Rock Goes Interactive

By RICHARD CORLISS

You'd never guess it from watching kids pogo-stick at a Pearl Jam concert, or vibrate to the street beat that pours out of their Walkmans, but listening to music is an essentially passive experience. Performers make the sound, consumers devour it. For every pop generation from A to X, the big creative decision has been which record (cassette, CD) to put in the music machine. For radio listeners, even that decision is denied. Music is too easy: a hot soak in somebody else's bathtub.

Well, listen up, rockheads. You're about to become the hippest form of computer nerds. You'd better smarten up too, because there's work to do, and lots of creative play. More than 5 million of you in North America have CD-ROM or Philips CD-i players, and that number is expected to double by year's end and treble by 1996. Get ready to hook up those players to your computers and home entertainment centers, fork over $25 to $100 a disk and jam with your favorite artist. Passivity is passe; tubby time is over. Here comes Interactive Rock.

In fact, advance forces have already landed. Music visionaries and cybernuts are dreaming big to merge the latest in computer savvy with the primal pulse of rock. So strap on your mouse and groove along with these desktop rockers:

-- Todd Rundgren. In No World Order, the veteran singer and producer (Meat Loaf, Grand Funk Railroad) has created the first do-it-yourself album. Listeners with CD-i players can customize any of the 10 tracks to their tastes. They can change the tempo (between 86 and 132 beats a minute), the mix ("natural," "spacious," "sparse" or "karaoke"), the mood ("bright," "happy," "thoughtful," "sad" or "dark"), even the form ("creative," "standard" or "conservative"). They can hatch new sounds by sampling the 933 snatches of music in the data base. Did you ever want to play the chorus of a favorite song over and over? You can do it here. At a click, you can do almost anything.

-- Peter Gabriel. The Genesis grad, whose music videos (Sledgehammer, Steam) have been pixilated eye-poppers, offers options galore in his CD-ROM Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World. First you put the singer's face together, which means choosing from a screenful of different mouths, noses, eyes and ears. "You'll know when you've got it," says Mr. Computer Potato Head while you give him a facial. This achieved, you must decide what to do next: Watch one of his music videos? Thumb through his old baby pictures? Choose various cuts by musicians from around the world and mix them together into your own jam session? Or "go backstage"; that requires a pass, which you earn while maneuvering through the disk. As Gabriel narrates, boxes of hypertext pop up alongside the images. If you click on Gabriel's passport, it shows his ! photograph morphing from infancy through adulthood into a skull. And if you dally in moving your mouse, he may chirp, "Click me!" Best advice: Don't be afraid, be a fighter -- and Gabriel's world is yours.

-- The Residents. No surprise that the first CD-ROM from the eyeball-headed San Francisco group should be called Freak Show -- a virtual version of their 1990 set. The user enters a carnival big top to see and hear such freaks as Harry the Head, Herman the Human Mole, Wanda the Worm Woman, Jello Jack the Boneless Boy and Bouncing Benny the Bump. Later the user can wander backstage and sneak into the freaks' trailers, flip through their photo albums, read their love letters, watch music videos on their TV sets. Animated by Jim Ludtke, Freak Show has an artfully eerie feel. "We didn't want it to be a techie thing," says Homer Flynn, the band's manager. "But we do like being the only CD-ROM with a worm eater on it."

-- David Bowie. The first CD-ROM from this charismatic chameleon, Jump: David Bowie Interactive, to be released shortly, will be as theatrical as its star's performances: the disk will allow users to create their own music videos using songs from Bowie's Black Tie White Noise album. "It's like you're playing a live TV producer with five cameras," says software designer Ty Roberts. "You have to pick which one to use." Jump will also feature three Black Tie music videos.

-- Heart. Power popsters Ann and Nancy Wilson will release this month an interactive CD-ROM called Heart/20 Years of Rock and Roll, including their songs, videos, a discography of past releases and notable events in the band's history, plus childhood photos and bio data. As a group retrospective, efforts like Heart's will surely become standard reissue in the format: a computer version of boxed-set CDs.

-- Elvis. The King is not dead -- we know that from reading Weekly World News -- but soon he will live, and sing, on the CD-ROM Virtual Graceland. Due out this summer, the Crunch Media disk allows users to roam freely through Presley's haunted mansion, room by room, in 360 degrees shots. Wander into the TV room and play Elvis' hits on his personal phonograph. Noodle on Elvis' piano, strum his guitar, open drawers by clicking on them. Just don't try peeking into Elvis' medicine chest; the bathroom is not open to the public.

Technological razzle-jazzle has energized rock music ever since the Moog- and-groove, sound-and-light-show days of the '60s. The synthesizer, a . computerized one-man band, has become the instrumental instrument in many a rock group. Heavy-metal outfits like Guns N' Roses and Metallica, as well as such megatheatrical performers as Janet Jackson and David Bowie, have shown that computerized control of stage lighting creates a wide range of effects. The Grateful Dead, on a perpetual postmortem tour, keeps things fresh with computerized psychedelia synchronized to the music and projected on big screens. The aim is to find a visual corollary to the spontaneity of live (or Dead) rock 'n' roll.

Ireland's druids of drone, U2, go a step further in their concerts: they program and project their own interactive special effects. Bono (or The Edge) will use a remote control to move a cursor (which can be seen on the two huge screens) that allows him to set a song's instruments and tempo. Then the band joins in. The onstage screen shows the choices he has and the decisions he makes. Between songs Bono can regulate four projections of himself; when he clicks on one of them, it will tell a joke, start singing or talk. "U2 love playing with these new technologies," says their "interactive producer," Philip van Allen. "They're more than just musicians -- they're show people. These big rock shows are so sophisticated that the artist becomes only one small point. We're giving the power back to the artist."

On MTV the notion of interactive rock is in vogue if not yet in practice. The latest Beavis and Butt-head video, I Got You Babe, has the two cartoon metalheads cackling wildly as they put on virtual-reality headsets, plunge into cyberspace and select a "chick" from a computer screen menu. Among the choices: "sexy," "wild" or "was married to dork." The boys choose No. 3, and out pops Cher.

In Amazing, a new video from rave-rockers Aerosmith, a pimple-faced lad summons up an image of himself on his home computer and magically erases those zits. Then he ups the ante. Feeding the computer an image of his dream woman and, donning the mandatory virtual-reality gear, he steps into a higher, hornier hyper reality where all his lusts are gratified. He and his girlfriend ride off on a motorcycle, make cyberlove, hitchhike a ride on a biplane and sky surf off the wing. If there's a rock 'n' roll virtual heaven for teenage testosterosis, this might be it.

Yet it still isn't interactive. MTV may soon be involved in the technology. But a few artists -- such as Billy Idol, the British punkster whose first band was named (remember?) Generation X -- are already living it.

"I got into music to do it myself without the oppressive thumb of convention," says Idol, who released a Macintosh floppy disk with his album Cyberpunk. Yet for years Idol was "trapped in recording studios with my band trying to get the music right -- playing, arranging, figuring it all out -- while the money clock ticked away." Then he found a technology that allowed him to create a "virtual studio" in his home. "I was excited. It was 'live' to the computer."

Now it's computer to computer, musician to listener, and everybody's a performance artist. For Gabriel and Rundgren, interactive rock is not just a career move; it is a techno-mission.

Rundgren bought his first computer in 1979, spent a year learning how to use it and then wrote a software graphics program that executives at Apple liked so much they licensed it. Now he can marry his vocation and his avocation into popular art with a message. "Musicians nowadays tend to use music as much for obfuscation as for revelation," Rundgren says. "I'm trying to use this technology to change it back to revelatory."

Revelatory and, in Rundgren's solo concerts, running amuck. Perched on a small platform beneath 24 blinking video monitors, he sings and "plays" his Apple Powerbook 170 laptop computer, a synthesizer and occasionally even a guitar. Audience members can sing along or swat drum pads and see their images recorded and played back at them, mixed, enhanced and amplified in a potentially infinite variety of ways by Rundgren. There is no set list or running order, no lighting or sound technician; Rundgren, a New Age Wizard of Oz, does it all.

And for Gabriel there's nothing to lose but fustian notions of who does what in music. "Interactive rock challenges the old roles of artist and audience," he says. "No longer do you have to supply a linear form with a beginning and an end and a singular journey through it. Instead you create an environment, a kind of forest, where people have the option to follow your path through it, or they can plan their own route -- they can see the world you provided as a collage kit. All the barriers that separated education from entertainment and communication are being eroded."

The four-time Grammy winner insists that rock fans need not fret about being deprived of old auditory pleasures. "There will be times when you just want to listen to music as a one-sense operation," he says, "and there will be other times when you want to sit down and get your hands dirty and play with it." Nor does Gabriel suffer from the traditional artist's skepticism, even fear, of technology's power tools. "I'm a great believer that technology has to go through two waves," he declares. "The first wave can dehumanize, but the second wave, if the response and feedback mechanisms are in place, can be to superhumanize. So rather than contain and isolate and alienate us, technology can also expand and challenge and open us. And that's empowering."

Before the rhetoric gets too elevated -- before the government is asked to grant tax-exempt status to the First Church of Interactive Rock -- let's pause and ask what it means for the music market. Even there the predictions are rosy. "We may be a little bit ahead of the curve," says Brian Fargo, the president of Interplay Productions, whose MacPlay software division distributes Gabriel's Xplora 1. "But I think this will be a brand-new market segment that didn't even exist before. It's no longer a question of whether this format will take off but when. I'd say within a year or so it will be a CD-ROM world."

Maybe. Desktop rock could be this year's GameBoy -- or next year's hula hoop. As Gabriel warns, "In the end it's only as good as the content." But the form is in its infant stage, and all babies look cute. The best thing is that right now, it's all promise, no threat. So keep your fingers crossed -- until you pick up that mouse. Interactive rock could be on a roll.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Francisco and David E. Thigpen/New York