I have a confession to make.

First of all, everyone who knows me knows that I have a history of, well, mocking every trend in popular music. And this in itself is surprising, since as far as classical music goes I'm bordering on the bohemian avant-garde fringe of John Cage and Georgiy Ligeti. (Just call me the John McCain of classical composers.) And although I can tolerably listen to most popular music, I still don't care for much of it.

Thus I must confess to all who thought they knew me that last night, for the first time, I played Guitar Hero.

But this confession begets an additional confession: it's actually kind of fun. I definitely think it doesn't deserve all of the attention it gets, but it is actually somewhat enjoyable to play. The system of notation they use is interesting; it resembles a variant of a primitive pitch-time graph which can basically describe most music until the late twentieth century, when Ligeti engendered a kind of chromatic grid to depict his famous Lux aeterna (made popular in 2001: A Space Odyssey; it's the music that sounds like random wailing noises). I have concluded that musically, Guitar Hero does have some (I repeat, some) merit.

Now don't get me wrong: the fact that I enjoy playing the game does not necessarily require that I like all or any of the music on it. I think even those who generally like popular music can concede that some of the songs on Guitar Hero are just plain annoying.

So that's it. I'm off to hack another notch in my column of moral decline.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.