The Guitar Hero's Performance

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Notes

See below for a more detailed discussion of Christopher Small's neologism ‘musicking’ in Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998).

Dominic Arsenault, ‘Guitar Hero: “Not Like Playing Guitar at All”?’, Loading … Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, 2 (2008), 1–7; Jesper Juul, ‘Guitar Hero II: Playing vs. Performing a Tune’, Blog entry on The Ludologist Blog, http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/?p=312, posted 01.02.2007 [accessed 06 October 2009]; Kiri Miller, ‘Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Virtual Virtuosity’, http://www.brown.edu/Project/Music/Kiri%20Miller%20Schizophonic%20Performance%20JSAM%20ms.pdf (posted 8 May 2009) [accessed 19 October 2009], pp. 1–40; Joshua Tanenbaum and Jim Bizzocchi, ‘Rock Band: A Case Study in the Design of Embodied Interface Experience’, Proceedings of the 2009 Acm Siggraph Symposium on Video Games (New Orleans 2009), pp. 127–34.

I would like to thank Melanie Fritsch (Universität Bayreuth, Germany) for the exchange of ideas and materials on the Guitar Hero phenomenon that helped to shape this article. I would also like to thank Activision for granting permission for the screenshots of Guitar Hero to be used in this paper. Finally, I am much indebted to Dr. Ian Hocking for his valuable suggestions and meticulous proofreading. Any remaining errors, however, are mine.

As Daniel Arsenault has described in more detail (2008), the fret board is a curious mix of a representation of a guitar neck, on which buttons are played on different strings, while on the controller they are actually located on different frets. The fret board also functions as a staff notation moving past the eye in real time, with the fret bars acting as indicators for the meter of the song. On occasion, this creates some absurdities for the trained musician: since most songs in the Guitar Hero repertoire are based on 4/4 beats, the fret board is subdivided in that way. But when playing the song ‘My name is Jonas’ by Weezer one has to maintain a 6/8 rhythm throughout, which is confusingly notated on the usual 4/4-based fret board.

Guitarist John Mayer, for example, was quoted saying: ‘Guitar Hero fans are fake wannabes’ (http://www.entertainmentwise.com/news/43006/john-mayer-guitar-hero-fans-are-fake-wannabes, 30.11.2009), and guitarists Jack White (White Stripes) and Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) found it ‘depressing to have a label come and tell you that [Guitar Hero] is how kids are learning about music and experiencing music’ (http://www.nme.com/news/the-white-stripes/45521) [accessed 30 November 2009].

See Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990 [1928]), p. 41.

Philip Auslander writes: ‘There is no better example of musical dramatization than the phenomenon known as “guitar face”. This phrase refers to the distorted expressions that appear on the faces of rock guitarists, particularly when playing a solo. These expressions are nonessential to the actual production of musical sound but serve as coded displays that provide the audience with external evidence of the musician's ostensible internal state while playing’ (Philip Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, TDR (The Drama Review), 50 (2006), 100–119 (p. 112). See also Isaac Guzman, ‘Face the Music’, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/2004/11/16/2004-11-16_face_the_music__your_guide_t.html, posted 16.11.2004 [accessed 23 October 2009]

This is not an established notion as far as I am aware, but anyone who has photographed people while they are playing videogames will recognize the idea of the unblinking, inexpressive stare with the mouth half-open that gamers tend to display.

I will concentrate here on one of the most common experiences of music-oriented videogame playing: gathering around the screen and playing the game together and/or in turns. The performative setting is different in the dissemination of particularly ‘successful’ performances via YouTube, where the audience's gaze is more controlled by the camera and where the performer is more consistently conscious of being watched. Some music-oriented videogame players also decide to be invisible in these clips and only provide a video of the screen during their play.

The term itself goes back to one of the pioneering scholars of soundscapes, R. Murray Schafer, and his book The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher (Don Mills: BMI Canada Limited, 1969).

Miller, ‘Schizophonic Performance’, p. 3

Ibid.

Juul, ‘Guitar Hero II’, n.p.

Miller, ‘Schizophonic Performance’, p. 9.

Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’; Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

‘A performer doesn't just express emotion, but also plays it. This means that along with the basic level of a performer's personal expression, a process of “double enactment” is involved as the performer enacts both a star personality (their image) and a song personality (the role that each lyric requires)’ (Frith, Performing Rites, p. 212).

Auslander, Performing Glam Rock, p. 4.

Miller's article actually supports this kind of thinking: in her layering of performances, she refers to playing music only with regard to the original bands, which recorded and/or re-recorded (covered) the tracks which the game uses.

Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, p. 101.

Miller, ‘Schizophonic Performance’, p. 35.

David R. Shumway, ‘Performance’, in Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ed. by Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss (Malden [MA] and Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 188–99 (p. 190).

Miller, ‘Schizophonic Performance’, pp. 22–3.

Small, Musicking, p. 9.

Shumway, ‘Performance’, p. 193.

The campaign used the famous Tom Cruise dance routine in Risky Business (dir. by Paul Brickman, 1983) to Bob Seger's song ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’ as a model, which in itself was a consciously ironic citation of clichés and poses of rock stardom – the Guitar Hero campaign thus deliberately engages in cycles and layers of the iterability of rock performance (see Section 4 for a fuller discussion of Derrida's notion of iterability and citation). For the campaign clips, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU9rgzKdrEE; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojHOiNcp6us; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_MmOUZ085s; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USXYJ8htAaw [accessed 28 November 2009].

These include allusions to excessive behaviour, affinity to the dark, diabolical and the mythical and quotation of typical gestural and mimic patterns, such as the pogo jump, the punk kick, the string lick, the windmill, the Satan fingers or rock hand and, again, the guitar face (see note 7).

Tanenbaum and Bizzocchi underline this point in their assessment of the very similar game series Rock Band: ‘While it is possible to play Rock Band as a purely strategic exercise, one of the central pleasures of the game is bodily engaging in the fantasy of being a rock star. This often means moving in rhythm to the music, dancing with the microphone, ‘pogo-ing’ up and down while playing guitar, twirling the drum sticks, and generally performing the role of a rock star. All of these behaviors, while not explicitly required in order to succeed at the game, are afforded and encouraged by the design of the interface and an implicit aspect of the bodily experience of the game’ (Tanenbaum/Bizzocchi, ‘Rock Band’, p. 130).

There are only two small, but not insignificant options for instrumental movement, which actually impact on the music itself and are not prescriptively fixed: the tilting of the neck and the operating of the whammy bar. Both do not create sound, but modulate it. The whammy bar lets a long note already played tremble, oscillate and deviate in pitch, even if the original performer did not make any use of that feature at that point, and the neck-tilt unleashes ‘star-power’, which not only doubles the factor at which the player accumulates points, but also makes the music sound more ‘live’ than before (an equalizer effect) and increases the audience's noises to a more frantic appreciation of the guitarist's musical and other appeal.

J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1962]), p. 22.

Ibid.

See Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. by Gerald Graff, trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988 [1971]), pp. 1–25 (p. 9). See also Uwe Wirth, ‘Der Performanzbegriff im Spannungsfeld von Illokution, Iteration und Indexikalität’, http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/∼wirth/texte/WirthPerformanz.htm# Kulturwissenschaft, posted 2002 [accessed 19 October 2009].

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993).

It may be worth noting that most YouTube videos in which guitarists display their skills are incidences of famous virtuoso guitar solos being copied as accurately as possible. It seems that a significant number of musicians who have decided to go for the ‘real thing’ still implicitly follow the logic of the gameplay, which is to impressively re-perform an existing musical performance.

See, for example, Danny Johnson at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K‘PJ_L4KCIxs, and Nick Nolan's rock licks lesson at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyqAPNxSGtE. See a young kid playing Guitar Hero at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnwpfJRea3k, and a young kid playing the guitar at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhtDkDBzHL8 [accessed 20 October 2009].

van Eikel refers to Vladimir Jankélévitch, Liszt et la rhapsodie, I: Essai sur la virtuosité (Paris: Plon, 1979).

Kai van Eikel, ‘Unpopuläre Virtuosen: Zur Typologie Des “Musicians” Musician’, blog entry, Tuesday, 12 August 2008, http://wasistvirtuos.twoday.net/topics/grenzphänomene [accessed 22 October 2009] (original emphasis, my translation).

Melanie Fritsch, ‘Live Performance Games’, unpublished paper given at the symposium Movements between Hearing and Seeing: Music, Dance, Theatre, Performance and Film (University of Bayreuth, Forschungsiustitut für Musiktheater, Schloss Thurnau, Germany, 19–21 November 2009).

Bettina Brandl-Risi, ‘Virtuosität’, in Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, ed. by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Matthias Warstat (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), pp. 382–85 (p. 382), my translation.

Gabriele Brandstetter, ‘Die Szene des Virtuosen. Zu einem Topos von Theatralität’, in Hofmannsthal-Jahrbuch 10 (2002), 213–43 (p. 215), my translation.

Gerald Posselt, ‘Produktive | Differenzen. Forum für Differenz- und Genderforschung. Beitrag: Performativität’, http://differenzen.univie.ac.at/glossar.php?sp=4 (posted 6 October 2003; [accessed 23 October 2009] my translation).

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005).

Auslander, for example, maintains that ‘musical performance may be defined, using Graver's terms, as a person's representation of self within a discursive domain of music’ (Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, p. 102).