An old post about Streets of Rage II
Perhaps the best idiosyncrasy of electronic music is how, more than anything, it manages to convey moral clarity. A synth can tell you who you are, or, more accurately, who you’re not.
Hello everyone! Long time, no post. We're about a month and a half into the second Trump presidency; the chaos has me thinking about the first time around, when we were all younger and things appeared to be far less broken. Back in the summer of 2017, I pitched an idea to a pal at the New York Times Magazine about the Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack and fascism. It got assigned — and then summarily killed the next spring. I figure it's been long enough to publish the first draft here in essentially unedited form; maybe you'll get something out of it. Maybe not! But I hope you do.
Yours,
Bijan
The game Streets of Rage 2, released for the Sega Genesis in 1992—known in Japan as Bare Knuckle 2: The Requiem of the Deadly Battle, a far better title—picks up where the first game (Streets of Rage, aka Bare Knuckle) leaves off. Like many of the side-scrolling beat-’em-ups from that era, plot is incidental to gameplay. A narrative summary of the first two games might read something like this:
A once peaceful city has been overrun by a crime syndicate led by a mysterious “Mr. X”; three police officers—Adam Hunter, a boxer, Axel Stone, a martial artist, and a judo expert, Blaze Fielding—quit the force to fight back, vigilante-style, and they prevail. But it doesn’t stick: A year later, Axel and Blaze have left the city to focus on their new careers as a part-time bodyguard and a dance instructor, respectively. While they’ve been away, Mr. X and his cronies have returned—and this time they’ve kidnapped Adam. Chaos reigns. Axel, Blaze, and Adam’s younger brother, Eddie ‘Skate’ Hunter, a rollerskater, roll up their sleeves and get back to work.
Sounds like 2018, right? Video game critics loved it. The game was action-packed, and complex beyond what most players imagined was possible. Where SoR2 really shines, though, has almost nothing to do with its ludic design.
Nah, the reason this game is still well-known is its jagged, futuristic soundtrack. As a standalone record, Yuzo Koshiro’s compositions (created in part with Kyoji Kato) take on a weirdly prescient edge: Here and there you’ll hear the outlines of trance, jungle, acid house and Detroit techno, sounding like they’ve been teleported in from an alternate timeline. This is more surprising when you consider that most of the sounds Koshiro was working with hadn’t hit Japan in any kind of coherent way; if the soundtrack feels like a wistful homage to a certain placeless place and timeless time, that’s because it is.
Video game music is not supposed to sound like this, all frontal assault and stomach-churning bass. It is supposed to loop unobtrusively in the background indefinitely. It is not for intentional consumption outside the confines of a cartridge. And, untethered from a game, it is certainly not supposed to take you through the stages of the narrative monomyth without any of the usual external stimulus: there are no words, no visuals, and yet, somehow, by the end you feel as though you’ve completed a deep emotional experience. In this regard the song titles are descriptive—there’s a clear progression from “In the Bar” to “Under Logic” to “Revenge of Mr. X” to “Good End.” It’s beautiful to feel like you’re clearing levels in your mind, especially if you’re in need of a victory; if you’ve lost a job, say, or if you’re healing from a breakup. If you’re doing fine, Streets of Rage 2 will only make you feel better.
And yet Koshiro, using his own programming language (“Music Love”) on an outdated PC-88, ignored the rules to write one of the most forward-thinking electronic albums of the decade, one that’s useful as both music and emotional salve. In a 2012 interview, Koshiro said he was influenced by Tokyo’s booming Juliana subculture—“Juliana’s Tokyo was the nightclub that defined the early 90s Bubble Economy, and the sight of its women with their one-length hair, their form-fitting clothing, and their feathered fans became a cultural phenomenon,” according to the interview’s translator—and the hardcore rave and techno music that went along with it. Perhaps the best idiosyncrasy of electronic music is how, more than anything, it manages to convey moral clarity. A synth can tell you who you are, or, more accurately, who you’re not.
This, I think, has to do with the genre’s history as an outsider-driven subculture. The people are radical, and the music they make can sometimes feel revolutionary. Subversive music rarely lends itself to more than one interpretation, because that’s beside the point.
Most counter-cultural movements have their origins in one scene or another—Whole Earth Catalog junkies created the seasteading, VC-funded pile of garbage we know today as Silicon Valley; LSD-fried hippies got wavy enough to make rock ‘n’ roll; Bronx block parties birthed hip-hop; and neon-bedecked, pilled-out ravers had a hand in the LGBTQ rights movement. Where two or three or more are gathered, ideas follow.
But what’s often not acknowledged is the danger in nostalgia. While the past might seem more pure than the present—for some, the strict social norms and economic boom of the ’50s seems ideal; for others, the bullish boom-times of the late ’80s and early ’90s, with their cocaine-fueled decadence, is the dream—time distorts the horrors of an age.
The ’50s were a terrifying time for civil rights in America: Slavery’s legacy wasn’t meant to end. Not then, and not now. The ’80s and ’90s gave us the disastrous, failed War on Drugs and the Cold War. Worse still is trying to impress beliefs from an unrecognizable era onto the present. Today that looks like the Men’s Rights movement, the fetid swamp of the alt-right, and Gamergate’s mental gymnasts. In electronic music, Third Reich-sentimentalists have taken up synths to produce “fashwave”—fascist synthwave. Andrew Anglin, the racist proprietor of Nazi site The Daily Stormer, said the genre is “the sound of … our revolution.” Perhaps. But white, male dominance isn’t anything but regressive, and the music lacks substance because of it.
In video games, the music plays to the universe’s conceit. For No Man’s Sky, in which you explore an infinite number of undiscovered planets in space, the music is jagged and barren post-rock, which mirrors the loneliness of the void. 2012’s Journey—where you travel up a mountain as a mysterious robed figure—earned the industry’s first Grammy nomination. Its music is built around a single cello theme, carried through the entire game, that represents the player. Each game’s sonic footprint conjures a world. And though they’re both excellent, they don’t have the same awareness of gritty reality that the compositions in Streets of Rage 2 do.
That’s one reason I find Koshiro’s music so compelling. But it’s also a direct attack on nostalgia; the songs resist interpretation as soft on moral degeneracy.
Recall our protagonists: Though they aren’t present as anything more than ghosts in the soundtrack, it’s impossible to listen to any of the songs and not feel inspired to do something good for other people. That kind of clarity is rare, both in games and in life.