In a lengthy interview with GameDaily BIZ, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos offered his thoughts on air drumming – the preferred form of percussive input in Nintendo's Wii Music, skillfully demonstrated above by a professional – and explained why Harmonix felt the need for an actual drum peripheral on the Wii. After considering using the Wiimote in an air drumming capacity, Rigopulos says, "We backed away from it because we found that the tactile element of actually hitting a surface when you're drumming is a fairly critical part to the visceral feel of actually playing drums." So, with air drumming, you're missing "a critical element ... in the experience."

Not much of a surprise coming from the head of a company currently shipping a giant, plastic drum kit, sure, but we were surprised to learn air drumming was ever even under consideration at Chez Harmonix.

Buffeted by presidents, presidential hopefuls, titans of industry, and the occasional blogger on this year's Time 100 – a list of, well, those sorts of people – are Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, better known to you all as "those Harmonix guys." While Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto came out tops on the user-voted list (ie: the popularity contest), Rigopulos and Egozy were cherry picked and their writeup comes to us courtesy of one Mr. Steven Van Zandt, guitarist for Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band (yeah, the Boss also made the Time 100) and chair of the Rock Band music advisory board.

At the root of their new celebrity is Rock Band, of course, which Van Zandt says "is one of the ways kids will find music in the future" and "may just turn out to be up there with the rise of FM radio, CDs or MTV." While we're not quite ready to sign that declaration, we're thrilled that Rock Band is being put on Time's cultural pedestal and happy to have Little Steven as an impassioned (if somewhat partisan) proponent of the medium. Now what's a blog gotta do to get some Springsteen in the Rock Band Store?

We understand why Stephen Totilo at MTV's Multiplayer blog is concerned about the lack of rap music in rhythm games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. He noticed that when playing drums on "Sabotage" (the closest thing that Rock Band has to rap) he was bored by the lack of structural changes in the song. Totilo says that he's not the first to realize this: Even Harmonix chief Alex Rigopulos has said that some big changes would need to made to the Rock Band formula to accommodate rapping.

But we would submit that both need to do some outside-the-rock thinking. There are lots of rap tracks that we think could be fun. We present the above video as Exhibit A. If your tastes run a bit more Old School, we've got another after the break. What would your picks be?