AlexHopmann.com

The Coachella Festival 2008 line up is out. My first reaction is that the overall list of bands playing is by far the weakest that I have ever seen. This is not to say that there aren’t some acts that I’m really eager to see- The Breeders and Fatboy Slim are two on the top of my list. But overall there is a ton of stuff I don’t care about and a ton more that I’ve never heard of.

Which brings me back to my thoughts at the end of last year’s show. Over years of going to this festival most of the best aspects were bands I didn’t know I’d love. For me this is ideally about discovering the great new stuff for the next year. So I’m keeping an open mind and I’ll dig into the full list and check out the whole list ahead of time.

Complaining about the mass media doing a poor job is like shooting fish in a barrel. Mostly I leave it to A Daily Show and the Colbert Report. But this one I’ve got to comment on.

I’m really annoyed by all the coverage of New Hampshire. To read the headlines it would seem like Hillary Clinton had a huge defeat of Barack Obama. She did “win”, but by 2 percentage points. But, and this is a big one, both Iowa and New Hampshire are not winner take all states- you get delegates proportional to your votes. So Obama’s “big win” in Iowa gave him 16 delegates to Clinton’s 15. And in New Hampshire, they each got 9. In other words, in the real impact, its a tie.

Meanwhile, to hear the pundits talk about it, Mitt Romney is just sucking wind, with two second place finishes. Again, until you look at the delegate count and see that he is leading with 24, compared to Huckabee in 2nd place with 18. It is just AMAZING that no one in the press has mentioned this (that I’ve seen, but granted I have very little patience for the inane commentary on TV, so my sources are the NY Times, Slate, etc).

Furthermore I continue to be annoyed with the way that the press and politicians are barely covering the big scandal, which is how Iowa and New Hampshire continue to use thuggish tactics to maintain their up front primary and caucus roles, disenfranchising 99% of the US population from much of the election process. These two states are a very poor representation of America. They are both more than 95% white, to the extent that they have any minorities, they don’t represent the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who are becoming very much a part of America, and even more important to me, they don’t have ANY major cities (the closest either comes are the parts of New Hampshire that are effectively Boston suburbs and those are pretty far out there). Some of the key political issues are involving the differences between urban and rural issues and to let two states with no major cities have this kind of role is crazy for a society where more and more of the population is living in those big cities.

I’ll save complaining about the caucus system (typical voter turnout- 1-3%), for another post.

But the bottom line is that the major politicians and the party infrastructure both kiss these states butts, and it really has to stop. The extreme here is the way the Democrats have pretty much banned their candidates from campaigning in Michigan or Florida. Are they crazy??? Florida, hmmm, that really sounds like a good state to piss off the electorate.

There are several good proposals of rotating regional primary days that can give fair opportunities to various regions of the country and keep things so that candidates don’t have to criss-cross the country constantly. Maybe now that Iowa and New Hampshire are behind us we can have some leaders with the guts to proclaim 2008 the last election where these guys go first.

Rock Band was the big arrival in our house this Christmas eve and its now been enough time to share some real thoughts on it.

Overall Rock Band is way better than Guitar Hero III. Lots of small things are better- more customization of the look of your avatar, more variety of songs. The big thing is that it moves things into a very social arena. Given the addition of voice, Rock Band has the potential to become the new karaoke, but rather than just signing along with your friends, you can do the guitar, drums or bass parts along with someone singing. The New Years after most folks had left a couple of friends stayed and we had great fun messing around with various songs.

They have also done a great job with the downloadable songs. Every Tuesday since their launch there have been 3 to 5 more songs, and they have done a decent balance of classics and newer stuff. There have been so many downloads that this already shows up some really big weaknesses in the XBox Live marketplace- it is becoming a real pain to browse through them, the description box is so small you need to wait for it to scroll to really see what the song is, and they don’t have the ability to do audio previews in the marketplace. Still, this is in serious danger of costing me $100-$250 a year if they can keep it up, and in an industry seeking ways to generate real revenue for music and artists, that should be gold.

There are two places where Guitar Hero III is still better. First, the overall feel of the guitar playing seems slightly better there- maybe its just that I got used to Guitar Hero first, but I feel like I get more places where Rock Band is just showing me missing notes for no reason. Also (go figure) the “solo play” for Guitar Hero is somewhat better, with the cool “boss battle” sequences, while the Rock Band solo play is just a list of songs.

Early production of the Rock Band guitar controllers apparently had lots of issues with the strum bar. Mine broke after just a few days but the EA return policy could not have been better. I just went to an online site, gave them a credit card # (just for a deposit) and they sent me a replacement in two days. I put the old one in the box and sent it back to them. No cost to me, very low hassle. Stuff breaks, but EA should be commended for having such a great approach to fixing it, and especially for letting me deal with it all on the web without having to talk to a support person.

Rock Band has the potential to be really huge. Its a bit expensive to get into it ($170), but the potential to be the karaoke “party game” replacement is huge, both in terms of being really fun and in terms of their potential market for the download songs. My advice would be to make sure they keep this scenario in mind as they produce new downloadable songs and game updates- make sure there are good modes in the game where its all about fun performing together, fun stuff to sing along with, etc. It would be great if they could do an update where you could have two microphones so people can sing along together, a better marketplace, better ways to browse the list of songs you own, etc.