Ah, summer camp. Log cabins. Bug juice. Video games.
Exsqueeze me?
Power Chord Academy, a company that runs mini-music camps for aspiring rockers, has added summer sessions featuring the popular game where kids pretend to play instruments. Why anyone thinks this is a good thing to have their kids do during the summer is beyond me. To be fair, the sessions are short, as in two or three days. That only adds to the head-scratcher quality of the enterprise for me, however.
Many have hailed Guitar Hero and Rock Band as fantastic gateways for kids to start learning how to play a musical instrument. I am not one of those people. I play guitar, and I've played Guitar Hero. It's different. I actually had some difficulty at first learning to "play" my "guitar" the way the game wanted me to rather than the way I would play an actual guitar. Why? Because it's different.
I do think that the game exposes kids to music that they would otherwise probably dismiss as "lame" or "for old people." Guitar Hero 3 includes music by Mountain, Social Distortion, Heart -- guitar rock. Even a song like "Sabotage" by The Beastie Boys, which shows up in Rock Band, is retro to these kids today. (These kids today. With their hippity-hop music, and that Justin Timberwolf...)
There's nothing wrong with the game. I've played it, it's kind of fun, and I'm sure if I was 10 I would enjoy it more than I do at...the age that I am. But sending kids to camp to play a video game? No way.
Image: Amazon
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