Thursday, November 3, 2011

David Pogue on You Rock

Since recorded music has little marketplace value in and of itself in the age of online file sharing, music  increasingly gets commodified as an adjunct to other, more commercially viable, media.  One consequence is that music sometimes ends up being reviewed in the mainstream by critics who have precious little experience writing about music (and maybe even scant interest in music at all).  For example, Bjork's recent album, Biophilia, was reviewed by the New York Times's video-game critic.  And now comes technology critic David Pogue reviewing the new You Rock, which appears to be the latest development in the convergence of video games and "real" (whatever that means) musical instruments (see Kiri Miller's forthcoming book, Playing Alongfor more details).

So, I guess it's almost inevitable that we end up reading gaffes such as the following, from Mr. Pogue:
the You Rock lets you do some stunts you can’t do on a real guitar, like Tap Mode. That’s when you don’t pluck the strings at all. Instead, you play entirely on the neck, as though it’s a weird sort of fretted keyboard.
Hmm... I guess this means folks like Stanley Jordan and Eddie Van Halen are pretty much just chopped liver?

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