BSB Insider
We need to talk about keytars BSB student journalists have continued to submit to and produce editions of the Insider student magazine over the past two years, writing numerous articles on current and social affairs topics, reviews, and opinion pieces as well as on events taking place around the school. Here, Adam – a former Insider editor – waxes lyrical on his love for much maligned keytar instrument. Long-time readers of the BSB Insider might have noticed that at least one of my articles in every issue refers to a certain musical instrument; the keytar, a keyboard-guitar hybrid. Sometimes it’s just a passing mention, sometimes it’s more integral to the article substance, sometimes I realise I forgot to include a keytar reference, so I stick it in lastminute in an arbitrary Editor’s Letter. Either way, it’s always there, often accompanied with a free-to-use picture of a Yamaha SHS-10. I don’t know why I started doing it; I don’t know why I continued. I don’t own a keytar. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a keytar in real life, let alone played one. Keytars are about as relevant to my life as Millard Fillmore. Tracking the origins of my keytar tradition, I think I initially grabbed it purely at random from my mental wordbank to facilitate an article’s surreal tone, then inexplicably decided to call back to it in the
36 • The British School of Brussels
next issue, then called back to it again in Issue Three, and after that it just felt strange to stop. Okay, maybe keytars weren’t an entirely random choice. I do genuinely think they are up there with Segway’s and aviator shades as ‘things that are objectively cool, but society simply doesn’t currently accept their true coolness’. The world of the future will be full of people wearing aviator shades playing keytars on Segways, and anyone who disagrees needs to get with the times. (The discontinuation of Segways has obviously hampered their cultural progress slightly. But they’ll be back.) That said, keytars aren’t a modern idea; indeed, humans have known the power of the keytar for quite some time now, and I don’t mean since the 80s; I mean since the 18th century. Ludwig van Beethoven wrote two pieces of music for keytar. I’m not kidding, he genuinely did. Admittedly it wasn’t called the keytar back then, it was the orphica, a portable handheld piano invented by Carl Leopold Röllig. But the principle was the same.
