Hello and welcome to a bonus episode. Of the blame by podcast. Why is it a bonus episode, because this episode is sponsored. And I've been approached for sponsored episodes before, but it often means the people who are sponsoring it saying this is what I want you to talk about and I want to talk about it like this. And then I'm like, well, I wouldn't like to do that then. I'm not making a podcast that I enjoy. So I tend not to do sponsored episodes because I want to make sure whatever I'm doing, I enjoy making it and you enjoy listening to it.

And it's something I'm passionate about. But this time for fun came to me and they said, Doc, here's the crack. We want to talk about our gigabit broadband, right, so Vodafone have this they have this broadband service that's ridiculously powerful. It's like one gate, one gigabyte speeds for four gigabit broadband. And I say to them, what? You know what I do? Online streaming, I stream video games and audio on Twitch. And in order to do that, I need incredibly powerful Internet.

So how about I talk about that and then I speak about video games, something related to video games and music, and then Vodafone me like Grant Grant, do your thing. So that's why this is a sponsored episode, because I'm going to speak about the history of video game music, which is something incredibly interesting. And I have a little heartache and it's something I do want to chat about. So before we get into that, Vodafone is offering gigabit broadband, right?

It's available to more people than ever before. And what it is, is it's broadband at one gigabit speeds incredibly powerful broadband. Now, if you're if you do online gaming, right, if you game online, you understand you got to have a strong connection and you have to have a connection that doesn't that won't quit out of nowhere. Because when it does, then gaming, which is an enjoyable, fun, relaxing activity, then becomes a frustrating, not enjoyable activity.

So if you're doing things like gaming Vodafone Gigabit Broadband, got to Vodafone, Daria forward slash broadband to find out about it for me when I'm streaming. If you watch me on Twitch. So I'm on Twitch once a week on Thursday nights. And what I do on Twitch is.

It's an art project, it's an ongoing hyperreal art project that I do at this stage more from my mental health than anything. It it's I get to be really creative for like two hours once a week, and it's massively cathartic for me and it also gives me a feeling of connection, because when I'm doing Twitch, I'm also talking with people. So it it feels like I'm out a little bit of a party for small bits. So it's quite a I started this.

I started doing it as an art project. Now realize it's quite important for my mental health. It really is. There's a lot of catharsis in what I do on Twitch, but when I'm on Twitch, I'm live streaming. So I'm in my studio. I'm playing the Xbox, I'm playing Red Dead Redemption, which is like a virtual simulation of the American frontier, so I'm playing Red Dead Redemption, redemption. I've got a good camera filming me.

I've got a lot of audio equipment because what I do is I make live music to the events of a video game and I'm chatting with people. So that's a huge amount of data that's being sent live over the Internet and. If that caught on me at any point. Then forget about it, the stream is over. That's it. The stream is done and it could take 10 minutes for me to get back into the stream and then I've lost everybody.

But most importantly, the reason I need to have Shihad Hot Internet connections is. I have to have confidence, confidence in my Internet quality, so. If I'm on Twitch. Playing a video game and then getting in to create a flaw so that I'm writing a song in the moment, which is really exciting and incredibly fun to be in that state of flow in order for me to enter that state of creative flow and to write a good song. There can't be any fear present.

Now, if I'm for one second worried that my Internet is going to courthouse, then I can't create because now fear is present. But I don't have to worry about that. I don't have to worry about it because I've got incredibly reliable, powerful broadband that does the trick. So, you know the crack, you know the crack. If you're doing online game and stream and anything, you need good broadband. So check out. For Fonterra, forward slash Broadbent, OK, for one gigabyte speeds.

So I want to speak about video game music. Because now I've done several podcasts. On the history of music and specifically the origins of different musical styles and genres, I'm fascinated by because music is symmetrical vibrations of air that make you feel emotions. That's what music is. It's a completely abstract type of art that you feel with your ears and that makes you feel emotions.

And I adore music. And I'm fascinated with how culture, society, economics. How these things can influence symmetrical vibrations of air that make you feel emotions, I'm very interested in in why certain music sounds a certain way and the cultural and sociological conditions that make it that way. So what makes video game music fascinating for me is. The earliest video game music, it wasn't it wasn't intended to be made to be listened for its value, if you get me, I grew up in the 90s, so I'm talking video game music that would have been on the Nintendo are the Sega Mega Drive, Super Mario, Brothers, Streets of Rage, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mark Combat, that type of stuff.

Video game music was never intended for someone to literally enjoy the music, to sit back and go, I'm going to listen to this tune that was never the case. Video game music was like a functional background music, deliberately repetitive. It was their turn to set a tone and a mode, it was there to create emotions, but ultimately, traditionally video game music acts in service of playing the game. It's to enhance the game experience. It's decorative, if you will.

It's wallpaper. It's there in the background. If you take it away, your game and experience is zero crack. But you add it and it's enhanced. But it's not intended as a media that you consume for its own value. Boss. Like it or not, us. An entire generation grew up playing Super Mario Brothers are playing Sonic the Hedgehog are playing street streets of rage, playing these things for hours and hours and hours. And with the music also playing.

And almost in a subliminal fashion, this music is going to then imprint on your sense of aesthetics like. When I was a little kid, I'm playing Mario, ah, I'm playing Sonic the Hedgehog. And at the same time, I'm I'm listening to bands like Guns and Roses are listening to hip hop iced tea. But then I'm listening to this other music on video games, not cognitively realizing it as music, but it's obviously then going to influence my tastes.

Of course it is, because I'm a kid. The music from Mario. If I hear it now, I instantly recognize every single melody is catchy. So whether I like it or not, videogame music has shaped my musical aesthetics and it has done for an entire generation. So what I want to focus on on this week's podcast, I want to trace. That's the style and sound of early video game music to one band in particular, a Japanese band called Yellow Magic Orchestra from the 70s Yellow Magic Orchestra made music that was highly experimental, incredibly strange.

Absolutely left of center, unlike anything else all the musicians were making at the time, using instruments that other musicians weren't using, they were using cutting edge since, and they made this incredibly strange. Weird music that. Shouldn't have really. That was so experimental, it shouldn't have really survived certain music is so weird and strange that it exists in that period and it doesn't really go on to become mainstream as such. But yes.

When I listen to the music of Yellow Magic Orchestra from the late 70s, which was this incredibly avant garde, strange music, it doesn't sound strange at all. I'm alienated from the strangeness of Yellow Magic Orchestra's music because to me.

It sounds completely familiar, and the reason Yellow Magic Orchestra's music sounds familiar is because that's directly what went on to influence video game music being made in Japan in the 80s and early 90s. And I'll give you an example so you know what I'm talking about. I'm going to play another piece of music from the video game, Sonic the Hedgehog two, which came out in 1992. It's a classic video game. You've probably played it. It was completely ubiquitous.

It's one of those games that not only did people play when we were kids, people still play Sonic Toño because it holds up as a video game. But it also has an incredibly unique and interesting soundtrack with a sound that you into instantly associate with early 90s video games, in particular fun Japanese video games. This song is it's the soundtrack for The Green Hills on level, and it was composed by Masato Nakamura. Sonic the Hedgehog to video game music from 1992.

Computer game music not intended to be listened to aesthetically, but it has its own. It's it's unique. And if you played Sonic when you were a kid, that would have brought back quite a bit of nostalgia. Now now I'm going to play a track from 1970s, long before video games, long before Sonic the Hedgehog, a song from 1978 from the Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra, which sounds quite similar.

So that song is called Tongue Poo. But Yellow Magic Orchestra, it's on their debut album from 1978. And you might be thinking, why are Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978 making Sonic the Hedgehog music 14 years before Sonic the Hedgehog? What's that about? And also, you know, why does the music sound so familiar? And it's like they're not that's Sonic the Hedgehog sounds like Yellow Magic Orchestra. Video game music, it it originates in Japan, the composers of early video game music were Japanese and they were listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra.

And that's why Sonic the Hedgehog sounds like that and that 1978 Yellow Magic Orchestra song, that's really revolutionary at the time. Nothing else sounds like that at the time because of its use of electronic instruments and its pacing and the happiness of it not only sounded like that, it was out on its own and it was very revolutionary and it wasn't necessarily popular either. Not in the West for sure. But yes, when I listen to it and when I play it for you now, it doesn't sound weird because indirectly we've become accustomed to the sound of yellow magic orchestra, not by here in Yellow Magic Orchestra, because not a lot of people know them, but by here in video game music.

We've heard Yellow Magic Orchestra channeled through the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and numerous other games from our childhoods. So before I get into Yellow Magic Orchestra and why I think they're really, really important and why I'd like to I'd like to make a yellow magic orchestra friends. Before I get into that, I'm going to speak a little bit about video game music. This isn't going to be an entire history of video game music podcast. So I'm going to try to make it.

I'm going to try and make it as simple as possible to describe, you know, what is early video game music with, say, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. So because music is so abstract, like music is symmetrical, vibrations of air that make you feel emotions, that's what music is. It's very, very abstract. It's vibrating air. So I'm going to use. I use a visual metaphor. It's easier to describe something visual than it is to describe something our so that Sonic the Hedgehog Choom.

Ah, the music we would have heard on Super Mario Brothers early 90s already stuff writes, It's fair to say that it's shit, right? And I mean that as respectfully as possible.

The Sonic the Hedgehog music is a bit Sheth and Super Mario Brothers, music is a bit shit in us. The fidelity of it, it doesn't sound. Like real music, it doesn't sound like it's performed by humans. It doesn't sound like a recording of an instrument. It sounds a bit shit. Now, just because something sounds a bit shit doesn't mean it's bad, because it certainly isn't bad, because it's very melodic and it's very pleasant to listen to.

But the recording, it's shit quality and think of it like this. If you have a good camera, a good digital camera, and you take a photograph. Overload of instruments, you take a photograph of drums, guitar. And a keyboard with a good camera. That photograph, it's going to look a lot like the drums, guitar and keyboard that are there in real life, a good camera is going to take a good photograph of that. And you look at it and you'll go, wow, that looks almost like reality.

Now, let's say you have a shit camera like a camera phone from 2002, a really, really bad camera phone, and you take a photograph with the camera phone of the same musical instruments. Now, when you look at the photograph, it's going to be heavily pixilated. It will kind of look like the instruments that you took the photograph of, but not really because you've got these big heavy pixels, these big blocks, what you're dealing with is that there's less information in the image, a high resolution digital camera.

Can take a photograph of more information and then represent that information in a photograph so it's more detailed, whereas a sheet camera doesn't have sufficient memory to take that to represent everything that's there. So instead of pixilated it, it must get as much information across as it can. Within very limited parameters. So that's what a pixellated photographies. You're dealing with an economy of information, video game music is the exact same, Sonic the Hedgehog. Fucking Super Mario Brothers, Sega Mega Drive in is what you're hearing there is the economy of information that back then it big technology or 16 big technology as it was known, the cartridge that you played Sonic the Hedgehog on, it had limited memory and within that it had to portray the visual elements of the fucking game.

And then it had this tiny little segment to represent the music. So the musician who and back then the lads making the music didn't even consider themselves musicians. They considered themselves to be engineers. But the people making the music were like, I have to do a song here. And the technology is very, very limited. So I can't have a guitar, I can't have drums, I can't have a piano. But what I can have is a very pixilated version of this sound that kind of sounds like it.

And that's what they did. And as a result, aesthetically, that's what video game music is. When you hear that clip, sloppy video game sound, it's the oh, it's it's it's the aural equivalent of a heavily pixilated photograph. So that's all I'm going to say about the video game, music technology, the limitations of that. That's all I'm going to say about what I'm interested in is the aesthetic choices that were made in order to construct that music.

And those aesthetic musical choices with a limited palette were very heavily based on the music of Yellow Magic Orchestra. So who Yellow Magic Orchestra are wammo, whether they were a Japanese band formed in 1977 and it was three three Japanese musicians and all three of them were kind of legends in their own right already, but had very specific and different backgrounds. So I suppose the brainchild the person would have started the band me Harsono. Who his roots, so Harsono.

He was in psychedelic bands in the 60s. He was very experimental in what he was doing, so he brought the kind of experimental boundary push and vibe HARSONO, as well as considered at the originator of Japanese City Pop, which was a style of music in the 1980s in Japan. And Harsono is seen as the pioneer of that. His sound was done to influence what Japanese city pop was. Then you had Yukihira Takahashi, who was more of a rocker.

Takahashi had been in a band called The Saddest Sadistic Make a Band, who were a 70s Japanese rock band who would have had a fair bit of success, crossover success in America and in. England, they they toured with Roxy Music and stuff. So you've got Harsono bringing this. Psychedelic experimentalism, then you've got Takahashi, who's drunk, who's the drummer, bringing a rock and roll sensibility and a kind of a music industry experience, and then you have Ryoji Sakamoto and Ryoji Sakamoto today.

Even still, Ryoji Psychomotor is one of the most important classical music composers composers around. He's probably my favorite classical music composer, aside from his work with wammo Ryuji Sakamoto, like the piano, the piano that you hear in the background of my podcast that you hear playing right there.

Like that, I made that, but that's me trying to sound like Ryoji Sakamoto's piano, he makes the most beautiful piano pieces you've ever heard and he mixes Western music with traditional Japanese music. But Ryoji Sakamoto was also one of the founding members of Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 70s. And he was he was like the nerdy one. He was studying classical music in college and studying classical music and traditional Japanese music and Japanese classical music and classical music all around the world, really.

So what you have there is three completely different people with different backgrounds coming together to form this band that's highly experimental.

Now, again, it's if you go and listen to Yellow Magic Orchestra from the late 70s or 80s, it's hard to listen to it and go, wow, this is groundbreaking and avant garde because it was so influential. It doesn't sound groundbreaking and avant garde now because it influenced music so much, but at the time it was what made Yellow Magic Orchestra special is. Firstly, there were pioneering an electronic music. Now I've done podcasts on the history of house music.

I've done a podcast on a lad called Patrick Crowley from San Francisco who was making electronic music. You had Giorgio Moroder in Italy, so electronic music by 1977. Like it was it was still very much nesh and still viewed as novelty and still definitely not taken seriously and bye bye bye Elektronik. I mean, instead of a real drumkit, someone's using an electronic drum machine or instead of using the keyboard, someone's using a synthesizer to synthesize different sounds. This was happening in the 70s, but I hadn't gone fully mainstream yet.

But in Germany, you've got craftwork. You've got Gary Numan in the U.K. Here's the thing. A lot of electronic music, not 90 percent of electronic music, LEDs in the 70s. If you take Giorgio Moroder, who's pathing Italo Disco are Utech Kraftwerk with their electronic music are Gary Numan. The music tended to be called and robotic. And deliberately so not that was important because cold robotic electronic music is what went on to turn into house music and techno, especially like the forfour beat of a drum machine or arpeggiated stuff.

So electronic music was deliberately not human. Kraftwerk music doesn't sound human. It's supposed to sound like androids made it. Same with Gary Numan, Giorgio Moroder stuff was a bit more fun, but still Giorgio Moroder has music like If You Listen to I Feel Love by Donna Summer, which was produced by Giorgio Moroder and how he uses an arpeggiated scent in there, that the music it deliberately wants to sound like a machine. It doesn't want to sound human.

It wants to sound like a machine. And that's where electronic music was heading. But what makes WAMMO Yellow Magic Orchestra different in the 70s is they didn't want their electronic music to sound like robots. They weren't afraid for their synthesizers and their drum machines to sound human. In a way, they had a more mature view of the tools that they were using, Kraftwerk were being like we are machines and we're playing machines and the music sounds mechanic. Same with Marauder and same with Gary Norman, but why Amoa, they're gone.

This is a synthesizer. This is a drum machine. These are just new instruments. That's all they are. And I'm going to try and play this synthesizer with the same humanity, touch and feeling that I would afford a piano or a guitar. And who says that this electronic music has to be robotic and cold? Who says you can't just dance to it and vibe to it like any other type of music? And they had quite a mature attitude towards these brand new electronic instruments.

And what's important to note, too, would what? Yellow Magic Orchestra? There are Japanese band drum machines and synthesizers, most that she comes from Japan, like I did an entire podcast on the eight, a drum machine, which is an iconic famous drum machine, one of the most ubiquitous drum machines in all of music invented by a Kotaro Kakashi who started off as a clockmaker in Japan, put Yellow Magic Orchestra with the first ever band to use an air to air drum machine.

They use the two years before anyone else because they had access to new technology and new drum machines before other people did because they were in Japan. This ship was being released.

And you have to remember, it's hard. It's hard now because of the Internet. But like back in the 70s and 80s, shit was coming out in Japan fast. Like if if a new synth was being developed, the new synthesizer, our new drum machine or a new video game like the Nintendo, I grew up playing the Nintendo video game system, the NHS, which came to Ireland in like Ireland, in the UK in nineteen eighty nine. This came out in Japan in 1984 in Japan.

They were playing Nintendo's Falcon six years before I was like, so technology come out there first. So Yellow Magic Orchestra were embracing as many synthesizers and drum machines as they came out, as they were available and they didn't. Romanticism, European and American artists were romanticizing and fetishizing electronic instruments and treating the instruments as robots. They were saying this drum machine is a robot. This synthesizer is a robot. So it must sound like a robot. And women weren't going there.

They were going, no, it's an instrument. I'm going to play it and make the best sound that I can get out of it and make it sound. I'm going to I'm going to play this in service to the music rather than having it as strictly robotic. And I'm not shitting on anyone who was making robotic electronic music. That's where fucking dance comes from. That's where techno comes from. I fucking love Kraftwerk. I love Giorgio Moroder. I love Gary Nomen.

I'm just saying why I'm over doing something different. They were humanizing the music and what they did is it makes Yellow Magic Orchestra's music sound way ahead of its time, like I would a fast, hard yellow magic orchestra around maybe 2003 because how I used to learn about music. Is when Wikipedia came about in 2001, I used to start reading about music on Wikipedia and through Wikipedia, I read about bands I'd never have heard of before. I'd have had no reason to hear about them.

And I found Yellow Magic Orchestra on Wikipedia and they were had a tiny article at the time and someone on Wikipedia would have written the hugely influential Japanese electronic band, Yellow Magic Orchestra. So then I went, who the fuck are they? I've never heard of them. And then what I had to do in order to hear Yellow Magic Orchestra, because this is the dinosaur years of the Internet. That's I couldn't just go into YouTube or Spotify because it didn't exist and type in yellow magic orchestra and expect to hear the music.

Nor could I go on to Google even type Yellow Magic Orchestra and then hope to hear the music. What I had to do was one or two things.

If I could afford it, I had to go to Amazon and see if somebody was selling a CD of Yellow Magic Orchestra. Amazon or eBay are. What I did is I pirated it. I would have went to a like limor and illegally downloaded some yellow magic orchestra music just to see. Who are this band, who are this Japanese band that were really influential, what they sound like? So in 2003, arrogant on the line where downloaded a few of their tracks and may have had to wait a week or possibly three weeks to hear one song.

I'm not joking because we forget what the Internet was like. Firstly, I didn't have broadband. We were using you had to it was phone Internet.

It was phone Internet, which you could only have for about a half an hour a day, or my dad would kick my head in. So that's the first problem. You've got a half an hour a day to download a bit of a track at terrible, terrible speeds. And then secondly, Yellow Magic Orchestra in 2003 are quite a niche band. So if they are online where I'm depending on other people to have those songs so I can download them and not a lot of people have the songs, so I might have had to wait three weeks to download one fucking song.

And that's no exaggeration. This was the fucking Wild West. No, the thing is, if you remember using these illegal downloading sites for music, sometimes you couldn't trust the empty trees that they were giving you. So if you were to download an Eminem song will say you weren't getting an Eminem song, it was some rapper who was pretending to be Eminem so that you'd hear their music.

So when I first downloaded Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1977 album, I didn't believe that it was real. The fidelity was too. It was too far ahead of its time. I and my first thing was that this can't be real because it sounds vastly too much like video game music. So it sounds too much like Sonic. And I thought whoever made this album made it now. And they are influenced by video game music. And also I thought they were influenced by Daft Punk.

And I refuse to believe that this shit was from fucking 1977, but it was the stone age of the Internet, so I had no real way to find out. So it was only when the Internet kind of developed a bit more around 2009 that I was able to really verify, holy shit. This music actually is from the 70s and the main track that threw me a curveball. It was a song called Technophiles from 1979 by WAMMO, and I just I didn't believe it.

I was like, No, this just sounds like Daft Punk. This this sounds like something Daft Punk would release in 2001. And I refuse to believe that this is from the 70s, because you have to remember, too, I did have access to like Kraftwerk and Gary Numan because these bands were a bit more well known and, you know, something like Giorgio Moroder with Donna Summer. This stuff was a bit more mainstream. So I had a vision in my head of what electronic music sounded like from that period.

And Wiimote didn't sound like that because it was too advanced. It was decades ahead. So here's an example of this is technophiles. And I heard it. And I'm like, nah, this isn't some madness now. And they're influenced by Daft Punk and to him because it's classic.

So that's take take Nobelists by Wiremu from 1979, and it's just fucking banging, it's fucking banging and it has no business belonging in the 70s because it's too far ahead of its time. And, you know, I think why did I think that that was, you know, Daft Punk influenced? Because it sounds like Daft Punk have an album called Discovery. I think it's their best album, 2001. It's one of my favorite albums of all time. And that song, Wamala song sounds like it could fit on that album.

And the reason being is.

Daft Punk have said about that album, a lot of the sounds they were trying to recreate with Discovery was the sounds of cartoons from their childhood and Daft Punk, a French and a lot of early 80s French cartoons were made in Japan. And the music that was made for these cartoons was being made by Japanese musicians, and they were influenced by Yellow Magic Orchestra. So that's why I know I'm sure fucking Daft Punk, no yellow magic orchestra as well. Of course, obviously, because Daft Punk are absolute nades, both Daft Punk explicitly saying we want to sound like cartoons from our childhood.

That's because Japanese composers were making French cartoons and they were influenced by Yellow Magic Orchestra.

And again, it's it's interesting. That the yellow magic orchestra sound is so ubiquitous and so familiar, but it because of functional music like music, that's background music and anime cartoons are music, that's background music for video games and wanting to dance. Like that track is undeniably banging and the music of wammo is absolutely banging, the recording is fantastic. The fidelity still stands up today. It's just class music. But it's also distinctly Japanese that they frequently use scales and melodies that are from traditional Japanese music rather than sticking strictly to the Western scale of music and the Japanese scale tends to it tends to locate around the Black Keys on a keyboard.

You'll find that with a lot of Japanese melodies that are played almost exclusively on the Black Keys. But they also have a kind of a hot take and a theory around why would say Yellow Magic Orchestra were incorporating Japanese melodies into their music. Which again, in the 70s, in the 70s, that's kind of career suicide bands wanted to sound American. You know, for a Japanese band to decide, we're going to we're going to we're going to incorporate elements of all sounds, all styles, including Japanese, was very, very brave because it meant.

You're not going to then make it in Japan or make it in the U.S. or in the U.K. because. Japanese sounds had been turned into novelty as such. It wasn't. It wasn't taken seriously as like music, it was it would have been hard instead as all that Japanese music art that's quote unquote Oriental music. And I discovered something very recently which kind of was the inspiration for why I wanted to do this podcast about one of Wiimote songs. And I think this song is their most important song, the most influential song.

And the song is called Firecracker Forward Slash Video Games, and it's from 1978, right? So firstly, the fucking song's called video games. And what they are doing in 1978 is their video game. Music didn't really exist. In 1978, you had. So in Japan at the time, Pakman was fucking huge, Pacman and Space Invaders were massive, like I'm talking insanely massive. They had entire buildings full of Space Invaders. But by 1977, 78 entire buildings full of Space Invaders machines were people were playing Space Invaders all day long.

Space Invaders were so big in Japan in the late 70s that there was a there was like a fear at the time that the Bank of Japan would have to triple the output of 100 yen coins because so many people were playing the video game. Space Invaders in arcades and Space Invaders didn't really have music. It had sounds. Music and melody wasn't really a thing in arcade games in the 70s. But Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978 decided, which is again revolutionary.

We're going to release a song called Computer Games and we're going to we're going to sample some computer game sounds and mix the scene with our fucking electronic music. But also the song was called Firecracker. And this is the it's probably the most popular Williams song. It's definitely the most important song. This is the song that the band formed because of this song. So all three musicians had been performing and doing solo albums and working on each other's albums. But Whitemoor formed around this song, Computer Games, Forward Slash Firecracker, and also with this song, the the lead melody is very clearly Japanese.

It's a Japanese type melody.

So that song is Video Games, Firecracker Yellow Magic Orchestra, 1978, probably the most well-known song, that song was a little bit of a I don't know what you call it, a breakthrough hit. They perform that song on the American TV show Soul Train in 1980, which Soul Train was an American music show, what it would appear that primarily played African-American artists for an African-American audience and yellow magic orchestra brownness in 1980. And as a result of that performance, Yellow Magic Orchestra ended up being quite influential on hip hop music.

They were sampled in quite a lot of early hip hop songs, but the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and they stayed in hip hop culture like Mariah Carey song Loverboy 2002, the demo version of that song. If you hear the demo version, it was a sample of firecracker video games by wammo.

But here's what interests me. What interests me about that song is number one, why among themselves is said that that is the song that formed the band. Number two, it's the deliberate use of a Japanese sounding melody within the song.

And why I find that interesting, because I've been listening to that song for years and in my head, I've always just I always just assumed, OK, there are banned from Japan and they're doing this disco type music, very experimental.

And why wouldn't they include melodies that are Japanese if they were an Irish band like Harsh Lips? Harsh Lips are an Irish rock band from the 70s. He used to play rock. But they would also incorporate melodies that belong in Irish music into the rap music, creating a fusion of Western rock and Irish traditional music, and that's what Herzlich did. So why can be viewed kind of similarly in that they were incorporating melodies that belong to traditional music from their culture and their country.

But the interesting thing with that song, video game slash firecracker number one, like not even speaking about the revolutionary nature of it, it's sampling folk and video games in the 70s. OK, laying the foundations for further video game music was very recently. I heard a song when I was in a YouTube poll and I heard the same melody that wammo used and it took me aback. Have a listen.

And that there that's a song from nineteen fifty nine, which is also called Firecracker, so Yellow Magic Orchestra Song. Video games slash Firecracker is a cover version of that song from 1959 called Firecracker, but then I look into it more. And the artist isn't a Japanese artist, it's a lad called Martin Denny, who's American, and then I look into it more going, all right, is it is an American lad doing like a traditional Japanese song or something?

And it's like, no, he just made it up. So the composer of that track, Martin Denny, it was an American. He was an American like lounge jazz artist who invented a genre of music called exotica. No, exotic, exotic. It's a weird type of music. It's it's not real. It's it's exotic. It is white American people creating music that they think is the music of locations that they perceive to be exotic and that maybe they would like to go on holidays.

All right. So.

It's Hawaiian music, Polynesian music, Caribbean, this whole musical genre came about in the 1950s and it would have been real easy listening lounge stuff. It would have been what middle class suburban white people in America in the 40s and 50s would play in the background when they're hosting a party. It wasn't really for people who enjoyed music. It was for people who played music. For the sake of it is the equivalent of like whatever they play on the radio today.

It's it's not for fans of music, are appreciators of music. It's for people who just simply want music in the background. So exotica music, it borrowed from the traditional music of all these different cultures and then melded it into this thing that didn't really exist. This weird American fantasy, it's associated with tiki culture. I've done an entire podcast on tiki culture before. Basically, America went to war with Japan in World War Two and America. American troops spent a lot of time in the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Islands, the area between the West Coast of America and Japan, places like Polynesia, Micronesia and Tiki Culture, was this cultural phenomenon in America from about.

The mid nineteen forties up into the 60s where. And kind of people who had been soldiers in World War Two, Americans who'd spent time on Pacific Islands when they got back to America, they used to relax by drinking drinks that reminded them of like Polynesia are listening to music that sounded a little bit Hawaiian on. If you look at a tiki glass, if you get a tiki cocktail in a bar now like a mighty a zombie and you see the glass that they give you.

It's like a carved wooden thing, and that looks like the traditional carved artwork of Polynesia. Similarly, grass skirts drink and drinks out of coconuts, flower lanyards, Hawaiian style music, tiki torches, all of these things, none of them are really authentic to the culture of Polynesia. They're like weird little American memories. They're hyperreal simulacra. They're weird little American memories that are replayed as something that's not at all authentic and is viewed through this American lens.

So it's this really weird American memory of the Pacific. That's created as this false culture purely for Americans to kind of other. The Pacific Islands. But it's not based on anything authentic, it's based in a memory and exotica music was the soundtrack to that scene and Martin Denny was the biggest exotica artist. So he made all this music that kind of sounded Hawaiian, are kind of sounded Caribbean, are kind of sounded Japanese, if you get me. None of it is authentic.

None of it is rooted in any kind of respect. It's just it's an othering. And that song are played by Martin Denny Firecracker. That way I'm all covered. That song is it's kind of racist. Now, you might be wondering, how could a fucking song be racist blind boy? How could a song that doesn't even have words be racist? Well, here's the thing. Like if you listen to the song Firecracker by Martin Denny from 1959, which is in the exotica genre.

It's it's not Japanese music, it's not Chinese music. It's what can only be described as Oriental, which is a colonial term invented by the British, and when something is Oriental, it has nothing to do with like the area of Asia is fucking huge with loads of different cultures and billions of people with all these separate different cultures. But when it was colonized by Britain, they just said, that's the Orient, it's this huge area. And we don't give a fuck about any of the cultural differences between the people, because to us they are like the exact same.

So that's the Orient. We don't want to bother ourselves with any with the humanity of the different people that are there. Fuck that. And the thing. What Mirchandani song. It's it's it's it's it's Oriental music, it's him just gone. I'm going to write a song that sounds a bit like. Over there, I mean, it'd be like if if if an English or American artist released like an Irish sounding song and it's just delivered, like to really do Lou, I am off to Galway Diddly Doodle Doo.

Going to have lower children to do. Going to plant a bomb over London. La la la la la la. Drinking loads gaynes. W-w like that and you'd be listening to. What the fuck is this. What's this shit. So as a result, there are elements in it that are kind of traditional Japanese military kind of, but then if you listen to the. The instruments, the instruments are then Chinese and then he's called that firecracker because. Chinese celebration and fireworks, the song is musically.

Musically, that song is like and he might have been well-intentioned, I don't know, but musically that song is the equivalent of him doing an impression of someone he considers to be, quote unquote, Oriental, OK, if he was to do the accent are dress up as or whatever of what he considers to be the Orient. That's what that song is musically. And then to someone who is Chinese or Korean or Japanese, they would listen to it and go, what the fuck is this like if you're Irish and you see an American film and the people have ridiculously bad Irish accents, that multiplied by a thousand.

So the song is its colonial and it's racist because it's like here's a song that sounds like those people over there. All right. Martin, is this traditional Chinese music or is it Japanese music or is is the Korean music in there? Are Vietnamese. I don't know. I don't know. There's fireworks and it's just it's Oriental, you know. You know, and that's what that's his entire genre of exotica, is that it's the same with Polynesian music.

It's like I, you know, Fokin slighty guitars and grass skirts, that Hawaiian shirt.

And then it's like, oh, what about Caribbean music, have you been listening to any traditional calypso music right now? And I just, you know, that fuckin steel drum shit, it's like that's that's his entire genre.

It's these really lazy impressions of entire cultures and traditional music and then labeling and packaging it for a kind of a white touristy American market who don't want to who don't want to think of these places as anything other than holiday destinations, if you get me. But then you mix in the horrendous history between America and Japan in particular, and it becomes a lot more dodgy because, you know, that's a song from 1959 during World War Two in the West Coast of America, in particular, when America went to war with Japan, America literally just rounded up a bunch of people who were of Japanese ancestry and put them in internment camps like straight up.

And these people could be could be like, but I was born in America. My dad was born in America. And America is like, give a fuck, give a shit, get into an internment camp. And America did that this horrendously while fighting the Nazis, while fighting the Nazis for for having concentration camps. The Americans got a bunch of, you know, Japanese immigrants and American people of Japanese ancestry and fucked them in the camps.

So what that does. So why then have you got yellow magic orchestra covering this track as their as their first song and as like it now makes the Yellow Magic Orchestra version really, really subversive, like Harami Harsono.

That was his second time cover in that song because he covered it as a solo artist in the mid 70s and Harami Harsono also. He was very his solo work. Used to draw upon exotica a lot, used to draw upon the exotic genre a lot, and then you've got Ryuji Sakamoto, who is classically trained studying music that not only studying like Western classical music, but really to Sakamoto in college, doing his master's degree, specialized in two things electronic music and ethnomusicology, like he specialized in Indian music, African music, Japanese music, particularly Okinawan music, like this is an expert in his field and the academic study of different and different musical traditions around the world, which means.

Understanding and listening to the music of other cultures with respect. Are you telling me that those two lads didn't know what they were doing there? They're reclaiming something that to them is clearly fucking ridiculous. Like, why cover, why do a cover version of. The Yank, who has made this utterly ridiculous, quote unquote, Oriental sounding song, why cover that? And for me, the obvious answer has to be it's it's it's reclaiming it, reclaiming something that's dumb and offensive.

And then flipping it, flipping it on its head by making it really, really fucking good and danceable and getting this piece of music that's kind of tired and lazy and innovate and then bring in electronics into it and being the first ever song to sample fucking video games, you know, taking something stale and gone. Let's have a bunch of fucking crack here and take this stale thing and be so revolutionary with it that we actually make it brilliant. And isn't that hilarious and a bit empowering.

And that's that's my take on it. That's my heart take. You know, that's that's how that's how I view it and viewing it like that gives me a much more a different appreciation of that song, because previously I'm appreciating it because look at all this electronic innovation and look at how good it is as a piece of music. Isn't a class that the used video games, but now it may possibly be subversive. So that's my little my little tribute to Yellow Magic Orchestra, who I think you should definitely listen to their fucking fantastic and to go back to where I started on video game music.

The reason video game music sounds the way it does is because of the influence of Yellow Magic Orchestra who were absolutely massive in Japan, huge. But not so huge outside of Japan, but massively influential on hip hop and on electronic music in general. So I had no ocarina pause this episode because I didn't need one. There was no anchorena pause because there's no adverts in this episode because this episode was brought to you by Vodafone Broadband, if you would like broadband, that is incredibly powerful, incredibly fast, that won't let you down.

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