Activision and Red Bull have teamed up with a wide-ranging swath of artists to auction off customized Guitar Hero II guitars. The scratch earned from the auctions will go towards MusiCares, an organization set up in the late 80s as a monetary lifeline for people in the music industry who have fallen on hard times.
The artists range from the beloved Tenacious D to the why-won’t-someone-just-hand-him-a-razor-so-he-can-be-over-with-it, Dashboard Confessional and everyone in between. Even non-musicians have been tapped to customize guitars, including Tony Hawk, Missy Broome and the Suicide Girls.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like tattoed girls of loose moral values as much as the next guy, and, in fact, I’m friends with quite a few of the SGs, but what sort of artistry they represent is beyond me. I suppose there’s a certain amount of creativity behind paying to have a pictogram of Jhonen Vasquez’s life story tattooed on your junk only moments before stripping naked, and lying erotically in a bathtub filled with cows’ hearts, but if that’s all it took to be recognized as a serious artist, I certainly wouldn’t have spent all that time huffing ether on the Champs-Elysées