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- <text id=94TT0044>
- <title>
- Jan. 17, 1994: The Arts & Media:Music
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
- Jan. 17, 1994 Genetics:The Future Is Now
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE ARTS & MEDIA, Page 58
- Music
- Rock Goes Interactive
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>From David Bowie to Peter Gabriel--and even including Elvis--computerized pop stars are letting listeners take a hand
- in the music
- </p>
- <p>By Richard Corliss--Reported by David S. Jackson/San Francisco and David E. Thigpen/New
- York
- </p>
- <p> You'd never guess it from watching kids pogo-stick at a Pearl
- Jam concert, or vibrate to the street beat that pours out of
- their Walkmans, but listening to music is an essentially passive
- experience. Performers make the sound, consumers devour it.
- For every pop generation from A to X, the big creative decision
- has been which record (cassette, CD) to put in the music machine.
- For radio listeners, even that decision is denied. Music is
- too easy: a hot soak in somebody else's bathtub.
- </p>
- <p> Well, listen up, rockheads. You're about to become the hippest
- form of computer nerds. You'd better smarten up too, because
- there's work to do, and lots of creative play. More than 5 million
- of you in North America have CD-ROM or Philips CD-i players,
- and that number is expected to double by year's end and treble
- by 1996. Get ready to hook up those players to your computers
- and home entertainment centers, fork over $25 to $100 a disk
- and jam with your favorite artist. Passivity is passe; tubby
- time is over. Here comes Interactive Rock.
- </p>
- <p> In fact, advance forces have already landed. Music visionaries
- and cybernuts are dreaming big to merge the latest in computer
- savvy with the primal pulse of rock. So strap on your mouse
- and groove along with these desktop rockers:
- </p>
- <p>-- Todd Rundgren. In No World Order, the veteran singer and
- producer (Meat Loaf, Grand Funk Railroad) has created the first
- do-it-yourself album. Listeners with CD-i players can customize
- any of the 10 tracks to their tastes. They can change the tempo
- (between 86 and 132 beats a minute), the mix ("natural," "spacious,"
- "sparse" or "karaoke"), the mood ("bright," "happy," "thoughtful,"
- "sad" or "dark"), even the form ("creative," "standard" or "conservative").
- They can hatch new sounds by sampling the 933 snatches of music
- in the data base. Did you ever want to play the chorus of a
- favorite song over and over? You can do it here. At a click,
- you can do almost anything.
- </p>
- <p>-- Peter Gabriel. The Genesis grad, whose music videos (Sledgehammer,
- Steam) have been pixilated eye-poppers, offers options galore
- in his CD-ROM Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World. First
- you put the singer's face together, which means choosing from
- a screenful of different mouths, noses, eyes and ears. "You'll
- know when you've got it," says Mr. Computer Potato Head while
- you give him a facial. This achieved, you must decide what to
- do next: Watch one of his music videos? Thumb through his old
- baby pictures? Choose various cuts by musicians from around
- the world and mix them together into your own jam session? Or
- "go backstage"; that requires a pass, which you earn while maneuvering
- through the disk. As Gabriel narrates, boxes of hypertext pop
- up alongside the images. If you click on Gabriel's passport,
- it shows his photograph morphing from infancy through adulthood
- into a skull. And if you dally in moving your mouse, he may
- chirp, "Click me!" Best advice: Don't be afraid, be a fighter--and Gabriel's world is yours.
- </p>
- <p>-- The Residents. No surprise that the first CD-ROM from the
- eyeball-headed San Francisco group should be called Freak Show--a virtual version of their 1990 set. The user enters a carnival
- big top to see and hear such freaks as Harry the Head, Herman
- the Human Mole, Wanda the Worm Woman, Jello Jack the Boneless
- Boy and Bouncing Benny the Bump. Later the user can wander backstage
- and sneak into the freaks' trailers, flip through their photo
- albums, read their love letters, watch music videos on their
- TV sets. Animated by Jim Ludtke, Freak Show has an artfully
- eerie feel. "We didn't want it to be a techie thing," says Homer
- Flynn, the band's manager. "But we do like being the only CD-ROM
- with a worm eater on it."
- </p>
- <p>-- David Bowie. The first CD-ROM from this charismatic chameleon,
- Jump: David Bowie Interactive, to be released shortly, will
- be as theatrical as its star's performances: the disk will allow
- users to create their own music videos using songs from Bowie's
- Black Tie White Noise album. "It's like you're playing a live
- TV producer with five cameras," says software designer Ty Roberts.
- "You have to pick which one to use." Jump will also feature
- three Black Tie music videos.
- </p>
- <p>-- Heart. Power popsters Ann and Nancy Wilson will release this
- month an interactive CD-ROM called Heart/20 Years of Rock and
- Roll, including their songs, videos, a discography of past releases
- and notable events in the band's history, plus childhood photos
- and bio data. As a group retrospective, efforts like Heart's
- will surely become standard reissue in the format: a computer
- version of boxed-set CDs.
- </p>
- <p>-- Elvis. The King is not dead--we know that from reading
- Weekly World News--but soon he will live, and sing, on the
- CD-ROM Virtual Graceland. Due out this summer, the Crunch Media
- disk allows users to roam freely through Presley's haunted mansion,
- room by room, in 360 degrees shots. Wander into the TV room
- and play Elvis' hits on his personal phonograph. Noodle on Elvis'
- piano, strum his guitar, open drawers by clicking on them. Just
- don't try peeking into Elvis' medicine chest; the bathroom is
- not open to the public.
- </p>
- <p> Technological razzle-jazzle has energized rock music ever since
- the Moog-and-groove, sound-and-light-show days of the '60s.
- The synthesizer, a computerized one-man band, has become the
- instrumental instrument in many a rock group. Heavy-metal outfits
- like Guns N' Roses and Metallica, as well as such megatheatrical
- performers as Janet Jackson and David Bowie, have shown that
- computerized control of stage lighting creates a wide range
- of effects. The Grateful Dead, on a perpetual postmortem tour,
- keeps things fresh with computerized psychedelia synchronized
- to the music and projected on big screens. The aim is to find
- a visual corollary to the spontaneity of live (or Dead) rock
- 'n' roll.
- </p>
- <p> Ireland's druids of drone, U2, go a step further in their concerts:
- they program and project their own interactive special effects.
- Bono (or The Edge) will use a remote control to move a cursor
- (which can be seen on the two huge screens) that allows him
- to set a song's instruments and tempo. Then the band joins in.
- The onstage screen shows the choices he has and the decisions
- he makes. Between songs Bono can regulate four projections of
- himself; when he clicks on one of them, it will tell a joke,
- start singing or talk. "U2 love playing with these new technologies,"
- says their "interactive producer," Philip van Allen. "They're
- more than just musicians--they're show people. These big rock
- shows are so sophisticated that the artist becomes only one
- small point. We're giving the power back to the artist."
- </p>
- <p> On MTV the notion of interactive rock is in vogue if not yet
- in practice. The latest Beavis and Butt-head video, I Got You
- Babe, has the two cartoon metalheads cackling wildly as they
- put on virtual-reality headsets, plunge into cyberspace and
- select a "chick" from a computer screen menu. Among the choices:
- "sexy," "wild" or "was married to dork." The boys choose No.
- 3, and out pops Cher.
- </p>
- <p> In Amazing, a new video from rave-rockers Aerosmith, a pimple-faced
- lad summons up an image of himself on his home computer and
- magically erases those zits. Then he ups the ante. Feeding the
- computer an image of his dream woman and, donning the mandatory
- virtual-reality gear, he steps into a higher, hornier hyper
- reality where all his lusts are gratified. He and his girlfriend
- ride off on a motorcycle, make cyberlove, hitchhike a ride on
- a biplane and sky surf off the wing. If there's a rock 'n' roll
- virtual heaven for teenage testosterosis, this might be it.
- </p>
- <p> Yet it still isn't interactive. MTV may soon be involved in
- the technology. But a few artists--such as Billy Idol, the
- British punkster whose first band was named (remember?) Generation
- X--are already living it.
- </p>
- <p> "I got into music to do it myself without the oppressive thumb
- of convention," says Idol, who released a Macintosh floppy disk
- with his album Cyberpunk. Yet for years Idol was "trapped in
- recording studios with my band trying to get the music right--playing, arranging, figuring it all out--while the money
- clock ticked away." Then he found a technology that allowed
- him to create a "virtual studio" in his home. "I was excited.
- It was `live' to the computer."
- </p>
- <p> Now it's computer to computer, musician to listener, and everybody's
- a performance artist. For Gabriel and Rundgren, interactive
- rock is not just a career move; it is a techno-mission.
- </p>
- <p> Rundgren bought his first computer in 1979, spent a year learning
- how to use it and then wrote a software graphics program that
- executives at Apple liked so much they licensed it. Now he can
- marry his vocation and his avocation into popular art with a
- message. "Musicians nowadays tend to use music as much for obfuscation
- as for revelation," Rundgren says. "I'm trying to use this technology
- to change it back to revelatory."
- </p>
- <p> Revelatory and, in Rundgren's solo concerts, running amuck.
- Perched on a small platform beneath 24 blinking video monitors,
- he sings and ``plays" his Apple Powerbook 170 laptop computer,
- a synthesizer and occasionally even a guitar. Audience members
- can sing along or swat drum pads and see their images recorded
- and played back at them, mixed, enhanced and amplified in a
- potentially infinite variety of ways by Rundgren. There is no
- set list or running order, no lighting or sound technician;
- Rundgren, a New Age Wizard of Oz, does it all.
- </p>
- <p> And for Gabriel there's nothing to lose but fustian notions
- of who does what in music. "Interactive rock challenges the
- old roles of artist and audience," he says. "No longer do you
- have to supply a linear form with a beginning and an end and
- a singular journey through it. Instead you create an environment,
- a kind of forest, where people have the option to follow your
- path through it, or they can plan their own route--they can
- see the world you provided as a collage kit. All the barriers
- that separated education from entertainment and communication
- are being eroded."
- </p>
- <p> The four-time Grammy winner insists that rock fans need not
- fret about being deprived of old auditory pleasures. "There
- will be times when you just want to listen to music as a one-sense
- operation," he says, "and there will be other times when you
- want to sit down and get your hands dirty and play with it."
- Nor does Gabriel suffer from the traditional artist's skepticism,
- even fear, of technology's power tools. "I'm a great believer
- that technology has to go through two waves," he declares. "The
- first wave can dehumanize, but the second wave, if the response
- and feedback mechanisms are in place, can be to superhumanize.
- So rather than contain and isolate and alienate us, technology
- can also expand and challenge and open us. And that's empowering."
- </p>
- <p> Before the rhetoric gets too elevated--before the government
- is asked to grant tax-exempt status to the First Church of Interactive
- Rock--let's pause and ask what it means for the music market.
- Even there the predictions are rosy. "We may be a little bit
- ahead of the curve," says Brian Fargo, the president of Interplay
- Productions, whose MacPlay software division distributes Gabriel's
- Xplora 1. "But I think this will be a brand-new market segment
- that didn't even exist before. It's no longer a question of
- whether this format will take off but when. I'd say within a
- year or so it will be a CD-ROM world."
- </p>
- <p> Maybe. Desktop rock could be this year's GameBoy--or next
- year's hula hoop. As Gabriel warns, "In the end it's only as
- good as the content." But the form is in its infant stage, and
- all babies look cute. The best thing is that right now, it's
- all promise, no threat. So keep your fingers crossed--until
- you pick up that mouse. Interactive rock could be on a roll.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-