Rockstars

The need for rockstars – Part 3

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Maybe rockstars aren’t even rockstars in Australia.

Bernard Zuel asks why Australia hasn’t produced one strutting god since Michael Hutchence.

The English do them regularly, the Americans do them comfortably but where are the Australian rock stars? The classic rock star, that semi-mythical figure born of bedroom fantasies, fed by music-magazine intensity and crowned in tabloid frenzy.

Bernard Fanning from Powderfinger, you say? Nup. Big-selling but self-effacing and deliberately ordinary. Chris Cheney from the Living End? Workmanlike is not exactly what women like. Shannon Noll? Two words: soul patch. John Butler? You can’t be a rock star sitting down. Jimmy Barnes? Too blokey, too matey, too old. Gareth Liddiard from the Drones? Too unknown, too inner-Melbourne.

From The Age.

The need for Rockstars – Part 2

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Following on from my post on why we need more rockstars locally, this link showed up in my Google Alert for Freeplay and reminded me that Kieron Gillen had said very much the same thing in 2005.

Rock Star is just used as short hand for fearless. It’s worth remembering that there’s all manner of Rock Star archetypes to follow. There’s Rockstars known for their piercing, caustic intelligence and puritanical rage as much as those who are just a byword for narcissistic excess. Some already do it – I had the rare pleasure of interviewing an independent developer who argued that the conservative critics were right: games /were/ murder simulations. However, since we live in a world where such power is centralized in Authority who regularly use it oppressively, it’s important that we’re able to train ourselves to resist them if required. Essentially, the videogame reinvented as a part of the revolutionaries toolkit alongside the trusty AK-47.

You can read the whole transcript of his talk here.