10 Songs That Should Not Have Been in Rock Band

I read a lot of Cracked.com, and every so often I think to myself, “I ought to make a list in that style.” One topic has been on my mind pretty much since the game’s release – the songs of Rock Band. Now, I can be very picky about people who are content to group Punk, Metal, Grunge, and Pop into an overly sweeping generalization of the genre that is Modern Rock. The following is the result of carefully considering each track in the game, and crafting my personal Top 10 songs that should not have been included, and rest assured I will be very specific in why they are on the list. And like any list, this is from ‘least critical’ to ‘most critical’ offense.


10 – The COVER of “Tom Sawyer” by Rush
The first thing that needs to be said here is that Tom Sawyer is bar none the best song Rush has ever made and will ever make. This is no surprise, considering it’s ranked as number 19 on the All-Time Greatest Hard Rock tunes by VH1.
So you’ve developed a video game where the players get to jam along to their favorite classic rock tunes. But you can’t get the licensing rights to the most epic Rush song ever made, so what should you do? The correct answer to this question is to either a: go to your money source and beg for the extra cash to do so, or b: go straight to Rush and convince them that the fan response will balance the cost. What you should not do is find a cover band, whose lead singer sounds nothing like Geddy Lee, and show the gamers how immediately willing you are to spoil a classic. I wouldn’t doubt that the fan response to this little faux-pas was the driving reason behind the original’s introduction in the downloadable content well after the fact. Rush rocks, plain and simple. If you can’t get the rights to their greatest song, aim for the second greatest and keep working down that list until you find one you can afford.


9 – “Next To You” by The Police
I’ve never proclaimed myself a huge fan of the Police – I know their hits, the rest is obscurity and sometimes appropriately so. This is one of those latter tracks. Apparently it’s the first track on their first album. Before Rock Band I had never heard the song, and from the research I’ve done on it, the reason is logically that it never got any airplay, and thusly never received any specific acclaim or award. This is a case where I would suggest to EA to aim higher on the list of Police songs that rock. Granted, this may also be a case of them actually applying the logic I suggested for Rush – maybe they went down that list and realized this was most rock-oriented and least ‘weird Police music’ song they could get on their budget.

8 – “Epic” by Faith No More
And now we hit the category of songs that annoy me. In first defense, this has to be the only Faith No More song I’ve ever heard, so I’m not immediately writing off their entire career. On this list a song can annoy me for two reasons – being exceptionally difficult to play on the guitar-controllers, or just being outright annoying music. ‘Epic’ is annoying music. The lead singer’s voice has an almost whiney quality to it that I find not quite the right fit for the hard rock genre, in which this song definitely can be classified. Musically the song’s instrumentation is fine, kinetically it’s one of the least difficult to play; lyrically it’s very hard to listen to multiple times. People I’ve played the game with would support me on this – it’s just not a very good song. FNM probably have better songs; why EA picked this one is anybody’s guess.

7, 6, 5 – “Pleasure” by Bang Camaro, “Brainpower” by Freezepop, “29 Fingers” by The Konks
You might think I’m being kind of hard on these bands, considering each owes their inclusion to the fact that a band member either works for Harmonix or the band itself lives near the Harmonix corporate headquarters. But they have good reason to be on this list – they all really suck. Bang Camaro earned their position by basically sounding like Def Leppard, with the critical difference of kind of missing the point of Def Leppard. It was the late 70’s – hair metal was the rage, and it was a genuine challenge to do something unique. Def pulled it off; with Bang Camaro you don’t feel any solid originality in the song - it all feels very done before.
Brainpower got itself on this list right away by not being rock at all. It is electro-pop, synth heavy, cartoonish, and the lyrics themselves are literally the story of the band’s creation. The simple fact is that the song is one hundred percent electronic instrumentation, and by base definition it is not rock. The game’s called “Rock Band,” not “80’s One-Hit-Wonder Wannabe.”
29 Fingers would be number one on my list of “Most Annoying Songs in Any Rock Band Game”. The music is an uninspired riff, simple drum beat, and the modulation on the guitars it at times painful to the ears. The lyrics themselves are a bizarre clue about the band – clearly one of them is missing a digit. Was it so important that they had to write a song about it? Maybe it was lost in a particularly raucous gig and some fan has it tucked away in a box in his closet. Whatever the disfiguring tragedy may be, it can’t possibly be worth subjecting us to one of these ‘loud for the sake of loud’ songs.

4 – “Run To The Hills” by Iron Maiden
First point: as with Rush and the Police, Iron Maiden rock the socks off, like that baseball hitting Charlie Brown. My problem lies not with the song. It’s definitely one of their coolest tunes. My problem lies simply in the instrumentation. With single-note strings that feel about a hundred strums long, this song is designed to wear out not only your fingers, but the controller. These things aren’t cheap, Harmonix. We want them to last us into the sequel. My own guitar was out of commission until a while back when my tinkering with it inexplicably re-enabled its strum and D-pad. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could blame this track for basic wear and tear on the strum mechanism. But mechanical stress and Carpal Tunnel aside, the song rocks.

3, 2 – “Enter Sandman” by Metallica, “Train Kept A-Rollin” by Aerosmith
I list these two side by side on the grounds that they seem to have caused the most distress in band play, being the songs with nearly impassable guitar solos that would inevitably kill the performance. By themselves in solo campaign, it didn’t take too many tries to pass them (I’ve listed them by my perceived solo difficulty, which incidentally were made that much easier by getting the Stratocaster controller). ‘Enter Sandman’ may have been a tedious song with crippling solos, but after a few tries you not only internalize the pattern of the solo breaks, you start to recall the best times to deploy star power, and that’s what got me through. ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ just took that stress up a notch by being such a long damn song. The worst part was deploying the star power too soon and watching it peter out in the long empty stretches before a critical solo. Obviously the songs were picked for that reason - their complexity, but seriously Harmonix. Sometimes less is more. Could have gone for some “Master Of Puppets” and “Walk This Way.”

1 – “Sabotage” by Beastie Boys
I knew this was number one before even plotting out the rest of the list. The Beastie Boys are a good band in their own right, and in their own genre. Rock is not their genre. They only found a slot in the game because of the incidental fact that the band members can actually play instruments and occasionally do in their songs. What you don’t hear in their music is anything resembling what I call rock. This is a genre nitpick, one that they’ve gone on to abuse a second time in the sequel. Neither song is particularly difficult (as a matter of fact I aced the one in Rock Band 2 on the first try because it’s pitifully easy) and I don’t have anything against the band in terms of my tastes. The song has, for some reason that I can’t particularly justify, found a place on Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list. That position is number 475. All this means to me is that in empirical terms it’s a little better than Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ and not quite as good as ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ by Funkadelic. Does this make it rock-worthy? Very doubtful.

-Nick-