Paperback Writer

There's a fascinating take on pop music history in this weekend's Life & Arts section of the FT. A lengthy essay by Elijah Wald chronicles the shift in the center of gravity in music from the live performance to the studio.

A video game called "The Beatles: Rock Band" will go on sale next month -- designed as the other Rock Band games and the analogous Guitar Hero games) generally are, to give a player the vicarious sensation of 'being' the famous musician for whom the simulated audience is cheering.

The new game includes manipulated footage from a performance the Beatles gave in Budokan Hall, in Tokyo, Japan in the summer of 1966. It shows Paul counting off the opening beats to "Paperback Writer." In reality, Wald writes, "The harmonies were a bit rough but the filmed performance still has a loose infectious energy." Yet the game makers have manipulated the music to match the studio-recorded version of the same song, editing out the roughness.

In doing so, the game's makers are keeping faith with the Beatles' own self-image as it was developing at that time. This was their final tour. They saw themselves chiefly as the makers of recordings, not as a live act. The studio, not the stage, was the center of creation, for them and for their public.

This is very well observed by Wald, and it prompts the (unoriginal) thought on my part that perhaps the digital revolution will force a swing back to the centrality of live performances. For if the musicians in time have to accept the fact that the new technology is incompatible with older ideas of property interests in the recording, that the recording "wants to be free," then their profit center will become ... the live stage. Only there can they provide something that nobody else does.

I've just touched on the themes of two classic episodes of South Park. Season 7's Christian Rock Hard involved the issue of the economics of music int he 21st century, whereas Season 11 included Guitar Queer-O, which took aim at the sort of game that inspired Wald's meditations.