Nostalgia

If you had asked me last fall if I'd ever try a game like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, I would have replied with a resounding "NO". For whatever reason though, last January I found myself driving to Sam's Club to pick up a Rock Band bundle. I've been addicted ever since. Over the several months following there's been lots of threads and posts about which bands should be in the game and which songs are missing or shouldn't have been in the game in the first place. A lot of that passion comes from our memories of what songs we loved as kids and how we'd love to relive some of those moments from childhood, playing air guitar in the basement to the latest Kiss album or AC/DC cassette. This got me thinking about my first album.

A little background first. For, much of my life I was raised in a pretty conservative household. Think John Lithgow in Footloose, conservative. My mother was pretty anti-movie, dancing and popular music. So from age 0 - 10, I really wasn't exposed to much popular music. My parents would listen to country stations occasionally and I would hear popular songs on the jukebox when we'd go to Pizza Hut or something, so I wasn't completely cut off, but I certainly wasn't as immersed as my friends were.

At age 11 I finally got my very first Sony Walkman for a Christmas present, and a new world of music was opened to me. I remember my Aunt and my Mother taking me to a local mall to look for a cassette for me to have with my Walkman. When we got to the music store, I was a little overwhelmed to say the least. There were some definite no-nos that my mother quickly objected to. No Ozzy, no Quiet Riot etc. and after a while my Aunt started steering me to some more "mom friendly" areas of the store. My aunt was pretty liberal in her music tastes so it was a good thing that she had driven us to the mall. I finally ended up buying Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man" tape. I assume that my Aunt just picked some thing with an innocent enough title and cover and simply ended the long search for me. Regardless, I played the hell out of that tape. I'm not sure how the tape didn't actually break in the machine. I knew every song by heart.

About a year later I got my first bona fide stereo system. AM/FM stereo with dual tape decks and a record player. I even bought my first vinyl album for it, Twisted Sister's "Stay Hungry". I don't remember listening to that one quite as much. Not long after I moved to live with my dad and his attitude was quite a bit more liberal. Hair Bands were the rage by then, at least they were the rage for me, and I had plenty of cassettes and eventually CDs of everything from Bon Jovi and Van Halen to Bulletboys and Skid Row. I don't know how well I'd enjoy the "Innocent Man" album now. In fact, even as I'm writing this, I'm d/l it to my Zune. I haven't heard it in years so it'll be interesting to see how much my taste has changed since then. I know it wouldn't really lend itself well to Rock Band, but I can certainly understand why people want to hear the songs of their youth on the game so much. In fact, it seems that Rock Band and Guitar Hero are really as much about nostalgia as they are about learning songs and instruments. I'm pretty sure that if they released the Innocent Man, I'd buy it. Even if I was the only one who liked it.