The unspoken rule is that you have to manage the band for three songs.
"Roadie, can you sign Peter out and sign in my character on this guitar? Also, I think this is the guitar with the broken red button."
For the inevitable complaints of "I think this guitar is broken", we have a can of compressed air on standby. The new guy blasts the red button on Jude's guitar with compressed air.
"Okay, you're good to go," he says, ducking back out of the way.
We start up on that Foo Fighters song, which I now really like. After that, Peter has me trade places with the new guy. As the roadie, I resist the temptation to watch the screen while they play. I watch them, which no one else is doing. In Rock Band, everyone looks at the screen, even when he's not playing. Their faces range from grim to delighted to ecstatic. Each of them is starting intently at the screen, watching his own fret scrolling along. But they're plugged into the same thing: the song. The song is the point, and they each play their part, ignoring each other, yet completely tapped into each other.
I figure a sewing circle must be like this. A bunch of old ladies sitting around concentrating on their own thing, but doing it together.
I see them listening to Gimme Shelter, watching its bits pulled apart and laid out and unfurled before them. I'm starting to think, incorrectly of course, that it's sort of hollow. Not hollow like dead, but hollow like old and a little mystical. Hollow like looking through photo albums with a friend. This isn't new stuff. It's old stuff with a new way of resonating.
None of us cares to play the bonus tracks, for instance. Those songs don't mean anything. We haven't heard them before. They're an unwelcome reveal that Rock Band without familiar music is just a bare rhythm game with expensive controllers. The songs we don't know are the worst ones to play, at least until we come to know them and they get a little less worse. Freezepop in Guitar Hero II, for instance, and now that Foo Fighters song.
This is not the revolution; it's just something like it. It's not about games. It's about music. It's a new way of listening, of trying to get in, like following the lyrics in the album sleeve or clumsily learning the chords on a beat-up guitar in the hopes of one day being that guy at a party who impresses the girls who might like the song as much as you do. Like Guitar Hero before it, I will practice Rock Band, like a skill. I will do this off and on for two weeks, imagining each time that with just a little effort each day, I'll get really good. Not YouTube good, but still good. Better than Jude, maybe. But like Guitar Hero before it, something else will come along and I'll resign myself to never making it past the fourth tier on hard. As a drummer, I'll never get past medium. As for singing, I have no interest in it.
And then Rock Band will sit in the corner where Guitar Hero sat, while Guitar Hero is cycled into a closet. We'll always think fondly of it, like we always think fondly of board games, or D&D, or a favorite LithTech engine shooter, or Giants when someone mentions it once every two years. There are no revolutions. Just different ways of playing. It's never about the games. It's always about something else, and the games simply point, like ghostly promises of things to come, inchoate, barren, and expectant, waiting to be born while I watch my friends jump around, oblivious and slightly happy.
