Videogame-themed music is a tricky proposition. Most of it is too much videogame, and not nearly enough music. It is so easy, as millions of the young people of America already have, to descend into some excruciating middle point between baseless, facile nostalgia and shallow, cheap kitsch. The truth is, I do not care whether your Altered Beast tattoo is in the spirit of irony or a sincere love of the Genesis classic; you still look like an idiot.
My musical colleague 5 Limbs evades that particular trap by, along with many other chip musicians (many of whom lack his chops and songwriting skill, and end up once again putting too much faith in the nostalgic capabilities of their textures) adopting some of old-school videogame music’s aesthetic and minimalist sensibility, while nevertheless writing original materialhe thus lifts himself out of the ghetto of Super Mario Bothers theme song cover bands who, as talented as they may well be, and as many good memories they might conjure, nevertheless come off as a bit of a gimmick.
But 5 Limbs is not actually what prompted me to write this entry. I have been listening, nearly nonstop, to the eponymous first LP by The Protomen, which is a 36 minute rock opera inspired by the videogame Megaman.
They write about videogame characters, they have buzzing synths and even apparently like to paint their faces before they play shows—and yet the single crucial and revelatory feature of this record is that it is all deadly serious; somehow they have created a dark, compelling narrative concerning Dr. Light’s Faustian toil against the nearly omnipresent Dr. Wily, all for a populace which doesn’t seem to even want to be saved. This stuff is epic, and absolutely nowhere on the record does the massive, ambitious music—in turn both wrenching and catchy as shit—ever take a back seat to the ‘hey, remember being 12 years old?’ sentiment which one finds oneself confronted with at nearly every turn elsewhere.
If the notion of a Styxian sense of scope. ambition and drama wedded with a much more stomachable and utterly accomplished musical style—I dunno, I hate band comparisons; let’s say a little bit of the Faint, a little Murder City Devils—does not appeal, then the subject matter will probably not redeem the music for you. But in this enlightened age let me once more transcend the rockist/anti-rockist divide (because Christ, with every anti-rockist who hurls accusations of orthopraxy and pre-post-modernist fallacies of binary dualism, I can’t help but detect a slight hint of hypocrisy) and say fucking shit, this stuff rips.
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