I like rap music. I like it so much that my favorite album of the year is a rap album.
And yet there I was in my apartment this past weekend, drumming in "Rock Band," banging away with my amazing medium-level skills, and thinking, sadly, that maybe Alex Rigopulos, head of Harmonix, architect of many a music games, was right.
Maybe perfectly good rap songs could not work in "Rock Band," "Rap Band," "Hip-Hop Hero" or whatever they would call a hip-hop version.
I was playing the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," the closest thing to a rap song that is in either "Rock Band" or "Guitar Hero III," and while it seemed that my guitar-wielding "Rock Band" friends were having fun, over on the drums I was experiencing all the joy and variety of a guy hammering nails. Bang. Bang. Tap. Again and again and again. Almost no variety, and not much fun.
Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive" didn't cause me this problem. Not did songs by The Rolling Stones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or any other band in the game. That's why comments Rigopulous made to me for a September story at MTVNews.com about the lack of rap-based rhythm games crept back into my mind.
Oh yeah, Rigopulos did say there was a problem with rap in rhythm games.
Specifically, he warned:
"There are some inherent attributes to hip-hop music that pose some unique challenges to game design ... For example, in rock music, there is a lot of structural variation (verses, choruses, bridges, solos, etc.) that keeps things interesting for the players. By contrast, a lot of hip-hop instrumental elements tend to be extremely repetitive — sometimes a single groove in the rhythm section that repeats with little variation for the duration of the tune. If you were simply to cut and paste 'Rock Band'-style gameplay onto hip-hop grooves, it wouldn't work well. The drummer and bassist would get bored playing the same riff 100 times in a row. That's not to say that it's an unsolvable problem, however."
And wouldn't you know it, I think that's the problem I had with "Sabotage." It's not even what you'd typically consider a rap song, but it's rap enough that it turned playing the game into the dreariest form of carpentry.
There are other complications. They're mentioned in the article. Rap songs tend to have more lyrics than pop songs, making the karaoke part a bigger challenge. The act of rapping needs to be made fun in its own right, and given pre-eminence in a rap-based multi-performance game. And so on.
But right now all I can focus on is the sad realization that some of my favorite rap beats just might not be fun to play. Fun to listen to, but not fun to play.
How disappointing is that?
