Guitar Hero making kids classic rock fans

My son has fallen in love with the Bad Boys from New York, a.k.a. the Rolling Stones. My husband Rick got the Stones New York concert DVD a few weeks ago for his birthday and he and Truman have been listening to it almost every night, playing invisible electric guitars and pretending they are “Captain Jack Sparrow’s dad,” (Keith Richards). Amazing to think those guys are my father’s age. When Rick and Tru aren’t dancing to the Stones, they’re cranking up U2’s new album and the DVR’d U2 concerts on David Letterman a few weeks ago.

All this has given my son a healthy song vocabulary. He knows the words better than I and gets peeved when we’re having an in-home concert and I’m on the “microphone instrument” and mess up the lyrics to “Can’t Always Get What You Want.” (I can’t remember the line after “she was going to meet her connection.”)

I’ll state the obvious here and say that “Can’t Always Get” is a perfect song to reference when your child falls limp on the floor and begins to wail like a cat in heat because he can’t get what he wants, when he wants it.

Rick is all about nurturing our son’s interest in music, and I am too. But I thought 5 was a bit young for the junior drum set Rick wanted to get. So we’re compromising. Rick has talked me into getting the Wii Guitar Hero IV, which comes complete with a drum set and mic as well as the guitar. Oddly enough, while researching the merits of Guitar Hero I came across this story on Game with a Brain about how video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero have piqued the interest in classic rock music among the younger generation. Parents especially love this trend because it offers another way to connect with their kids, which is what Guitar Hero I & II and Rock Band founder Alex Rigopulos calls a “big part of our secret agenda.” The games, he says, “are about connecting people to music in a deeper way.”