Words by Justin Hurty//Illustration by Ryan Flynn

editor’s note: the accompanying illustration is of Spencer Seim mowing a lawn the morning after this show in Iowa

We as a generation are fairly keen to beginning life in the hyper-advanced and technologically overwhelming post-post-postmodern world. This beginning for many of us was a gray box with red letters that had controllers, and games. Some will argue that Kong, or Ms. Pac-Man, or Centipede began the transition out of the innocent age of telephones and board games, but it is the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System that cemented our relationship to things plugged into the T.V. The Advantage have unplugged just that system, run it through a good little bit ye old human ability, a couple guitars, and out the P.A. for all to hear. They proliferate the world—The Word—of a high-technology from our past in a decidedly low-tech, human type of way.

Tonight, in this comedy club, they wore cut off shorts, beards, t-shirts and long hair. There were no keyboards, or sampling equipment, or flashing lights, no Devo planters inverted headward. Just these four guys, a couple pitchers of water, the red suitcase that had earlier adorned the stage was gone,¹ something incongruous, dissonant about how they looked, and what was purportedly about to happen in my ears. An air of understatement was abound.

They needed none of the technology that was supposedly missing from their stage, the quickness of their hands and the intensity of their composure were more than sufficient to compensate for what could easily have crumbled into an evening of gimmicks and schtick. The arrangements were tight and the speed at which they proceeded was immense. The music did not put me in video reality, or transport me to a far off land of hyper-stimulated activity, while never leaving my seat. What did happen is that I found myself wondering what was actually from the games and what was their genius showing up and taking a little liberty. They took what—to many—would be considered a low form of music and legitimized it. I would have been hard pressed to actually sit through a computer generated performance of these same songs, but the use of real instruments to perform such oft-parodied musical effect and soundscapes intrigued and excited a desire to go buy all these games and find from where all this music was coming. Speculation as to the improvisatory nature of the music aside, the complex fluidity by which we jumped from game to game, level to level was in some ways a mastery of the fairly unexplored genre. The ability to take something meant for the background into the headline is what makes these guys so exemplary in their field.²

The set closed with a rearrangement of the Beatles I Want You (she’s so heavy), and the only videogame sounds I could legitimately say that I may have recognized as a level from Zelda.³ And for the first time in my life thanked the powers that be for creating the Nintendo Entertainment System.

1. This red suitcase had caused some speculation. Lion in Rome played, the case sat, and someone leaned in and made conjecture that it, the red suitcase, contained drugs, guns, cigarettes, one AM radio, and perhaps, or hopefully, a stuffed animal.
2. I wanted to use the word “rad” but thought better of it.
3. N.B. it is true that this person, me, has never really had much in the way of contact with Nintendo, or any video game playing system. My brother and I shared the NES that was a hand-me-down from our uncle who had most decidedly not bought it when it was brand new, and we only ever had Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, neither of which made the set list.