![]() ![]() I thought to myself, “what else had I been missing?” I had become enamored by this world but a few pixels deep, I fell deeper in love because of this soundtrack. The impulse purchase of the strangest cartridge I’d ever seen had exposed me to obscure genres of music, and it quickly became one of my favorite video games. It was weird, it was insane, it was old and it was new. This music that I had recognized as this strangely familiar, yet ephemeral style of music. Meanwhile, on this tiny little cartridge was the 30-second looped melodies of hip hop, techno and turntablism. At the time, most handheld games from the era of 2010 had still retained the waning chiptune style of the 32-bit era, with straight chiptune or chiptune-influenced rock/orchestral music. I had been greeted by this strange little cel-shaded oddity, and this funky little soundtrack of crunched hip hop. I grew up with media that had glimpses of it, and the bits and pieces that I had gleaned from various sources allowed me to construct a facsimile of what I thought culturally encompassed the 90s.Īs a giddy child, I’d often accompany my dad to flea markets, and I remember one day, I had bought a strange little title for the Gameboy Advanced called Jet Grind Radio, an isometric-style skating game where the object was to graffiti the entire city of Tokyo-To with your street gang and avoid the cronies of the Rokkaku police state on the cusp of late-stage capitalism. I have no way of understanding the complex musical culture that took place during that decade, aside from musical exploration of my own. However, as someone born in the 2000s, that era is before my time. ![]() By night, the city receded into discotheques and “clubs” as alien new music called electronica, club and techno flourished under a heartbeat of strobe lights. Hip hop was seemingly on every corner, creating a collage of unique rhythms and thought throughout a fluorescent grid of lamps and headlights. The 1990s and its monolithic legacy is something of an inescapable omnipresence in pop culture.
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