Musician, record producer and early glam rocker Todd Rundgren has been making music, seemingly endlessly, since he began in 1970. On top of his own cult works, he produced albums for XTC, Patti Smith, Hall and Oates, Sparks, The New York Dolls, Bad Religion and most famously Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. In a career spanning check-in with Vulture, the musician unloaded grievances against modern radio hits, with him and the magazine pinning video games for the decline of men making popular music.
“The biggest artists in the world are female artists at this point, and that’s because of video games,” Rundgren tells Vulture. “Back in the ’90s, boys stopped spending money on music and started spending it on video games.”
While any dude north of 50 spend a lot of time asking “where did all the rock music go,” Rundgren seems confident that video games are to blame. While the ‘90s began on fixated on mosh pit makers conjurers Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails, it ended in contrast with boy bands and pop stars like *NSync and the Spice Girls dominating the music world.
Responsible for what remains the ninth best selling album of all time, Rundgren doesn’t hate pop stars by default, and seems to like Lady Gaga quite a bit. But he doesn’t seem to be a fan of video games, for the sin of robbing young men’s attention and weekly allowance when they could have been trying to impress older girls with a guitar. And he really hates Taylor Swift, and the fella-less music environment that gave her stardom, who he says “doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair.”
I’ll be honest, somehow when I first read Vulture’s headline “The biggest artists in the world are female,” Todd Rundgren observes, “and that’s because of video games,” my dumb brain somehow assumed that he meant the subtle influences of Yuzo Koshiro’s in Britney’s work. Even if he is notable for embracing the internet far before his peers, Rundgren’s read feels preciously antiquated.
Video games in the ‘90s were certainly overwhelmingly marketed towards boys, but that shifted rapidly when omega level hits like Pokémon and The Sims proved those limiting assumptions wrong. And while the numbers continue to show the diversity of players, the gender normative front of the culture war remains exhaustive. As far as examples to the contrary of this specific case, chart toppers now openly gush over their gaming obsessions, Gaga included. So rock stars and Rockstar Games are not mutually exclusive.
Since we lost Steve Albini, who actually did appear in a video game, we don’t get to choose our rock n’ roll cranks like we used to. While he opened the question on Hermit of Mink Hollow, Rundgren isn’t asking gamers or Swifties “Can We Still Be Friends?”