A virtual Suzanne Vega serenades her online acolytes in Second Life– the place to be for once-popular musicians seeking to up their hip factor.
As one of the many who were sure that Simon LeBon’s cultural (and musical) relevance had flamed out somewhere between “The Reflex” and “A View to a Kill,” count me among those intrigued to learn that the Duran Duran boys are reportedly working up another concert.
On an island, no less.
A virtual luxury island, somewhere in Second Life, the online world—floating in the electronic ether at www.secondlife.com—with the Sims-style sensibilities and (in most of the grids, anyway) the anything-goes attitude.
With a reported subscriber base of 400,000 people, Second Life is more than just an online phenom—it’s also a better, more well-trafficked place to stage an impromptu concert than the local coffeehouse or student mall. Indeed, as MMOs (short for Massively Multiplayer Online games) gain in popularity, the opportunities for generating publicity (and a huge online audience) is growing right along with them.
Amateur indie artists already knew this, of course, having augmented the fan-filled fields of Myspace and the bottomless music-video pit of YouTube with the virtual venues of Second Life. In fact, the bleached-hair purveyors of “Girls on Film” aren’t even the first mainstream group to take advantage of this unusual musical delivery method. That honor goes to U2, a band that’s embraced the musical marketing possibilities of interactive entertainment more assiduously than any other. (Bono, it turns out, is a key financial partner in Elevation Studios, the monolith that recently snapped up hot indie game developers BioWare and Pandemic Studios). Back in April, fans threw together a set of U2 avatars and used Second Life’s music-streaming feature to serve up highlights from the band’s Vertigo tour. And last month, willowy alt-folkie Suzanne Vega—who’s been off the pop-culture radar only slightly longer than Duran Duran—performed a live Second Life concert, which was simulcast on public radio’s “The Infinite Mind.”
The way I see it, this marriage of real-world music and the MMO world could go one of two ways: It’s either going to be a model of how two entertainment mediums work together to their mutual benefit, or the equivalent of hiring Mark Cuban to run your media enterprise—a situation destined to end with profanity-laced embarrassment. But you have to admit that it’s a hell of a lot more interesting, and user-centric, than simply jamming the latest round of hip-hop hits into the NBA Live version of EA Trax.
Sure, it’s not exactly revolutionary—but watching a digital avatar that looks like Suzanne Vega at age 25 channel the live, actual voice of a much older Vega in an online universe is cool (and even groundbreaking) in the same way that watching an animated Sonic Youth jamming with Homer on “The Simpsons” was cool. It’s also yet another gratifying-yet-worrisome instance of establishment pop culture (admittedly B-list, retro pop culture, but still) crossing mediums to plant a kiss of mainstream credibility on something the cool kids have been playing around with for months.
So enjoy it while you can. Just like the animated celebrity cameos on “The Simpsons”—which became ubiquitous to the point of annoyance—it’s probably only a matter of time before the music industry takes the music-marketing potential of Second Life and drags it down to the lowest common musical denominator. Can you imagine paying real-world prices to attend a virtual Ashlee Simpson concert at Second Life’s Muse Arena? (And how would we know that the digital Ashlee wasn’t lip-synching? The mind reels, the gut churns.) If it ever comes to that, Second Life may have not only jumped the shark, but the schlock as well.
