Rock Band Wish List #4: (Addendum)

Recently I praised Activision and Neversoft for their eclectic range of songs in Guitar Hero 5, but today I come to bury them. Because this shit just isn't acceptable.



It might be hard to believe, but I do try to avoid preciousness or excess fragility when dealing with pop culture ephemera, and not get my knickers in a twist about, say, JJ Abrams coming along and making Spock and Uhura a couple (I thought it was quite sweet, actually), but with music, it's different. Music is more personal, and the connection to certain creators is more direct. When Kurt died, it fucking hurt. Hurt me, hurt my friends. I still remember the night his death was announced like it was yesterday. Years earlier my mother had been reduced to tears over the deaths of Elvis and John Lennon, and I hadn't understood why she would do that. When Cobain died, I got it.

This Rolling Stone article -- or should I say retyped press release -- claims that this only came about once Courtney Love (that brave defender of Cobain's legacy) signed off on it, along with Primary Wave Publishing and Dave Grohl, but it's unclear whether they're talking about the music or the image.

The licensing deal had been in the works for years, but Activision’s Vice President of Music Affairs Tim Riley is still pinching himself. ” ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is a song that we’ve had at the top of our wish list ever since I came to Guitar Hero,” he tells Rolling Stone from his office in Santa Monica. “So it’s been a while.”

Indeed, securing the proper approvals was no small feat. Not only did Cobain’s widow Courtney Love have to sign off on behalf of the estate, so did former drummer Dave Grohl and Primary Wave Publishing, which administers the Nirvana catalog. “There’s a lot of moving parts to something like this,” Riley explains. “But it was about timing, not an issue of resistance. We almost did it for World Tour, but we couldn’t get it together. Then after three years of working with the different parties, it was like the perfect storm.”

Naturally, Love did have some concerns. Namely, Cobain’s physique, Riley reveals. “Courtney supplied us with photos and videos and knew exactly what she wanted Kurt to look like,” he says. “She picked the wardrobe and hair style, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit’ look, then we went back and forth over changes — some subtle, some not so subtle.” In column B? Love’s reference to the Greek God Adonis, whose youthful good looks made the male deity an object of desire. “She certainly had a physical image in mind,” says Riley. “She wanted him to have that sort of athletic definition but not overly so.” And while Love has long had a reputation for being difficult, Riley’s experience was anything but. “She was actually great to work with,” he says. “She got back with comments pretty quickly.”

I'll bet she got back to them quickly. Milos Forman hasn't been rushing to cast her in another movie, I'll wager. Would Grohl have any say in image control rights? He can't have thought this was a good idea, surely. And what about Krist Novoselic? I'm unclear about how the Nirvana estate has been handled, but doesn't he have a say?

Whatever. I'm pissed, and I'm not the only one. I'm coming in late to the game complaining about this, but it needed to be said, my recent excitement about the game was done before I realised this had happened. Shades of Caruso does not endorse this bullshit.

Rock Band Wish List #3: Phoenix

A lot of the songs I want made available as Rock Band download tracks appeal to me as possible challenges, probably because many of the tracks I looked forward to most have turned out to be depressingly easy. That's not the worst problem in the world, but just as some gamified songs have revealed levels of songcraft that I hadn't fully appreciated, simple songs make some of my heroes seem like charlatans. This is a mistake on my part, as Nirvana's talent often lay in the oppressive atmosphere and visceral impact of their sound, not in intricacy. Only when repurposed for acoustic did their songs become nuanced. When in their raw form, they were often a barrage of sounds, which is not as much fun to play, though still great to listen to. (N.B. I'm not just picking on Nirvana because I'm impatient for a future release of Lithium, Come As You Are, and Smells Like Teen Spirit, plus all of In Utero. Not at all.)


Nevertheless, when I spend precious Space Dollars (© Warren Ellis) I want the songs to tax me. That's probably why I play Blue Sky by The Allman Brothers Band so much. That enormous solo is pure joy from start to finish. A lot of Nothing's Shocking by Jane's Addiction is a test of dexterity, and my current favourite purchase is Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughan, where all of the guitar tracks are difficult to finger-annihilatingly hard. Coughing up the big bucks for that whole album is the smartest frivolous purchase I've made in a while.

And then there are the songs I want just because they are outrageous fun. We recently fell in love with Green Day's Know Your Enemy after seeing them play some blistering versions of it on The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live. This would definitely have been on the Wish List, but we don't need to now that the imminent release as part of a three song track pack has been announced. And this excitement from someone who never took Green Day seriously? That's how much fun that song is. So, with that sorted out to our satisfaction, I'm exhorting Harmonix and MTV Games to make 1901 by Phoenix available as soon as possible.


I never got the appeal of Gallic popsters Phoenix before, but their latest album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, is undeniably the album of the summer. It's a multi-hook pile-up on the joy highway, and I'm begging all readers to chase it down immediately. Just like previous summer albums from my past, like I Should Coco, Ill Communication, and Dig Your Own Hole, it feels like it's made of pure sunshine, and 1901 is the track that immediately caught my ear on first listen. Buy that album and you get a free suntan just by standing in front of your speakers. It's that good. Here's 1901 as a taster.



Gamify this immediately, gaming people, and I'll be playing it as often as other grin-inducing uplift-providers as Nine in the Afternoon by Panic At The Disco, Use It by The New Pornographers, and Dead on Arrival by Fall Out Boy. And that's a promise.