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| Diggin in the Carts by Rafiki 10/21/2014, 3:57pm PDT | ||||
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| http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/diggin-in-the-carts
Somebody decided to interview a bunch of music composers for video games in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. They also interviewed a bunch of hip-hop and/or electronic music artists and producers for their thoughts, but I'm way too white and out of touch to recognize anyone or know how famous most of these people really are. The only name I recognize is Dizzee Rascal, and I've never heard anything of his. IGN describes the series like this: Diggin' in the Carts from Red Bull Music Academy is a six part documentary series designed to explore the lasting influence Japanese video game music has had on hip-hop, and music in general. And the official Youtube page includes this: Peppered with commentary from some of modern music’s finest DJ’s, musicians and electronic producers from around the world, the documentary also shows the influence these Japanese composers had on the world - and the world of music. As far as illustrating the influence of video game music: total failure. I've only watched 5 out of 6 episodes, but only one person mentions a song they wrote that was inspired by Street Fighter II music. Everyone else just reminisces about playing video games as a kid. If I wanted to see people reminisce about playing video games growing up, I'd visit Caltrops.com. There's not a single sample of a song that someone says, "this is because of games I played," although I'm guessing they couldn't include anyone's music because of licensing fees. I'm assuming "influence" entails more than just, "Castlevania had some badass music," and a fat guy humming Green Hill Zone. Luckily, most of the videos are interviews from various composers which is way more interesting and should have taken up the entire runtime of every episode and included more people. Turns out writing music for the NES was awful. People having to write out sheet music or draw waveform graphs (!) and then manually translate that through the NES' sound board or whatever the fuck, like the music equivalent of punch cards, before they could actually hear how it would sound through the NES. And they could only use THREE sounds! Ridiculous. The chick who did Mega Man 2 is now even more amazing. I think my favorite interview was with the guy from Sunsoft. He quit Sunsoft and music altogether 20 years ago. He mentioned it was frustrating writing music and getting absolutely no feedback whatsoever on how it was received, and cites that as a possible reason he may have decided to quit. Then he said a few years ago he saw a video on Youtube of people doing a live performance of one of his songs and people talking about how great the music for the game was, so he was inspired to get back into music again. I thought that was kind of bittersweet. All the people they interviewed seemed nice. I couldn't tell if Hip Tanaka was old and tired, unhappy, not a very excitable person, or some combination. It's interesting how I'm willing to take Japanese geeks more seriously compared to Western ones for no other reason than they're foreign and I'm not as accustomed to their nerdery. What the FUCK is with Anamanaguchi backpack guy? He's like Kevin to Dr. Mephisto in South Park. Every time he was on camera I kept thinking, "what the hell ARE you?" |
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Diggin in the Carts by 10/21/2014, 3:57pm PDT  Koji Kondo has got to be the most influential composer of the 1980s. by 10/24/2014, 7:26pm PDT *drops mic* NT by 10/25/2014, 5:56am PDT |
