4)
There's two levels here. One is the acknowledgement of the fact that as I've mentioned before, my childhood was very intensely defined by the role I served my parents who were far too young to have me and didn't know how to be parents, let alone adults. The Kurt Cobain lyric that actually has vague attempts at depth but nobody has made into an inspirational poster is "I tried so hard for a father but instead I had a dad". As I grew up, my relationship with my father was suffocated by our friendship. He was an incredibly lonely and bored man and needed a confidant, a sidekick, a mini, a protege. To this day, he continuously asks with optimism and anxiety if I'm going to take up an instrument, because clearly he views me as an extension of him and his life. This manifested in videogames because so often in order to keep track of me, keep me entertained, and to benefit him, we would play Sega Genesis together. As such I was programmed to suit roles he needed rather than he adapt to roles for me.
The programming and adaption is perfect for the relationship I have with video games because I was of course a kid who played a shit ton of video games and I was hearing music in them all the time. So much time I spent being bombarded by different genres and styles which I would later reprocess and re-re-process. Plenty of my generation have had their brains broken by the notions of 'video game music' or '8-bit' and failed to understand that all they heard was the emulation of styles. Flamenco flourishes in a Legend of Zelda game, faux Romantic orchestra stylings in a Final Fantasy. The scores of these games often pierced beneath the technology provided. Whole different languages constantly greeted me and my peer groups, and as I got older it would only hit me just how often their brains were being sapped into their commodification process. You then understand the reason why someone like Adorno would've taken out Satie's knuckles with a ball-peen hammer when you realize how the terms of engagement break so many brains to devalue and defang music. Movie Composers. Videogame Soundtracks. *spits on the Dissensian floor* Library Music. A continuous criminal dismissal. Letting the role and the dictate override the existence.
Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack work for the Streets of Rage series are mostly knockoffs. Go through youtube and check the 'influences' section and you'll see a number of ways songs were obviously ripped off. Ironically, later one of his compositions would get sampled aggressively in Goldie's "Terminator" so all in all, he got a last laugh. But at the end of the day, so much of his work are simple rewrites of stuff by Technotronic, Snap, Black Box. The Baitest Of The Bait as one might say. And of course, exactly the kind of entry level club music that a Japanese man trying to acquaint himself with the latest trends while on visit in Los Angeles, that he'd never heard prior, would be taken by. The selection in question, the overly somber intro to Streets of Rage 2, a theme song I have heard about no exaggeration at LEAST 5000 times in my life, is a complete and total by-numbers bootlegging of Soul ii Soul. It's SO OBVIOUS. You just need a CGI-d siren wail from a glitched out Caron Wheeler and you're good to go. Nevertheless, it's something that sounded like something I could go out and here from my home in 'real sounds' and hear the simulation of in the comfort of my home. Yuzo Koshiro, in his way, has taught me so much about subjectivity and reality.