For Those About to Rock Band, We Salute You

I decided the other day that one of the ways I had scaled back my big dreams was, that I had previously imagined being in a band, and now I just imagine impressing a group of people with my prowess at the game Rock Band. Really. Like, before, while dangerously closing my eyes and air guitaring in the car to When You Were Young by the Killers, I would see myself on a stage with like minded hipsters in thrift store clothes, belting away. Now, instead of that, I listen to the same songs and imagine myself impressing instead maybe eight or nine people in thrift store clothes at a party. Sometimes it gets so bad that I end up thinking explicitly about that scene at the end of the episode of Gossip Girl where Serena and Vanessa decide to become friends via Guitar Hero. Terrible.

There are more than enough, probably, books about famous singers; the two I can think of off of my head are Great Jones Street and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, though I would count Ulysses as a book that's at least a little about famous singers because of Blazes Boylan, I imagine that there are a lot books about aspirant singers, too, though I am sorry to say I cannot think of any of them that I have read. I think the new Jonathan Lethem one was about that? I don't know. But at any rate, I am willing to bet, and cannot imagine, a book about someone's quest to become great at Rock Band. No one wants to see Rock Band on television or in a movie or in a book. Even that thirty second scene in Gossip Girl, with Guitar Hero, seemed as though it were wasting its and our time. The only way that could possibly be deployed would like to mark the would-be Rock Star hero as a dork.

It is as if the kind of fame simulacra is unjustifiable in a fictional character, or at least it is unjustifiable for now. It is as if we expect that if a character is going to be given some dreams, they can at least be bigger dreams than we ourselves could get for one hundred and fifty dollars at WalMart. It would be like reading about someone whose big goal was to break into Twitter, or someone who wanted to get their photos accepted by facebook. Those are not things about which people ought not to care; they are not even things about which particular persons ought not to care a great deal, or to the exclusion of caring about making it as a tambourinist or a writer. But, and because everything seems like an excuse to me to think one more thing about books, it seems worth appreciating that characters -- those fictitious entities whose race written people are the most representative of, for their pure created-ness (viz., there is not even a real person confusing things by portraying them) -- for the fact that no matter how mundane my dreams and goals get, theirs, if I'm going to care about them, will remain big. No matter how many times I start dreaming about five oncoming neon rectangles as the notes I'm banging out instead of guitar tabs, there will still be fictions dreaming the biggest dreams dreamable, like their ancestor, tilting at windmills.