"100 IG Posts" Special: Walking Down A Musical Memory Lane

For my 100th post on Instagram, I decided to make it a sort of callback to my very first Instagram post. Most of this blog post will be adapted from my 100th post, but I'll also dive a little deeper into what my first IG post was about.

Video game music covers all sorts of genres, but I don’t think there are many instances where the music reminds you of artists who don’t make video game music. When it happens and I feel the same emotional beats from two different songs though, I just gotta bring it up!

Take Melty Blood: Type Lumina, a fighting game based on a visual novel, for example. My favorite song from the game has to be “Play a Little? (Plaza At Dawn)”. Appropriately, it’s the theme for a stage that’s an empty park plaza at dawn, complete with a huge fountain and a cityscape in the background amidst a still-sleepy sky with pink hues.

The song has a warmth and groove to it, it’s relaxing yet upbeat, and the guitar in the background adds a vibrant energy + really ties everything together. It also reminds me of A Tribe Called Quest’s “4 Moms”, an instrumental interlude off their fifth album “The Love Movement”. The songs obviously aren’t identical, but something about their sounds has me feeling the same type of way.

It’s a small thing, but it helps make “Play a Little?” my favorite song in MBTL. As someone who used to be a huge hip-hop head, who would say the genre helped “raise” him when he first discovered it, who played Tribe songs on repeat “back in the day when I was a teenager”…I find the song even more memorable in a fighting game soundtrack that I already enjoy.

In a way, it was my love for hip-hop that got me back into playing video games again too. I was always fond of the instrumental to Black Milk's "Story and Her" from his album "If There's a Hell Below". It's a lowkey, slinky beat whose drums give the whole song a natural, earthy feel to it. For the sake of being comprehensive, here's the music video with vocals:

And here's the instrumental by itself:

So when I heard the acid-jazz/funk inspired song "What's Going On" from the Japanese RPG Persona 5, I was surprised at how it reminded me of "Story and Her". The two songs are definitely distinct from one another (ex. Black Milk's song seems darker in tone, while Persona 5's feels a bit lighter). And yet, just like with the Melty Blood song, I was experiencing the same emotional beats that I got from a non-video game song.

I suppose it had to do with the drums of choice, or the rhythms of the songs (I don't know a thing about music theory BTW, so I'm sorry to any experts in music if I'm totally off on the "rhythm" aspect). In hindsight, I could even easily imagine Black Milk's beat being used as part of an in-game event in Persona 5.

Anyways, at the time it blew my mind that a Japanese RPG could have this sort of music. Prior to that, I hadn't earnestly played video games for a long time, but I did grow up playing them a lot (and I especially enjoyed story-oriented games). I was barely familiar with Persona 5 too...but thanks to the music piquing my curiosity, I decided to look more into the game and found out it was playable on PlayStation 3. As luck would have it, I still had my old one (the thick brick version). Plus, there was 1 copy of the game left on Amazon at $20.

I jumped on it, and...well, here I am now.

That little story at the end ties into a personal essay I wrote a while back about Persona 5. You can read it here, but I'm planning on transferring that essay to this blog after I edit it a bit!