Rock Band Affirms the Liberating Power of Music

While I hadn’t played Rock Band until recently, I continued to play guitar since I started learning my freshman year. I was in a probably pretty bad band in high school. I’ve played for friends or small groups at house shows. Mostly, though, my music playing and listening is casual. I sing a Springsteen or Joni Mitchell song if I’m in the mood, and occasionally try to rearrange the songs I’ve written over the years. I have a small vinyl collection. I feel that streaming has kind of ruined my relationship with music, but haven’t taken all the steps to fix it yet.

In large part, this is because my relationship with music is gendered and troubled. In high school, I liked Pink Floyd, Radiohead, and The National. In other words, I liked “straight white boy music.” In first trying to set myself apart from other straight white men, and then in the struggle to claim womanhood, I have felt that my music taste reveals something fundamental about myself, some underlying maleness. The result of this is less that I don’t listen to music and more that I just don’t really talk about it. It’s private to me. This coyness about my taste is the echo of my younger desire to make my consumption “productive.” My music taste should show my virtue and since it cannot (it couldn’t ever), I don’t bring it up.

While my motivation for revisiting Rock Band was motivated by similar ideals, I wanted to pick it up to at least kind of learn to play the drums. Instead it worked to make me more comfortable with myself and to listen more carefully. While Alex Navarro’s streams opened the door, actually playing the game forced my feet through. Now listening to a song, I can imagine how my hands might play it on my fake set. The diversity of Rock Band 3’s soundtrack helps me feel out why and how different genres are played. I’m more impressed at a difficult fill, more understanding and aware of both simplicity and complexity of beats. While I would still be clueless in front of an actual set, it is helping my channel my years of listening to music into something I can actually talk about and share. The game is not a way of playing music, but of listening to it.

That is true even with the game’s emphasis on interaction and skill. There is nothing about Guitar Hero or Rock Band that necessitates using anything other than a controller. However, the games insist on giving you an instrument, a thing that channels music. The real reason for this, of course, is upping the price. It makes the games more expensive, more of a hot ticket or prestige item. However, the effect of it in play is a physical relationship to the music, a way of affirming that human hands made these sounds. Playing a plastic guitar with five buttons is playing air guitar with mediation. I can put on a song and approximate playing along on the fake set. The thump of plastic replaces the crash of a cymbal or the sharpness of a snare. It is not the same, but it does show a truth about how music works. Someone’s hands and heart made this. Yours can too.

Music can feel distant. Watching an incredible musician at work can feel like watching a god. Behind all that skill, though, are hearts and bodies, just like yours. Rock Band affirms that music is your own. At least, it did for me. It is not pure, of course. The cultural power of capital, the boundaries of whiteness and Blackness, the oppressiveness of gender and taste, and so much else shape how people make music and which people are recognized for making it. Rock Band is as shaped by those things as much as anything else. However, I believe that music can be something else, if we trust our hearts and hands enough to make it happen. By teaching me to listen, Rock Band reminded me that loving music can be freeing. Maybe I felt that way, so many years ago at my friend’s house, giving voice to unknown songs I would later know by heart.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @grace_machine on Twitter.