Guitar Hero

Like many kids of my generation, I used to be a video game addict. From Mario Bros. to Contra, to Final Fantasy, and Grand Theft Auto, my addiction touched every genre and console. However, for various reasons, I stopped gaming about 4 years ago. This means that I felt completely untouched by the wave of Guitar Hero madness that has swept over the world...until now.

Last Thursday, I volunteered to give a guitar lesson to inner city kids in an East side elementary school in Vancouver. I spent about two days preparing for the lesson, thinking of simple chord progressions to teach to the kids, or easy riffs to keep them entertained. Memories of my first guitar lessons flashed through my mind and I thought about teaching them an easy Beatles song to get them excited about learning a full song in a single class ("Obla di obla da" was obviously the first choice). But one thing I never thought about was studying the songs in the game "Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock"!

As I walked into the class and introduced myself to the kids (fifth graders), I tried to begin a conversation about their taste in music. A teacher has to find some common cultural referents, so I tried namedropping some bands...to no avail. The kids stared back at me as if I were speaking in tongues! I namedropped some more, even began to play the intro of Wish You Were Here...but the result was the same. I stopped and realized that I was staring down into a deep and authentic generational gap.

And then a hand shot up in the air. It was a twelve year old with an awesome mohawk that made me and my knit scarf look like a Backstreet Boy. He looked at me in the eyes and delivered the magic words: "dude, don't you know any song from the new Guitar Hero??" Ha! Suddenly the whole class was talking of the songs, and of the levels, and if Slash was the hardest to beat, or if Jimmy Hendrix was faster. I was taken by surprise...shocked. It suddenly dawned on me that the musical tastes of a whole new generation are being shaped by the playlists in Guitar Hero! Elementary kids everywhere are connecting with long foregone music legends through the colored buttons of their plastic guitars. This, more than anything, more than its record breaking sales, is the true success of the game.

And, of course, as the lesson proceeded, I did NOT mention the Beatles song.