goth_is_not_emo

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, and the 20th anniversary of Sonic Adventure 2, so it's only fair that I talk about the Blue Blur, since he was super important to me as a kid in the early 90s.

First off, why did I care so much? Well, it didn't hurt that we were a Sega Genesis family. Or that Sonic had two cartoon series to Mario's one. (Sonic Underground and Sonic X didn't exist yet.) But the fact that I had ADHD was also a huge factor. See, kids with ADHD need constant mental stimulation, and also have a lot of trouble making and keeping friends. So you had a lonely, easily-bored kid who was pretty much guaranteed to latch on to any form of media that seemed to validate her.

Enter Sonic. Not only were the video games greatly stimulating to watch OR play, the 90s Attitude of Sonic just really gelled with me. Jaleel White's "I'm waaaaitiiiing" in both cartoon series was funny for me because I, too, saw the rest of the world as going too slow half the time. Sonic did things at his own pace, and his pace was fast. Rushing through levels in the Genesis games. Outwitting the robots from Adventures with silly disguises. Working together with a super-genius princess and an awesome cyborg bunny in the SatAM series. (If there were a Bunnie Rabbot action figure, I would definitely own it. Sega, TAKE MY MONEY.)

But then after 1995, the well dried up. The Sega Saturn sold pitifully in the US, and my parents refused to buy a Dreamcast. ("You already have that new Nintendo.") It wasn't until 2002-3 that I got to experience the thrill of new Sonic games again with the Gamecube re-releases of the Sonic Adventure games.

And don't get me wrong, the games are a pretty decent attempt at bringing Sonic into the new 3D gaming era. They're not as good as the stuff released from Sonic Colors on, mind you, and they certainly were a step down from the Genesis days, but I played them obsessively, trying to get all the medals. (It's hard, y'all. Really, really hard.) The Chao Garden is the one feature from the Sonic Adventure games that really needs to be reintroduced. (Seriously, I will buy a new Sonic game sight unseen if you promise me it includes the Chao Garden.) It brought Sonic to a new generation of kids, kept the franchise going, but it was pretty mediocre overall.

And the music sucked. (No, I am not just talking about the character themes and their ridiculous lyrics.)

In order to put this into perspective, we need to go further back into the past for a minute. Listen to any song from the Genesis era, and it is a bop. You can easily listen to just the BGM for hours, of any level, including the 2-player ones which always had different music. This isn't just the nostalgia glasses talking here: I never got to play Sonic CD as a kid, so the music from that game is pretty much brand-new to me. But I love it. It's all very suitable for listening to while studying or doing paperwork or housework. It gets you fired up to get whatever-it-is Done, because you believe in yourself and have Cosmic Infinity inside you or something.

And there are good reasons for this. Sonic 1 and 2 used the talents of Masato Nakamura from the J-pop band Dreams Come True, and Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles were scored with input from Howard Drossin, best known as part of Michael Jackson's sound team. These were composers who understood how to make people get out of their seats and on the dance floor--which means that they were easily able to create music that gets your adrenaline going while still having a fun, easy-to-remember melody. (Nakamura in particular used a very unusual I-II-III-IV chord progression in several levels' music, which propels the music forward without the melody itself having to run around superfast. Give Green Hill Zone another listen.)

So the Genesis music is all cohesive, peppy music that makes you feel more energetic just listening to it. It's very obviously a product of its time, sure (Launch Base Zone especially screams 90s), but it is all supremely listenable, which is why there are so many Sonic soundtrack videos and playlists on YouTube.

Now to jump forward again to the Dreamcast era. The year is 1999, and Sega is about to release a new console and a new Sonic game.

It's only been 4 years since Sonic 3D Blast (and 3 since the Saturn remake with different music), but video games have changed a lot in those few years. People expect games to have cinema scenes with voice acting, a coherent story that isn't just "Beat the main villain," and movement in 3 dimensions. Nintendo and Square/Enix especially have changed their main franchises heavily with the times: Mario 64 re-wrote the rules of platforming, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had beautifully-written character interactions that tugged at your heartstrings, and Final Fantasy VII cranked the emotional impact up to 11 with cinema scenes that made you really care about your teammates and mourn Aerith's death as if you'd just lost a real-life friend. So Sonic Team's got a lot to live up to here.

Musically, they decide to promote Jun Senoue, the songwriter and lead guitarist for the Japanese hard-rock band Crush 40, from a contributing artist to the Sonic Team music director. And that is where the soundtrack issues kinda start.

See, while pop changes rapidly as different genres become more or less popular, hard rock hasn't changed all that much overall. More importantly, hard rock is a smaller music category than "popular music" and is a slave to the infamous "three chords": I, IV, and V or V7. I say this as someone who enjoys hard rock and several subgenres of metal: Hard rock is not as versatile a genre as pop, because the limits of what makes a song "hard rock" or not are much more easily defined.

Don't get me wrong; "Open Your Heart" and "Live And Learn" are good songs. They're not life-changingly deep or anything, but they make you want to break out the air guitar. As far as main themes are concerned, Senoue hit it out of the park.

The problem is that video game music is way more than just a title theme.

Sonic Adventure

Because it consists of 6 interwoven plots, Sonic Adventure kind of has multiple personalities. You've got platforming with Sonic, Tails, and Amy; a treasure hunt with Knuckles; a shooting game with E-102; and a fishing game with Big. (Fishing is good and all, but fewer things scream "fast-paced adventure" LESS than fishing.) This still isn't a problem on a musical level, so long as you can come up with variations on each level theme that work for the different ways the characters are interacting with that level.

No, it's basically what I said earlier about hard rock sticking to the same 3 chords.

To be fairer in my analysis, I'm going to try to stick to level BGM here, not incidental music (of which Sonic Adventure has more than SA2).

"The Air" is an excellent upgrade of the Green Grove Zone music from the Genesis version of Sonic 3D Blast, which was also co-written by Senoue. "Skydeck a Go! Go!" has that Top Gun sort of feel, making it suited to a military-type aircraft like the Egg Carrier. "Run Down the Speed Highway" is a super-fun bit of techno that still feels super-cool even now. "Chaos 6" is a menacing bit of music that gets you fired up to fight a nearly-fully-powered-up Chaos.

All the other level music? Well, it's okay, but it's so generic. There are no surprises; it's just I-IV-V played super-straight in a variety of simple styles. At any given point, you can easily tell where the melody is going even if you haven't heard a song before, because it always follows the most predictable path. There are no surprise chord changes here, no I-II-III-IV, no "ha-ha you didn't see this tritone coming!" or anything. The instrumentation is left to carry the burden of Making Things Sound Interesting, and it just can't do it by itself. A saxophone or windchime or high-gain electric guitar is not a substitute for writing interesting music. (I actually forgot that Sonic Adventure had a beach level until I re-listened to "Azure Blue World" because everything about it is so damn generic.)

Okay, what about the sequel?

Sonic Adventure 2

This time Senoue decided to give each character their own musical genre. Sonic and Eggman had hard rock. Tails had--whatever you call the more innocuous musical style in Sonic Adventure. Knuckles had hip-hop. Rouge had what I call "spy-movie jazz." And Shadow had techno. On paper, this is all very well and good. In practice.....eh.

Since there are lyrics here, I'm ignoring the lyrics. It's not easy to compose lyrics that are actually cool when you're not only writing in your second language, but also have to keep it PG-rated the entire time. (There is a single "damn" in the lyrics to the Death Chamber rap.) Sung melodies? Yes. The actual lyrics being sung? Only to briefly note that the character themes that changed from one game to the next are all way less lyrically embarrassing. Amy no longer compares Sonic to parsley. Knuckles no longer points out that, unlike Sonic, he doesn't chuckle. It's still silly stuff, but you no longer feel secondhand embarrassment for the characters when you play their theme songs.

Sonic's levels are the same generic rock music we got from the first game. It's fun to listen to, but you're not as likely to seek it out as you are music from other characters' levels. City Escape is the only one that stands out, and that's mainly because it has lyrics and the others don't.

Eggman's levels also have generic rock music, but slower and somewhat darker in tone than Sonic's. That's...about all I can say for it. Oh, and Cosmic Wall has a siren in the background that adds a bit of interest, I guess.

Tails has the same generic non-hard-rock music from the first game. Every single song is so innocuous that I can't even call to mind a single melody from any of his levels. Hidden Base's intro sticks in your head, but I'm not sure how much of that is the song itself and how much is just the fact that I died SO MANY TIMES in Hidden Base as a kid.

Rouge's level music is fun, but it all sounds the same. It's all the same. Yes, technically each level has a different track, but all of them are just "that one that sounds like a James Bond movie." Yawn.

Moving to Knuckles, we finally see improvement in the music. Ignore what he's rapping (remember, we're not judging songs by their lyrics, and anyway, they're all descriptions of what Knuckles encounters in the levels). The backing instrumental bits are fun and have serious style. The rhythm of the rapping feels natural (ignore the lyrics!!). These songs stand out in a good way. I can always jam to these--though maybe not in public.

Saving my favorite character for last (I have a thing for tragic backstories, okay?), Shadow's music is incredible. Combine the incredible techno mixes with the fact that his levels control like Sonic's, and there's a damn reason that everyone replays the Shadow levels over and over. I will happily listen to any of Shadow's level themes, and you may even catch me singing along with the angsty lyrics.

Boss time. Most of the boss themes are, again, super-generic. They get the job done, don't get me wrong. They just don't have anything to tie them to one particular character or to make them stand out from each other--with one exception. At the end of both Hero and Dark stories, there is a showdown between Sonic and Shadow that uses Shadow's techno style. But all the others are just "have some hard rock that sounds vaguely antagonistic." Even techno can't save the Biolizard's music.

Now for the Chao Garden: It's good music for Chao-raising. The Hero and Dark variants work nicely to create atmosphere.

Character themes: Same old story. Sonic, Tails, and Amy sound too damn generic for words. E.G.G.M.A.N. is pretty good, compared to his level music. Knuckles' theme is a catchy rap theme. Rouge's theme is...very inoffensively jazzy. Shadow's theme is good techno (again, ignore how Teen Angst the lyrics are).

So again, the problem is: too many songs are too generic because they don't take any melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic "risks." I-IV-V in straight-up 4/4 time has been done to death, and had already been done to death by the time work started on Sonic Adventure. Banjo-Kazooie took more musical risks than the Sonic Adventure games.