Sleater-Kinney were (and still are, despite no longer existing) the sort of band I loved with desperate abandon – loud, messy, and smarter than they were ever supposed to be. I came on board with One Beat, their next-to-last record and one of the first actual protest albums to the then-new Iraq War nonsense. After devouring their back catalog and seeing how they evolved from your average Riot Grrl act into a band with something to say, last album The Woods was a revelation, the work of mature musicians at the peak of their abilities. They broke up a year or so later. I never got to see them live, which is one of the many missed live show opportunities I’ll regret for ever and always.

Today though, for no apparent reason other than to hijack my iPod for the rest of the day with fond remembrances of the rock that was, Slate has a piece by S-K bassist Carrie Brownstein discussing her experiences with Rock Band. While her initial opinion of the game is more in line with the sort of annoying and missing-the-point statements I’ve heard made by other actual musicians (e.g. “Why don’t you just learn a real instrument?”), she eventually finds a good chunk of the appeal on her own and thus continues to prove that girl bass players are generally the best people ever. Behold the wisdom of one of Olympia’s Finest:

“Not even the creators of Rock Band could possibly believe that playing the game is tantamount to making your own music. There is, however, a sad similarity between Rock Band and some actual bands, and that is the attempt at realness. With so much of music blurring the lines between ersatz and authenticity, at least the Rock Band game is a tribute to rock, rather than an affront. In the realm of fakery, I would choose Rock Band over American Idol or over any of the other flimsy truths masquerading as music. With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.”

See there?  Got it in one. Read the rest of the piece here while I find a nice quiet place for my head to explode from the culture clash of too many things I love at once.

Filed under: Rock Band