Who’s your favorite songwriter or composer? You can answer with normie choices like Bob Dylan or Ludwig von Beethoven or anyone else making music in a traditional sense, as in making music to make music. There are no wrong answers, honestly. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, because the wrong answer is the one you choose that you don’t really mean. It’s not that I don’t believe you when you say you love Dylan or Beethoven or Wagner or Lennon/McCartney or even Durst/Borland/Rivers/Otto. It’s that you may subconsciously have a composer you’ve developed more affinity for.
There are two avenues in which music plays an important role even if it’s only in a supporting role: television/movies and video games. Some folks will right-away cite someone like John Williams as their favorite, but odds are, I feel like compositions in a secondary application might get lost compared to first-run orchestration or instrumentation for popular release. Maybe this is anecdotal. Maybe it’s wrong. But it’s my perception. Regardless of it, music in these applications is still super important whether it’s recognized appropriately.
Movie music is important to me inasmuch as I recognize the work that John Williams did for Star Wars and Howard Shore for Lord of the Rings. Other than that, I’m not sure I’m qualified to speak on movie scores because I’m not all that much a movie guy. Video games, however, hoo boy.
Christmas 1989, I ran downstairs at my grandmother’s house (we were living there at the time) and looked under the tree. I unwrapped the first video game system I would own, a Nintendo Entertainment System, and from there, I was hooked. Part of that was always the gameplay, and you can’t really get into games without having an innate desire to control the action, from as hands-off/simulation based as a jRPG to as combo-oriented as the most complex fighting game.
But there’s something to be said about how the music in these games helped those playing them form an attachment. The prehistory of at-home gaming, systems like the Atari 2600 and 7800, had music, but it was limited mostly to sound effects. The processors weren’t powerful enough, but with the advent of the NES came sound processing that rivaled and possibly exceeded what was being built into arcade cabinets at the time. And what could be more conducive to an immersive experience than hearing this iconic ditty upon pressing “START” on the Super Mario Bros. title screen?
Yeah, the SMB overworld theme is synonymous with video games, and it was the beginning of a beautiful resume for one Koji Kondo. Sure, it sounds primitive now, but technological creep is real. The sound processors for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis put the NES to shame, just as the N64 and PlayStation did to them and so on and so forth. Now, you have symphonic quality music with clear-as-day fidelity, but the thing about our formative years, and by “our” I mean the Gen-X and elder millennials whose gaming journey started with the NES, is that the ChipTune quality and fidelity did not matter in the least. These songs were fully formed with melodies and textures, and in some cases, audible rhythm sections.
Kondo is perhaps the most well-known because of Nintendo’s market dominance and his work on other titanic franchises like Zelda and Star Fox. I mean, when you have both the Mario AND Zelda overworld themes under your belt? That’s clutch. He’s far from the only one. I gather the best overall composition for the NES wasn’t either of those, as good as they were. It was this song from MegaMan 2, composed by Takashi Tateishi:
There’s harmony, rhythm, everything you want. It sets the mood for the initial assault on the final cluster of levels. It’s hard to listen to this and think that because it was made by a “low quality” sound processor that it’s somehow less than any other composition. The value of music isn’t measured in the instruments with which it’s created. Guitars and drums that cost thousands of dollars apiece can produce insipid pap while the rattiest instruments can make the most influential music one could ever hear. There’s no shame in the ChipTune processor. These people created sublime melodies that some composers now with orchestra budgets fail to capture.
If one composer could stand with Kondo in terms of overall output, at least for me personally, it would be Nobuo Uematsu, SquareEnix’s musical genius best known for his work on the Final Fantasy series. In fact, he composed the scores for the first nine games by himself. Final Fantasy bangers are at the bedrock of most jRPG fans’ souls, and one could argue that even with the limitations of the PlayStation’s sound processor, the score to Final Fantasy VII rivals that of movies composed by Williams or Hans Zimmer or Michael Giacchino. The height of that score is the music sets the mood for the psychotic final battle with the game’s ultimate villain, Sephiroth. Here’s “One Winged Angel,” the original PSX cut:
Of course, this has been done orchestrally. It’s also been done heavy metal style too. Uematsu has a rock band that performs his Final Fantasy compositions called The Black Mages. They absolutely rip, and they also show how much influence video games have on modern music, even as many of these composers take their influence from popular music. Uematsu wears his prog rock and heavy metal influences on his sleeve, but his interpretations lend themselves to rock songs because music is a universal language. I bristle when people say they don’t like genres wholesale. My brother in Arceus, nearly every bit of popular music stems either from classical compositions or bluesmen in the delta twanging on guitars and updating spirituals from darker days in the past. Everything’s related, and yes, sometimes folks did their best work using tinny sound processors for 8- and 16-bit video games.
Your favorite songwriter might be Bob Dylan. Your favorite composer might be Ludwig von Beethoven. Or it might be Uematsu or Kondo or Tateishi or Kinuyo Yamashita or Keiichi Suzuki. Video game music is so vital to the experience that to discount it would be like discounting Dylan or Beethoven. I go back to the “are video games art?” question time and time again on this newsletter, but even if the games themselves reside in a gray area, there are people within it creating stuff of innate artistic value. The music made for these games is clearly art, and the people who make it should be held in the same esteem as their contemporaries in other fields.