave his penis at us a bit.

Speaking of which, Horning quotes the Marxist theorist Jon Elster in explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to the hard work of self-realization:

PLEASURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE IS WRONG. SELF-IMPROVEMENT IS THE ONLY GOAL. Sheesh. Because simple pleasures can't be improving or self-actualising, of course.

Could there maybe be a Poptimists sweepstake about how long it'll be before we see him do a follow-up post about how interactive music games are actually a brilliantly punk tool of deconstruction, and a clever means to use apparent consumerist tactics to undermine conceits of capitalism which attempt to package art as a singular experience owned and performed by a rarified privileged group, by putting the means of production back in the hands blah blah waffle waffle?

I'll take August 12th this year. I've got my fiver ready.

[ex-al-ewing.livejournal.com]

OMG the comments!

THINKING IS SNOBBERY IN THIS BRAVE NEW WORLD

Comments now closed in case the cultural proles turn up and spoil our beautiful discourse.