ERSATZ DYNAMITE: Nerds play plastic guitars, markets react strongly


There Will Always Be An England: Sirs David Beatty
and John Jellicoe appear off Jutland in the LA Times
as warm-up to Rock Band 2.

In the early Nineties your host created a column called Nightclubbing at the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, PA. It's purpose was to go out and spread humorous scorn on various rock music events, local and national, in the Lehigh Valley. The idea was to furnish adult readers who normally wouldn't be found dead in rock dives with something light and chuckle-worthy over weekend morning coffee. This was opposite the common practice in newspaper-land which was to send a reporter who would act as court-appointed stenographer and head cheerleader for who or whatever was in town.

After over fifteen years, one would think being a realist -- as opposed to being a shill -- would be more popular in newspapers.

Sadly, this is not the case.

The Los Angeles Times sent a free-lancer to cover a do for the game Rock Band 2 at the Orpheum Theatre.

We're going to skip most of the knee-jerk coverage from this morning's edition in favor of a couple of fatuous quotes, delivered to push a game in which people mime and manipulate little plastic guitars in time to canned rock 'n' roll hits.

"This game is for the first time bordering on an authentic music experience," Paul DeGooyer, an employee of MTV Games/Rock Band 2, told the royal court's human tape-recorder.

"There's this world full of people who are born with this innate desire to make music, and they spend their whole lives playing air guitar and loving music but having no way to tap into that instinct," another flack told the Times.

Riding to the rescue, Rock Band 2 releases the masses from their lives of not-real-quiet desperation.


Nerdy girl tapping into her instincts, courtesy of morning paper.
"Scientist" insert from last week's blog was accidental but looked OK, anyway. She's a scientist of rock!