This Christmas Toss Out "GUITAR HERO"

My Advice For This Christmas.  Toss Out Guitar Hero.  

That’s right.  Toss it out.  Here’s what you do for your kids.  They want to be so-called “guitar heroes”?  Then hop in the car, drive over to Golden Age Fretted Instruments on South Avenue* and pick up a trusty Fender Stratocaster and a 20-watt Marshall amp and put them under the tree with a little note that simply reads: “You’ll thank me later.”

I have no issue with video games as a class of entertainment.  As a kid I played Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Galga with the best of them.  But to me the purpose of such games is to take us to places that we cannot explore or experience in our own reality.  Only a tiny fraction of a fraction of kids will ever grow up to play professional football, or even coach for that matter, so Madden vicariously fulfills the unknowable in us.  Although sadly many more know about war than they do the NFL gridiron, my children will never (I hope) find themselves in a situation of urban combat fighting Lego zombie armies.  Experiencing something they will never know in reality satisfies their imaginations.  (I’ll leave the darker aspects of the more violent games for other bloggers to explore.)

Enter Guitar Hero.  First of all the positives.  I do like the fact that the game introduces younger generations to what many of us in our 40+ years refer to as “our music.”  There really was a Golden Age of Rock, wherein the dominant theme was the blues/pentatonic scale, courtesy of our African-American forefathers in the deep South, rebuilt like a juiced-up  transmission and returned to us by British artists who saw no stigma in mimicking the Black sound.  The driving instrument, the primary vehicle through which this new music was expressed, was Leo Fender’s recently perfected electric guitar.   Thanks to Guitar Hero, many kids can try to be like Jimi, Eric, Duane, Jimmy, Pete, Eddie, Angus, Stevie Ray, etc.   So there is a silver lining to what I see, however, as in the balance a negative.

And that negative is this.  Unlike Madden or Call of Duty, where the experience can only be explored vicariously, all one need do is walk into a guitar store, slap down some money (an introductory Squire costs no more than the Xbox) and have that experience for real.  There’s a concept.  An actual real guitar.  One with six strings, volume and tone, a whammy bar, frets, pickups, tuning knobs and that beautiful polished wood body that feels like a lover  in your arms.   Instead of buttons (Buttons? Really? On a freaking guitar???) you hold a pick in one hand (or just your fingers if you’re Jeff Beck, it’s all good) and make these bizarre shapes with the other over the strings running up the neck.  Yeah, it’ll hurt your fingers at first.  You’ll blister, callous, and cold air will feel like someone rubbing IcyHot on your digits.  But when you strum, when you graze that pick over the strings, something wild will happen.  You’ll make music.

That’s right.  Real honest to God music.   You will not be a virtual guitarist, but a real one.  Sure, it will take a long time to master…Malcom Gladwell says 10,000 hours to be precise.  And yeah, you’ll sound like total crap for a little bit in the beginning.  The initial urge to put it back in its case and retreat to the xBox will be powerful.  Fight through it.  Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, it will come to you.  One day  you’ll just get it.  Then you’ll feel it.   And then it’s off to races.  And the learning, the exploration, the fascination and complete and total satisfaction will stay with you for the rest of your life.  You got that?  For the rest of your life!  Talk about the gift that keeps on giving.

I have seen contests, actual contests, where Guitar Hero masters vie to see who is the best “guitarist.”  News flash: you are not a guitarist when you play this game, no matter how adroit at the charade you become.  You’re merely a typist.  A stenographer.  Someone vicariously mimicking the thousands of hours someone else spent learning the real deal.  

The great tragedy of this game I imagine comes from an eventual realization: how foolish will a grown man feel when he looks back on his years, tallies all the hours he spent playing Guitar Hero and realizes that if he’d put the same time and effort into learning the real thing and not the imitation, he may actually be featured on the game by now?  That no mature adult will ever even care that he can fake play a fake guitar?  Such an empty, meaningless use of time and interest, to master pretending to play an instrument that, unlike NFL football or Lego Star Wars, is so completely accessible to anyone boggles the mind.

I don’t know if Beethoven (not a guitarist but a darned good pianist if his finger-crushing sonatas are any guide) actually ever said this, but it’s a great quote from the movie Immortal Beloved in which Gary Oldman plays the brilliant, misanthropic, deaf maestro: “It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.  The listener has no choice.  It is like hypnotism.”  He’s right.  No other art form can stir such a visceral physiological response.  There’s a reason one works out in the gym to AC/DC in their earbuds rather than staring at a painting or sculpture.   As such, next to life and love and support, the gift of music is the greatest gift a parent can give a child.  It will be a gift that once embraced will carry through into adulthood all the way to the last day. 

So toss out the faux guitar.  Strap a Fender or Les Paul or Gibson onto your body, click on the amp and hit that iconic first A5 power chord to “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or the opening blues shuffle riff to “Cold Shot”.  You’ll feel it too.  And the one thought that will go through the mind—besides why the heck did I ever waste my time with Guitar Hero when I could be doing this instead—will be: “Long Live Rock”  For real.  It’s the only way.  

That's just my opinion.  I could be wrong.

*I have no affiliation with this establishment. It’s a great local music store.