Angry Gaming 03.10.08: Rock Out with your Block Out

Posted by Damian Sarcuni on 03.10.2008

Racial rants and three music genres that probably won’t be making it into the virtual band craze.

Welcome to Angry Gaming, the pack of overly buff security that regulates and tosses the game industry from the venue on a Saturday night. I am your hate master, Damian Sarcuni, and I apologize for the lack of content being posted as of late. The good news is: I have meaningful employment now! Drinks are on me.


Rock Out with your Block Out

Over the past two weeks, the members of the hate club have been involved in an inadvertent research project revolving around a subject near and dear to the hearts of most people who's hearts pump blood and not ice water. That would be music, by the way.

What we did on each weekend was to attend various shows and concerts each representing a different style of music. Why we did this is beyond me, as I hate concerts and the music represented at each show was hardly my favorite genre. We learned a lot though, as there are some serious life lessons to be socially absorbed when large groups of people are focused on loud music coming from a stage:

1) Cell phone photography is an altogether useless hobby.
2) Do not open your alcohol-serving rock club next to a police station.
3) If you drop something in the dark corner of a men's room, best pretend you never owned it in the first place and just walk away.
4) When someone starts throwing dead rats into the crowd, it's time to go home.

More importantly though, we learned the way people interpret music as being socially acceptable is far different from what the mainstream industries would have you believe. Sure, everyone knows who Britney Spears is, especially these days. But how many of those same people mocking the washed-out pop star's antics and breathing a sigh of relief at her successful rehab stints would actually waste the money on one of her albums? (Chris Crocker, if you're reading this, I'll thank you in advance not to leave any "publicly familiar" requests on the comments section of this article.) No, with no pop stars truly dominating the commercial market, all that consumer cash goes to the underground; the stuff you hear on those elitist satellite radio channels and on the local club dance floors.

It doesn't really matter what your scene is as long as it isn't some super-sized stadium. Outside the mainstream, albums and seats at a show are that much cheaper (and if you're lucky, the alcohol served is far stronger). Gaming industry, take note! With the popularity of Guitar Hero and Rock Band on the rise, all this free musical advice applies to you. In recent weeks, fans have wondered what the market is for Aerosmith to get their own special Guitar Hero edition. Personally, I'm wondering what the market is for Children of Bodom to get one.

Yet the media industry as a whole is glued to the way they want to steer the public dollar. Some music is safe and marketable, and this is the stuff that makes its way from large labels and MTV into our music games. Everything else seems to fall to the wayside, and that's a shame when you consider just how much most fans would like to see these genres get their spot on the virtual play list.

Why is that? Well, like all things, the answers lie within the games and material themselves. Here are three music genres that you probably won't see in Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or on any other music game anytime soon. We've also included the closest you can get to these music styles, just in case you're a Disney-bred pod baby who doesn't know that a world actually exists outside of the magic kingdom.


K-Pop



The first concert we attended was actually a milestone in Asian-American culture. Park Jin Young, affectionately known as JYP to his fans, brought his return tour to his adopted home town of New York City performing at the WaMu Theater in Madison Square Garden. (For those of you who were at Wrestlemania X, yes that's the Paramount Theater.) JYP has been a pop star in Korea since the early 1990's and has since gone on to produce for artists such as Will Smith. Now the effeminate superstar has taken to importing Korean talent to be produced on the American mainstream circuit, an endeavor which has collected Asian-American fans from city to city into the house seats at each Asian-American JYP concert.

Trouble is, I'm not Asian.



Korean pop (K-Pop, get it?) music has actually made it to quite a few music video games…all of them specifically designed and marketed for Korea. Case in point: Dance Dance Revolution 3rd Mix Korean versions 1&2, Technomotion, and Pump It Up. Any fan of these leg-killing rhythm games can tell you that K-Pop fits right into the mold of stomping out a techno bass beat while listening to broken English, Korean, and Japanese lyrics sung by a variety of Asian stars and groups. Korean dance games even made it overseas to the United States. That's because they were exported illegally.

In actuality, K-Pop doesn't get anywhere except in Korea. When Konami decided to pursue the Dance Dance Revolution series outside of Japan, they still managed to export several Japanese tracks into the American versions of the game. The Korean tracks from DDR Korea weren't so lucky, and eventually anything Asian was phased out from DDR altogether, creating the horrific and useless DDR: Supernova series. So while K-Pop may be an unending wave in the land of Lineage II and laggy Diablo II games, it doesn't ring any bells in the land of the great white mainstream Satan.



And as for good ol' JYP? He's having about as much success in the States as every other Korean-imported product (and that includes Hyundai Tiberons). We're talking about a guy who gets up on stage and tells American fans that he wants to storm the American English-speaking market, and then sings a medley in Korean. His label's fate is sealed, and it will be the same as that of the Korean dance games: Asian-Americans will love it, white people will reject it, the Japanese will replace it, and no one will miss it. Koreowned.


Death Metal



On the other end of the concert tour, the hate club took in a local death metal mini-festival deep in the heart of Brooklyn. Consequently, we also got a feel for just how high the difficult the drums in Rock Band would be when playing a classic Aborym or Incantation track. You poor fools still putzing around with Nirvana's "In Bloom" on Expert level who are just now getting your double bass petal down pat have absolutely no idea what would be in store for you if the black arts were to take a hold of your next-gen consoles and plastic drum kits.

American music games skirt around the idea of Satanic evil in music, but they never really cross the line that the fans are dying to hear. Play all the way to the final "hell" level (Lou's Inferno?) in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and when the time finally comes to square off against the devil, what does a heavy metal guitarist play? Why, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" of course!

Come on.

The closest anyone gets to actual satanic admission in Guitar Hero is when Tenacious D actually spells out that metal music comes from hell in their lyrics. Even Dragonforce, the much celebrated power band that gave the Guitar Hero series its most unrealistically difficult challenge ever, are actually formed from Demoniac, a New Zealand black metal group that went the sell out route to start singing about dragons and sorcery.



I'm not trying to insinuate that fans of music games are just itching to dress up in corpse pain and start blurting out low pitched growls while banging out double pedaled bass drums and grinding out the same guitar chord over and over for five minutes, but I am saying that we can do better than shoving "I Wanna Rock and Roll All Nite" by Kiss down players' throats another eight times. Fans shouldn't have to question their own religion while remembering to hold down the whammy bar for bonus points, but in the end both Guitar Hero and Rock Band need a serious dose of some non-conformist, anti-poser, flesh cutting death metal.



I suggest an entire music game dedicated not to Aerosmith, but to celebrated, animated death metal gods Dethklok from the hit TV series Metalocalypse. Their music is good, the subjects are tongue-in-cheek, and at least all the witty metal in-jokes found in our music games would fit in place for once.


Eurobeat



Ok, admittedly we didn't actually go to any show or concert for this particular musical genre entry; we just threw an album on the CD player and drove down the highway really fast. In the case of Eurobeat though, that's really all you're supposed to do anyway.

For those of you who never played Initial D or Para Para Paradise, Eurobeat is a genre of music developed in Italy and marketed to the Japanese at exorbitant prices. The main staple of the genre is how fast it actually is, and even the slow songs keep up a steady pace that make you want to slide your car sideways on the edge of a cliff. Other, smaller staples of the genre include oversaturated use of the word "Fire" within Eurobeat's lyrics, and the completely out of place vocals that line most of the songs.

Though you really aren't even supposed to dance to Eurobeat, (one popular video shows a Eurobeat singer driving a car and performing random martial arts in a parking lot…and that's it) that of course hasn't stopped those whacky Japanese from trying. The denizens of the land of the rising sun countered the Eurobeat invasion with an interpretive dance known as para para. Para para is a subdued form of raving that involves concentrated music and flailing arms and…well, see for yourself:



Sigh. Eurobeat has been described in the past as a faster, modernized version of 80's "freestyle" music, another genre that fell to the wayside soon after its inception. You would think that with Eurobeat's pulsing beats and broken English, it would be a prime candidate to swarm Japanese dance games we mentioned previously. From a fan boy perspective, you'd be right. Eurobeat made a big splash on the PC-based DDR bootleg program Stepmania; as users unleashed a swarm of Eurobeat tracks into the public eye for consumption. In the case of actual legitimate music games though, Eurobeat is virtually non-existent.

Just as Eurobeat cemented itself in the Japanese market, it likewise cemented itself in Japanese gaming. Much like its Korean counterpart though, Eurobeat has been unable to find its way out of Asia. Even Europeans don't listen to it, and they are the ones producing the stuff! That should tell you quite a bit about the value of Asian music on the American mainstream. It should also serve as a reminder that Japanese people follow no real sense of logic whatsoever.


The Anger

As the virtual dance craze has died down, so has the virtual band craze risen and taken the public by storm. Yet watching this cultural game movement from a far, it's a little disturbing when we notice that the mainstream entertainment industry is actually using our own games to steer us into the direction of music they want us to enjoy. We pick up Guitar Hero and subconsciously we find ourselves thinking of Poison as legends of rock. It's not because of Bret Michaels' mindless brain drippings on the popular show Rock of Love, either! We're supposed to accept that "Talk Dirty to Me" is legendary material just because it was included in the damn game! That sends a shiver down my spine.

On the other hand, the alternative is to import a Eurobeat CD and actually try to enjoy it while not at the wheel of a 1996 Mazda RX-7. That too, is a scary thought. Either way, embrace the hatred.