rock

When Guitar Hero or Rock Band come up in conversation, I always feel a little like Stan's dad in this recent episode of South Park (fast forward to 0:45 if you're in a hurry).

I feel a little better since yesterday, when Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein published her review of Rock Band in Slate, in which she compares playing Rock Band with playing in a rock band. It's a fun read, so I won't summarize it here, but the following quote pretty much nails it for me: "And, really, if you are going to … Read more

If you're going to have an all-night Rock Band session, make sure to invite your neighbors over for some of the fun. Or at least warn them before cranking it up.

According to the Rock Band message boards, two tenants of an apartment complex in Oregon were issued a 10-day notice to stop rocking so hard or move out.

Causational hypotheses on the message boards range from lame non-metal-loving neighbors, poor soundproofing in the ceiling, and good old-fashioned inconsideration.

The image of the notice that appears on the message boards is very blurry, perhaps due to the amount of … Read more

One hundred fifteen million dollars.

That was how much revenue Activision's Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock brought in in its first week on the market recently.

But the Guitar Hero franchise, which Activision bought in 2006, has lost its monopoly as the only major video game giving users the fantasy that they can join Steven Tyler or Bono onstage.

That's because Harmonix, the studio that developed the original Guitar Hero, has finally launched Rock Band, its own version of the rock star genre game, and the market is likely to heat up pretty quickly.

Many Guitar Hero … Read more

Just in time for Thanksgiving, the Vice empire has cooked up some snarky rhymes, headphone-wrecking, apocalyptic beats from some of the label's best and most recent reworkings for you to devour. Courtesy of Vice Records, all the remixes you see below were sliced and diced from hipster favorites Justice, Spankrock, The Streets, and Bloc Party. Download it, pass it around, play it at your parties. This music is meant to be heard (and danced to). Happy gobble gobble!

Britney Spears "Me Against the Music" Justice remix

Britney can sound listenable with the right producer--in this case, Justice implements a C&C Music Factory-reminiscent synth stab to spice things up. You'll wish they'd all met a long time ago. … Read more

While some 12,000 TV and film screenwriters go on strike this week, people are filling the void by turning to other forms of media, such as DVDs and the Internet. Ironically, these outlets are exactly what the members of the Writers Guild want more of the profit of (and don't want people to support). They're hoping to come to an agreement soon, although the last walk out like this (in 1988) lasted for five months. Ouch.

We'll miss The Office, Desperate Housewives and Conan O'brien, but it's not the end of the world, right? … Read more

If you're one of the millions of people who have shed your dignity to rock out to Guitar Hero and you've been waiting to find out what songs would be included in Harmonix Music System's forthcoming Rock Band, wait no more. I've got you covered.

We're talking dozens of hit songs here, and mostly not the sound-alike covers included in many of these kinds of games.

The track list starts with the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter, continues on with David Bowie's Suffragette City, the Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go, Metallica'… Read more

Facebook's Senior Platform Manager Ami Vora took the stage at this morning's SNAP Summit in San Francisco to talk about "the state of the platform" from Facebook's perspective. Besides a rehash of the social graph spiel from the launch of the applications platform earlier this year, several interesting numbers were thrown around, including one that noted that 1 in 4 people in Toronto are on Facebook, and that each Facebook user turns about 50 pages a day. The most impressive, however, is that 85 percent of users on Facebook have added at least one application … Read more