Go Straight to the Good Life

A lot of my teenage experience of music was computer music.  I don't think I was so much as in a record store until I was 17.  I knew they existed, but didn't ever see them around me, didn't know anybody who went to them.  There was the radio - classic rock and chart pop - and I listened to that.  My main avenue for discovering new music was electronic music on the computer.

I forgot about this part of my life for a long while.  Thought of it as not "real" music, as juvenalia.  Over time, though, it creeps back in.  Part of it is the more typical nerdy obsession with video game music, and sure, I can talk to you about the music to Mega Man or Castlevania or, less positively, the excruciating 4-note loop from the fourth dungeon of Rygar.  But I can also tell you about the MOD files, most of them long-since forgotten but preserved in the dustier corners of the Internet.

One of the first things people did with computer music, once they got them, was attempting to remake songs they already knew.  I hadn't actually heard most of these songs.  I had MOD remakes of "The Final Countdown", "Enjoy the Silence", Metallica's "Orion"... I had not heard any of the originals of these.  (I actually still don't think I've heard the original of "Enjoy the Silence".)  Jarre adaptations were also popular, I remember.

I found a copy of "Orion" somewhere for download so I can see what it sounds like to me now.  This was done in 1990 by someone calling himself "Death Angel".  How does it sound?  It sounds terrible.  I actually downloaded a second tracking program after opening this to make sure it wasn't just a tracker rendering error.  The drums are terribly out of time with the music - I'd suggest that whoever played the drums on this was also responsible for the drums on the "European version" of Obsessed by Cruelty, but Sodom's drums are better than that.  Really the impression I get is more of Helen Wiggin trying to play along to a dreadfully detuned attempt at Metallica.

Not having the original to compare to, I found this utter clusterfuck fascinatingly strange.  There is a long intro which is a sampled and looped version of Metallica's intro.  Some parts of it are sampled, using the full capabilities of the Amiga to do so, and some parts are just utterly cheesy MIDI guitar.  After four minutes of a very rough approximation of the first part of "Orion", the tune fades out at the beginning of the slow part.  There are some interesting samples of a pretty good bass tone not a million miles from Cliff's - this might be from the song itself - being plunked out haltingly as if it was being played by someone who had first seen a bass last week.  The song ending early is less a disappointment and more a merciful release.

I don't think this track is worth listening to on its merits, but I think it is instructive in terms of the overall quality of most chiptune or tracker adaptations of popular music of the day.

I have since heard some far more interesting and creative adaptations of previously recorded songs, and there were three I wanted to talk about.

Someone around 2013 put together an edit of the instrumental section of "Get Lucky" with the vocodered vocals replaced by the charmingly low-tech synthesized voice of KK Slider from the Animal Crossing game.  The music to Animal Crossing is a bit along the lines of the "retro" aesthetic in that it does not aim for realism at all.  Nintendo's emphasis has always been on creating an experience enjoyable for the player rather than using technology for its own sake, and this leads to games which are less obviously "advanced" than many of their counterparts but which tend to age better.

I was not around for the first wave of C64 music; I missed the chiptune era.  I am very fond of it, though, more fond than I am of the later, more sophisticated Amiga music.  One of my favorite composers is Rob Hubbard, and some years back I was listening to some of his lesser-known works, including the music to a game called "Wiz".  To my surprise the song, which is mostly original, partway through goes into a bit which entirely recreates the iconic riff of PFM's "Impressioni di Settembre".  This ostinato is instantly memorable to anybody who's heard it, but being from a song strongly associated with the brief vogue for Italian progressive rock by a band that, though they tried, made no commercial headway whatsoever in the United States doesn't exactly put it in the tier of "Enjoy the Silence".  I personally have heard a hell of a lot of Italian progressive rock so I instantly recognized it.

I must have first heard this sometime before 2009.  I made an early mix CD for my wife and I distinctly recall putting "Impressioni di Settembre" at the beginning and "Wiz" at the end, and my wife scratching her head at the latter, swearing she'd heard that tune somewhere before but couldn't quite place it.  The context is indeed extremely different from the original setting, and Hubbard's work is strongly original and high-quality.

The most famous example I'll bring up is Yuzo Koshiro.  While I was researching my Zork post the other day I found that someone who went by the handle of Renegade had, in fact, edited together "Go Straight", the music to the first level of "Streets of Rage 2", with its obvious inspiration, Inner City's "Good Life".  It is an extremely good edit which, to my ears, brings out the best qualities of both songs - they're similar tunes but have distinct differences, which this edit features quite well.