The influence lives on A Yuzo Koshiro Music Spotlight - Pt 0

Part Zero "The influence lives on" 

Frank Rivoire is a graphic designer from Lyon, France, who grew up on video games and 80's movie soundtracks. In his spare time he made chiptune music and animations of which he eventually would combine as his alter ego, a Dj who wears a nylon bodysuit which resembles the black costume that Peter Parker wore in the spiderman comics of the early 80s.



 This new persona goes by the name "Danger" and he's a culmination of everything Franck and most gamers who grew up around the reformation of gaming were inspired by. The following quote is from an interview where he's refered to as the "love child of Daft Punk and Justice".

"I think that we’re right to compare artists between themselves and find their resemblances but generally these similarities come more from common references that are older. My references come from the video games of my life, the films that I’ve seen, and I think the ability to relate about things other than Justice and Daft Punk, artists that nevertheless I like a lot."

Danger's music is nothing short of fantastic. You can clearly hear the inspirations flowing through the beats and drops. Nothing short of amazing. What's better is that from what has been said his live shows are audio visual events for the senses. His music has been used for various youtube based competitions and such.

 I''m sure you're wondering what this has to do with a certain Japanese composer of which this multi-part music spotlight is about? Well the major thing is the fact that Danger is influenced by video games and their music, and was rumored to cite Streets Of Rage as one of the influences for the 9/17/2007 EP tracks (Which makes plenty of sense considering the popularity of the Megadrive in Europe during the 90s while Nintendo's dominance was temporarily stopped due to litigation ).

Yuzo has also been known for producing arranged and remixed versions of his and other songs. He even has some incredible trance and club based music created for the Playstation 2 game Wangan Midnight.




 This only leads me to the conclusion that in a world where Video games are vying for some form of acceptance from other medium, music wise things seem to have come full circle, and one of the people responsible is in fact Yuzo Koshiro. It's actually an interesting conclusion to draw; Koshiro has created music inspired by the popular culture of the time which becomes timeless in the games we wound up playing which in turn goes on to inspire musicians to create something as awesome as what they experienced with that particular game. In fact if you listen to Koshiro's tracks for SOR 3 a lot of that music is in fact a mixture between Jungle house music and could be interpreted as one of the influences that lead to the bass heavy stylings of the recently popular Dubstep genre.





I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll talk more about Streets of Rage 3 later, but for now just think about the influence that video game music has had on generations and continue to have to this very day. Everything we listen to is being shaped and cultured by what we've experienced in our past, and to a lot of us Video games have been a big part of our pasts. Even now chiptunes are starting to show up in pop music.





The influence lives on. Not just Koshiro's influence, but video game music in general. Of course you're asking yourselves what influence is that? Well we'll have plenty of time to cover that in the next three parts of this series. The first of which will be one of my personal favorite series. A little tale about a Ninja who has a lifetime grudge against a certain crime syndicate.

Game on!