Axe to Grind

By Jason Killingsworth

[0:01] The Guitar Hero prodigy flashes a toothy smirk at the camera and lip-synchs along with the game’s soundtrack: “It’s a psychobilly freakout!” He’s wearing a Terrell Owens-branded Eagles jersey and has a plastic guitar controller slung over his scrawny frame. The guitar is decorated in stickers. Of course it is. The Guitar Hero prodigy is eight years old.

Early in my teenage years, I developed a kind of rickety self-esteem engine: the internal ambition-deadline calculator. Whenever I noticed somebody performing at a sufficiently enviable level, I found out how old they were and subtracted my age from theirs. If my childhood guitar idol Joe Satriani was 37 and I was 14, that meant I had 23 years to hone my chops to his rarified level. When you’ve been alive just over a decade, 23 years seems like more than enough time to complete the ascension to guitar god. This was my way of hitting the snooze button on acute adolescent insecurity.

I first became aware of the Guitar Hero prodigy in 2007. A friend sent me the link to his YouTube video, knowing I was a fan of the game. While I was fairly modest about my abilities on the actual six-string, I took inordinate pride in my Guitar Hero chops. I could nail solos in Expert mode that made onlookers cry, “No way!” and “That’s crazy talk!” I even walked away from a local Atlanta Guitar Hero contest—cleverly titled Battle of the Hands—with third-place honors.