Yup; this is a thing.
I can’t believe this was on the internet for about a month before I saw it.
Totally sweet.
A couple of weeks ago I picked up the Pat Benatar pack for Rock Band, mostly out of curiosity. Last night I played “Love Is a Battlefield” for the first time and found it to be a lot more fun than I was expecting. I suppose I hadn’t listened to what the guitar was doing in the background before.
I did 95% on sightread, which was good enough for 1,496th on the leaderboard.
It’s not the best Benatar on Rock Band, though; that honor goes to “Heartbreaker.”
My Rock Band activity page is here, by the way. I really wish Harmonix provided RSS feeds or another way to ingest this information elsewhere. I turned on the Facebook integration today, but I prefer to bring this stuff into my own site where I can control it.
Last month, I gathered in Seaside, Florida with my Automattic colleagues for the company yearly meetup, which ended up being a week of awesome working together, fun, and a lot of getting to know my coworkers even better still. I love working with a distributed company, but it’s amazing the different things you learn and pick up on when you are in the same place as the people you work with every day.
(Who, by the way, are the very fine people you see in the image above.)
On the final night, we of course gathered as many of us as possible into one location, which very much crowded one of the houses we were staying in—having been christened earlier that week as the VaultPress Discotheque. Naturally, this was accompanied by much music, starting at first with some sweet beats and moving at one point in the evening into classic rock and awesome impromptu-karaoke tracks for everyone to enjoy.
It was a during that part that I took over for the music selection and dare I say we continued to rock the night.
A few people have since asked me what the list was that I worked from, and here’s what iTunes says was played to round out the evening:
| Title | Artist | Album |
|---|---|---|
| Just What I Needed | The Cars | The Cars |
| Never Gonna Give You Up | Rick Astley | Whenever You Need Somebody |
| Blue Monday (’88) | New Order | (The Best Of) New Order |
| More Than a Feeling | Boston | Boston |
| Alex Chilton (LP Version) | The Replacements | Pleased to Meet Me |
| Message in a Bottle | The Police | Regatta de Blanc |
| Bohemian Rhapsody | Queen | A Night at the Opera |
| Baba O’Riley | The Who | Who’s Next |
| I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) | The Proclaimers | The Best of The Proclaimers |
| Go Your Own Way | Fleetwood Mac | Rumours |
| Africa | Toto | The Essential Toto |
| Shout | Tears for Fears | Shout – The Very Best of Tears for Fears |
| Brian Wilson | Barenaked Ladies | Gordon |
| Stand | R.E.M. | Green |
| Sledgehammer | Peter Gabriel | So |
| Thriller | Michael Jackson | Thriller |
| Canned Heat | Jamiroquai | Synkronized |
| Simply Irresistible | Robert Palmer | Heavy Nova |
| Wanted Dead or Alive | Bon Jovi | Slippery When Wet |
| Next to You | The Police | Outlandos D’Amour |
| Who Are You (Single Edit Version) | The Who | My Generation: The Very Best of The Who |
| Any Way You Want It | Journey | Journey – Greatest Hits |
| Back in the USSR | The Beatles | The Beatles |
| Unbelievable | EMF | Schubert Dip |
| To Be with You | Mr. Big | Lean into It |
| Free Fallin’ | Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers | Anthology – Through the Years |
Anything required you think I missed? Feel free to add tracks you think should have been in here, or vehemently disagree with musical selection or taste.
In a future entry, you’ll hear the story of how a video game brought me to respect and understand the classics of rock—and how you can get started playing it, too.
Ryan Markel 