I spent a good portion of Sunday playing Guitar Hero III on Easy level and watching The Boy play it on Hard level. He was consistently thwarted by Metallica’s One. He could get past the melodic guitar bits in the beginning without letting the Rock Meter dip too far into the yellow, but as soon as the serious speed metal bit came, he just could not keep up and the Rock Meter made a smooth transition into the red every time.
This game has a thin veneer of a story. You are part of a band paying its dues on the road to rock stardom and if you play a given set of songs well, you end up with promotion deals, a manager who steals your soul, videos, being the opening act at a Burning Man like concert in the desert, etc. I made it to London and started to play ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ by the Sex Pistols. The Boy asked me why a band would name a song that, whereupon I was able to give him a short history of rock music between 1968 and 1976 and the cultural threads between the death of the Hippie movement at Altamont, the rise of corporate sell-out rock, disco, and the rise of punk as a reaction to all of that as well as a reaction, especially in the U.K, to society as a whole.
When I started to play ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ by the Dead Kennedys, I could see he understood. It’s nice to know all that time rotting my brain listening to rock and punk at high volume when I was a teenager could translate into a teaching moment with my son 25 years later. It truly is the Circle of Life.
Update: Per a person who was actually there and who assures me she does remember the experience, updated the spelling of hippie.
1) Guitar Hero ROCKS! I am an your old geezer cousin who plays the easy level pretty darn well on all three versions of the game, if you can believe that.
2) For those of us actually there, this is how it was spelled: Hippie.