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Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: The Wes Montgomery of Particle Physics
Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: The Wes Montgomery of Particle Physics | Warp + Weft: The Wes Montgomery of Particle Physics |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 08:21 PM | |
 In a cover story for City Pages last week, Kevin Hoffman referred to 16-year-old Chris Chike as the Jimi Hendrix of video games. It makes a great headline—Chike is a world record-holding Guitar Hero player, after all, and it's a concept people are familiar with—but is it fair to Hendrix? Or even Chris Chike, for that matter?Saying someone is the Jimi Hendrix of X has come to mean that they're revolutionarily good at something. So good they break all the rules governing past accomplishment and set a new standard. And if we look at the early phase of Hendrix all-too-short career, this is fair enough. He blew minds at Monterey Pop when he set his guitar on fire; he scared Eric Clapton off the stage with his rendition of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" in London; he was booted off the Monkees' tour as the opener for being too feral and wild. But it's important to note that Hendrix didn't do these things by being just technically impressive. His performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock wasn't a profound statement primarily because of his dexterity or the liquidity of his pentatonic scales. It was profound because he was taking a sacred thing and swathing it in layers of distortion, twisting it into a brilliant new anthem for a deeply divided America. While his playing was certainly impressive, the lasting image of his incendiary performance at Monetery Pop in 1967 is literally incendiary: Hendrix, kneeling over his Stratocaster, coaxing flames out of it. Hendrix was more than the best at a game with prescribed rules; he shifted paradigms by breaking down the barriers between psychedelic music and old-fashioned blues and R&B. He was an artist borne aloft by the flames from that performance at Monterey who spent most of the rest of his career trying to move past his "wild" image. He was a black man playing with two white English guys whom he eventually ditched in favor of the funkier, nastier rhythm section that would make his performance of "Machine Gun" at the Filmore East on Band of Gypsies one of the great protest songs of all time. In short, his legacy is not one of simply being inhumanly good at something. Compared to guitarists like Wes Montgomery, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eddie Van Halen, and even, yes, Steve Vai, Hendrix is not technically in their league as a player. But as a musician, he's the total package. That's why the "Jimi Hendrix of video games" can't just be someone who's preternaturally good at playing video games. It will have to be somebody who creates them, and changes our ideas of what they're capable of. Peter Molyneux (creator of Populace, Black & White, and Fable) might be the closest thing we've seen so far, although I'm sure arguments could be made for a host of Japanese game designers like Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Legend of Zelda) and Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear series).  Chris Chike is more like the Michael Jordan of video games: Someone with prodigious physical talents and a drive to bend those talents to the perfection of a game. We can argue about Jordan transcending basketball to become a cultural phenomenon, but at the end of the day a dunk by His Airness was still two points, and his three-pointers only got his teams three points. Both Chike and Jordan are perfecting a game—a contest with rules and boundaries. In fact, it's these rules and boundaries that give their accomplishments meaning; 840,647 points on Guitar Hero is an accomplishment precisely because they keep score. Jordan's six championships mean something because you can crown a champion when there's a winner and a loser.Music is more complicated. When DJ Shadow's Endtroducing came out, he was called the Jimi Hendrix of the turntables, and I can see that, because with Endtroducing he demonstrated a level of craft and accomplishment within the sampling medium that hadn't been seen before. Here was someone building complexly layered tracks whose purpose wasn't just to get you on the floor with alacrity. He was playing drum solos with MPCs and making an entire album with just that sampler, two turntables, and a hard disk recorder. Now there are DJ competitions, and I bet you Shadow couldn't win one, any more than Hendrix could win a guitar competition, but that's not what really counts in music. Of course, "American Idol" and Pitchfork perpetuate the myth that you can crown winners and assign numbers to singers and albums, but any metric you develop for measurement is completely artificial. That's why people can have endless debates about the greatest guitarist of all time and whether Roy Buchanan is better than Peter Green. In Hoffman's article, Chike's mother is quoted as saying, "The real musicians are up in arms that he's getting so much attention for playing a plastic guitar," but I'd be willing to bet those are the musicians who treat music like sports, who are trying to be the Michael Jordan of the guitar. The real musicians know: Rules are limits, and playing by them might make you the champ, but it doesn't make you Jimi Hendrix. |
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| Last Updated: Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 06:56 PM |
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