A Hero's Song

Guitar Hero III features a section of songs called the European Invasion. It starts with Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, The Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K., Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing, and Weezer’s My Name is Jonas. It’s my second favorite section of the game.

Some interesting facts about this section: Sonic Youth is a band from New York. Weezer is a band from Los Angeles. And they wonder why America’s youth are terrible at geography? It’s been awhile since I last attended grade school, but back then, New York and Los Angeles were not a part of Europe. Have things changed? Did I miss a headline in the newspapers or something?

That’s not the most interesting fact about the section though. No, that belongs to The Sex Pistols. As any punk fan knows, they are royalty. Mostly because of songs like Anarchy in the U.K.. At any rate, when you select the songs to play, they always say who the artist is and when the song was originally released. For Anarchy, it said 2007. I thought about it for a second and decided they were wrong, but I wrote it off because they apparently think that N.Y. and L.A. are in Europe.

Turns out, they were right. Yes, I looked at my copy of Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols and saw the 1977 copy write date. But then, in the game I bought the video title The Sex Pistols where I learned that in some bizarre series of events, the record label either lost or sold the masters to all of their songs. Nobody knows where they were, so for the game, they assembled the available members of the band and rerecorded the song this year.

What I found to be most amazing about that was that I couldn’t tell. Normally, when you’re familiar with a song, then you hear a rerecorded version; you can tell that things have been changed slightly. Maybe the tempo isn’t quite right, maybe they don’t hold certain notes as long or they hold them longer. But this was not the case. Considering they originally recorded this song 30 years ago, I’d have to say they did an amazing job recreating it. But really, would you expect anything less from a guy named Johnny Rotten?