It’s still Rock Band.<\/p>\n
When the game’s intro unfolds your adrenaline rushes, your heart starts to palpitate and a broad smile crosses your face.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s akin to the lights going down at Madison Square Garden.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve been waiting for this.\u00c2\u00a0 And as the band takes the stage in New York and hits stray notes in the dark, you’re bursting with excitement. Unfortunately, the analogy ends there.\u00c2\u00a0 No band takes the stage out of tune.\u00c2\u00a0 And if they play a track from their very first album, you’d be thrilled.\u00c2\u00a0 The disappointment in the Beatles Rock Band has nothing to do with the music.\u00c2\u00a0 Or the graphics.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the game.<\/p>\n
Sure, you can sing harmonies with your buddies, if you want to buy a couple of extra microphones, but despite all the hype, there’s very little innovation in the game.<\/p>\n
Speak with a gamer.\u00c2\u00a0 He talks about finishing a game.\u00c2\u00a0 Could take a week.\u00c2\u00a0 But when it’s completed, the gamer almost never goes back, he wants a new thrill.\u00c2\u00a0 Only non-gamers believe that a phenomenon that’s lasted years would still be fresh.\u00c2\u00a0 Sales reports tell us otherwise.\u00c2\u00a0 The public is tired of music games.<\/p>\n
But this can’t be.\u00c2\u00a0 Guitar Hero\/Rock Band must go on forever.\u00c2\u00a0 They must be the new ringtones, making up for the drop in recorded music sales.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s music that lasts forever, not the ancillary products built atop it.<\/p>\n
Buy the remastered CDs.\u00c2\u00a0 Those will thrill you.<\/p>\n
Playing the Beatles Rock Band will deliver some joy, but it has none of the visceral excitement you got the first time you heard "I\u00c2\u00a0 Want To Hold Your Hand".<\/p>\n
All those articles in the paper, about all the effort, the TLC…they’re kind of right, although the Beatles don’t always look like themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that most gamers don’t read the newspaper.\u00c2\u00a0 And too many of those articles were written by people who don’t even own a video game console.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve been hyped by MTV, it’s a business story.<\/p>\n
Do I expect the Beatles Rock Band to sell?<\/p>\n
Of course.\u00c2\u00a0 There is a mania, sustained by the media, which will drive sales.\u00c2\u00a0 But the gross won’t drop your jaw.\u00c2\u00a0 It’ll be a business, which, according to the L.A. "Times", MTV may not even make a profit on.<\/p>\n
Who’s going to buy this Beatles Rock Band game?<\/p>\n
Certainly not hard core gamers.\u00c2\u00a0 It disappoints as a game.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s best as a parlor activity amongst older friends. But do older friends have a gaming console?\u00c2\u00a0 And, if so, does anybody in the house other than the children know how to use it?<\/p>\n
The Beatles used to be first.\u00c2\u00a0 Now they’re last.\u00c2\u00a0 CD sales have dropped 54.7% in the last five years according to the "Wall Street Journal", but now the remastered Beatle albums are being released.\u00c2\u00a0 Guitar Hero\/Rock Band is on death watch, now the Beatles Rock Band is released.\u00c2\u00a0 With two Beatles dead, it’s hard to come to a consensus, shareholders are fearful of tarnishing the legacy.\u00c2\u00a0 But with almost five decades gone, that’s less of an issue than ever before.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like worrying about postcards of Michelangelo’s Pieta, nothing can tarnish the original.\u00c2\u00a0 The Beatles Rock Band hurts the Fab Four not a whit.\u00c2\u00a0 I wouldn’t even be worried about licensing the music to films.\u00c2\u00a0 I hate to say it, because I’m against it, but even licensing to commercials would hardly hurt.\u00c2\u00a0 If you want to teach the younger generation how great the boys from Liverpool were you’ll reach more of them via advertising than you will via this half-baked game.<\/p>\n
Sure, advertising would forever associate certain songs with certain products, and that’s bad, but we’ve given up caring about music, it’s always a business story.\u00c2\u00a0 How many Beatles remasters will they sell?\u00c2\u00a0 How many Rock Band games?\u00c2\u00a0 Isn’t it curious that the public had no idea of grosses when the Beatles were together and still kings?\u00c2\u00a0 When it was truly about the music?<\/p>\n
The Beatles tested limits musically.\u00c2\u00a0 When we first heard "I Want To Hold Your Hand", it stunned us, we had to ask ourselves if it was any good, there was nothing remotely like it on the radio.\u00c2\u00a0 "Strawberry Fields Forever" was so innovative as to be jaw-dropping.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d decry the lack of chances taken in today’s pop music, just listen to Top Forty radio, the songs are interchangeable, they come from the exact same place, but that’s missing the point.\u00c2\u00a0 So there are a bunch of bottom feeders grubbing for money…\u00c2\u00a0 Is this the story?\u00c2\u00a0 Or someone who breaks the mold, gets us to relax, turn off our minds and float downstream?<\/p>\n
We’re in a period of musical chaos.\u00c2\u00a0 The mainstream is vapid and the alternative is so overwhelming as to be almost indecipherable.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no center.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody’s making music, most of it crap, there are a ton of scenes, almost none gaining traction.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’ve got an audience, conventional wisdom is you’re talented, that you’re worth listening to.\u00c2\u00a0 Alas, that isn’t true.\u00c2\u00a0 So much of what exhilarated us in the past took albums to develop and ultimately penetrate the populace.\u00c2\u00a0 But that which broke through, which was great, still sustains today.<\/p>\n
Lay down sixty bucks for the Beatles Rock Band.\u00c2\u00a0 If you want it, you won’t be disappointed.\u00c2\u00a0 When you hear your favorite songs, you’ll wring your axe, you’ll sing along with abandon.\u00c2\u00a0 But the experience won’t resemble the one you had years ago, before the mainstream media started speaking of the Guitar Hero revolution, when you felt you were a member of a secret club, doing something if not illicit and dangerous, containing joy the masses were unaware of.<\/p>\n
Like being in the Cavern Club.\u00c2\u00a0 Playing Guitar Hero\/Rock Band years ago had the same feel.\u00c2\u00a0 Then it blew up. But unlike the Beates music, it didn’t change.\u00c2\u00a0 It was still bubbles pouring down a two-dimensional guitar neck on a screen, which you had to mimic on your plastic guitar.\u00c2\u00a0 If the Beatles had continued to cut "Please Please Me", they would not be legendary.\u00c2\u00a0 But they took chances, tested limits.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe there can be a new music-based game, but this one is almost history.<\/p>\n
So blow your money on the CDs.\u00c2\u00a0 Consider it a last hurrah for the format.\u00c2\u00a0 Play them and discover heretofore unknown elements.\u00c2\u00a0 And remember the days when dropping the needle on a vinyl album was always something that got your heart beating faster.\u00c2\u00a0 From the moment you broke the shrinkwrap, you were entranced.\u00c2\u00a0 You were on an amazing journey, a magical mystery tour.<\/p>\n
The Beatles never did reunite.\u00c2\u00a0 Their flame burned for less than a decade.\u00c2\u00a0 They realized they’d done it, there was nowhere left to go, and the band splintered, its members going in different directions.\u00c2\u00a0 You’d like to believe, unlike the Police, unlike every classic act with more members alive than dead, they wouldn’t have reunited, soley for the bucks.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ll never know.<\/p>\n
But we do know the Beatles blazed trails.\u00c2\u00a0 Opened doors that were not even seen.\u00c2\u00a0 Created music that you could not only sing along with, but inspired you to take up musical instruments to play.\u00c2\u00a0 The Beatles Rock Band will inspire no one to become a musician, will turn few on to the music, because it’s at least two years too late.\u00c2\u00a0 The Beatles led, we followed.\u00c2\u00a0 Now Apple Corps. is so tentative that it can’t help but follow.\u00c2\u00a0 Imagine the remasters on Blu-Ray.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, few would be able to play them, but they’d inspire the public to get Blu-Ray players just to hear them.\u00c2\u00a0 Could have been done.\u00c2\u00a0 Would have blown our minds.\u00c2\u00a0 We’d have gone to friends’ houses just like we did in ’64, to be exposed to this magic music.\u00c2\u00a0 But that wouldn’t be expedient business. Expect the Beatles to sell MP3s when streaming is the norm.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a bit sad.\u00c2\u00a0 But the music, even listened to at 128kbps on cheap white earbuds, is still revelatory.\u00c2\u00a0 It will never fade away.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the White Album, all of the Beatles records, are not a fad.\u00c2\u00a0 They still get our adrenaline pumping and put a smile on our face.\u00c2\u00a0 No matter when and where we hear them.\u00c2\u00a0 You can build edifices atop the music, but the tunes still shine, will continue to shine.\u00c2\u00a0 Thank God.<\/p>\n
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