Growing up in the 80s and 90s there was Eurodance all over place, which is immediately accessible with its constant 4/4 beat and high energy keyboards and vocals—and it sucked.
It seemed cool at first—if I heard it in a movie or someone drove by in their car—but I'd listen to music on headphones in bed at night while staring at the ceiling and the thud-thud-thud-thud rhythm and really basic lyrics about partying, romance and empowerment neither resonated with pre-teen me or leave a whole lot to unpack musically.
This led to an error.
To young me, the style was electronic music. I was too young and in the wrong part of the world to be exposed to anything else, like the more punk-rock derived industrial and EBM styles, or the reggae-derived dub.
Generally, dub consists of remixes existing recordings created by significantly manipulating the original, usually through the removal of vocal parts, emphasis on the rhythm section [...], the application of studio effects such as echo and reverb and the occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works
I stumbled across my first taste of dub in the summer of 1994.
Earthbound was released for the SNES in June, and at the time it was divisive; this was the era of ‘digitized’ graphics seen in games like Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Donkey Kong Country and proper crap FMV games like Burn Cycle, Sewer Shark or Supreme Warrior:
3D polygon graphics also arrived in a big way around this time; Sega launched Virtua Fighter at the end of '93 and Star Fox is released a few months later on the SNES.
Traditional pixel graphics start getting pushed to the limits by SNK with games like Samurai Shodown that added visual flair with enormous character sprites, fluid animation and zooming (scaling).
And then Earthbound was released for the SNES in June, and bucked this visual trend with graphics that evoked the NES:
I swear the visual aesthetic here looked really old and out of date when it was released
A Divisive Thing To Do At The Time
I had friends that didn’t understand at all, and saw more than one review in a magazine (a big deal at the time) that didn't score it well, but a lot of us really dug the whole experience—mostly.
I was alone in appreciating the music.
No one was taking videogame music seriously at the time.
My friends and I were all being territorial teenagers about the sort of stuff we listened to.
They insisted it was throwaway, because it was electronic and even though there were all sorts of different themes, electronic music was Eurobeat, and Eurobeat was crap.
But there was something interesting going on that I couldn't describe.
The above track plays when your party is in a city called Fourside, about twenty hours into the game.
The following plays in the hospitals throughout, right from the very beginning:
Back in '94 when I finally made it to Fourside I remember walking in and out of the hospital listening to the background music for each.
I recognized the clever game-making here; hospitals are all larger buildings in the game, and Fourside is the biggest city, so the hospital music is foreshadowing something later on in the game.
Cool.
But back in 1994 I didn't really understand what was going on here musically.
There was no one to talk to about this, I couldn't describe what I was hearing and there was no track listing for the soundtrack anywhere, so the hospital music just floated around inside in my head for the next several years.
Six Or Seven Years Later...
It's the early 2000s and reggae clicks for me when file-sharing, smoking weed, a girl, and Bob Marley's Legend all came together at a party.
Late I'm replaying Earthbound with a (different) girl and realize that the hospital music has been living inside my head all these years, rent-free.
But this time I had the Internet.
I don't remember where I stumbled across the term, but this my first time seeing 'dub', and minutes later I connect it back to reggae, and the floodgates just open to the style.
All because of a SNES game from 1994.
This week I uploaded Dub Sampler no.2. Most of the tracks stick to its reggae roots, but we have a few deviations into electronic genres like trip hop and industrial, but the whole package is put together to be good for the gym.
You can check out the post here with a full track listing and go straight to the playlist, or give it a listen right here: