While those of you in the know will probably be aware of the various relevant anniversaries that I've missed in the long delay since the last post in this series -- 30 years since Sonic CD's Japanese release (23 Sep 1993), Mann's 83rd birthday (21 Oct 1940; a concert bootleg on the band's iconic 1996 tour on that day included a little celebration of the occasion), an entirely new Sonic game with its own perceived musical deficiencies (what a strange era we live in where the most criticized part of a Sonic game winds up being its music given the period from 20 to 10 years ago or so where it was the one thing critics tended to appreciate). All that notwithstanding, I haven't forgotten about the series, just been pretty busy with lots of other things from going to soccer games, family events, city events, and the like. I do at least hope to get these last two posts done by the time of the game's US release in November, which isn't terribly pessimistic even this far into October.
(Of course, I didn't get into the game until it received a PC port a few years later. I even still have that disc around here somewhere, though I tended to prefer to use a second copy that came when I got Sonic & Knuckles Collection about a decade later. What I can say, I like old games and games with the blue hedgehog in them. Don't ask how many ways I own Sonic CD at this point, I wouldn't make that November deadline.)
A long break might deserve a long preamble like this but I think we've gone on far enough and should just go ahead and get right into the meat of the discussion, the music of Stardust Speedway.
Present, Good Future, and Bad Future
One thing that sticks out in my mind is the drum beat in the present music. This driving rhythm, dubbed 'motorik', is derived from so-called 'krautrock' typified by bands like Neu! and Kraftwerk. Wikipedia informs me that Klaus Dinger, a multinstrumentalist whose work for Neu! included (but was certainly not limited to) drums, dubbed it the 'Apache beat' after the Incredible Bongo Band's cover of the Larry Jordan song from Bert Weedon. This and the fact that most of the harmonic action in the song is the result of long pad sweeps certainly places it strongly in keeping with some of Neu! more iconic work, which had a similarly spacey and ambient-ish sound. There's a stong connection to this style with the development of the autobahn system, with its long but potentially very fast-moving stretches of road. As someone who has spent hours driving between towns on the US interstate, it's a mood that's very recognizable to me and does represent the combination of intensity and repetition/drone that the highways instill in a person.
Like many penultimate Sonic stages, it serves as a bit of a breather stage between Wacky Workbench and Metallic Madness. With its extremely fast corridors, automated dash panels and tunnels, spring launchers, and relative lack of prickly obstacles (not to say none, of course), the spacey highway sound of Neu! is an excellent fit for the stage, and possibly the level whose music, even if it doesn't have a very pronounced melody, always fit incredibly well in the stage in my eyes.
This literal driving beat finds itself in both good and bad future remixes, though it's expressed in a slightly different context. The drums tend to be a ltitle more intense, and they're supplemented with melodic instruments that provide their own percussive effects. The good future has a more pronouced melody in synth orchestra hits while the bad future has guitar drones and percussive 'djent' sounds over the beat. The effects direct attention to themselves, and not for nothing -- unlike the other stages' music, these songs play during the boss encounter, as it's a race across the stage against Metal Sonic, rather than a typical boss that needs hits to be done on it. Get to the end before Metal, and don't get caught by the patented Eggman one-hit-kill beam. For one of the game's more intense moments, the music increases in energy to match, while still feeling of the character of the present track.
This Neu!-inspired sounds is certainly one whose context is pretty familiar to someone who'd have been following the Earth Band at this time. They'd been touring almost exclusively in mainland Europe around Germany by the end of the 70s, selling out large auditoriums (and turning to a slightly poppier, more arena-focused sound in conjunction with that) and becoming a major fixture in the rock scene there. Sure, their sound was never that much like Neu!, but compared to everything before Masque the band's sound was never this contemplative; it seems the sound of the country's more cult-classic rock movement rubbed off on them as well. Here, though, it is interpreted through the lens of a bandleader and arranger whose background was more focused in jazz, blues, and old British composers.
The closing song from the CD release, Geronimo's Cadillac is the most salient example of this meeting of influences. On the back of a similar motorik-style rhythm to Neu! we get a very jazzy interpretation of the Michael Martin Murphey original. While not a classic in the modern eyes -- the reference to American indigenous tribes as "red men" scrapes the ears unpleasantly; still, it is an earnest call for better respect toward these native communities and a subtle push against assimilationist philosophy, inspired by the imagery of post Civil War medicine shows. For those not familiar with the tradition, imagine if South by Southwest existed for the sake of selling fake medicine and spreading white supremacist imagery like "noble savage" archetypes and blackface shows.
Germany's relationship with indigenous American culture is fraught. While imagery of these native communicites has fascinated Germany for at least as far back as the American Civil War too, with notable examples including the Winnetou series of novels about the eponymous chief of an Apache community, whoSE TRIBE In the modern day exists in south-central New Mexico. While the stories were designed to champion a humanistic philosophy, they weren't very grounded in actual experiences of native life. Most of what reached Germany and the popular consciousness was romanticized and essentialized. There were even darker overtones to the popularity into the 20th century -- if you weren't taking the fate of American manifest destiny as a justification for more local forms of white supremacy, you might be trying to analogize native subjugation by an invading force in the way that Germany was trying to propagandize about its Jewish population. After the Holocaust it was often taken in a civil war lost-cause sort of way, emblematic of the hypocrisy of allied forces as they perpetuated their own colonialist abuses. Compared to the actual lost cause laundering the motivations and background of the confederacy, they at least had a valid point, though made here on the backs of heavily fictionalized interpretations of native life.
All of this is to say that interpreting the song or its cover in a modern context is fraught, as it meant different things in the US in the early 70s and other different things in Germany in the 80s. An interpretation of the song that's deeply steeped in German culture in many ways, even more than it is of the actual Apache culture Geronimo himself was part of.
The song was the album's only single. It did not chart anywhere, though the album hit 44 on the German charts. The single was played in a fake-live performance on Peter's Pop Show (so too was Telegram to Monica). While there's an intro to the song on the single versions not included on the album cut, it's otherwise not worth focusing on in this discussion.
Between the driving drum beat, syncopated piano bass notes, and chords filled out by a staccato panpipe-like synth voice, the song is almost staggeringly coherent against the Sonic CD tracks. And then the sweeping pads come in during the prechorus. The chords are in a I-V-IV6-I pattern. In the key of D, there's an implied descending line in these chords of D-C#-B-A, which gives it a progression that still feels a little like a lot of the music from Sonic 1, which use the same sort of descending pattern in a different context, a IV-iii-ii-I pattern -- our descending line would be in the key of A for that to make sense, or G-F#-E-D in the key of D. While it's certainly not the same chord progression, it does mean that they feel similar, and since D and A would be keys that share almost all the same notes (the only difference in scales is that A makes the G a G#), a lot of melodic ideas that would work in a Sonic 1 would sound good here -- we'll come back to this.
Sonic 1's most similar stage, based on its structure, placement in the game, and setting, would of course be Star Light Zone, whose music was actually not a major source of inspiration for Sonic CD's Japanese soundtrack, which took a song entirely placed in the major scale and built instead a funky tune based in the pentatonic minor. Working in ideas from Star Light Zone will actually make this track more coherent with the original Sonic soundtrack than what we got out of Japan this time. Not to cast aspersions on Japanese Stardust Speedway -- the tune, especially in the bad future, has long been iconic, and its resurrection in nostalgia-bait games like Generations and Mania (and, yes, Sonic 4: Episode 2 for you sickos out there) has only solidified this.
Of course, I still wanted to borrow something from Chaotix. The songs that I found myself working from were Speed of Sound from Speed Slider, a similarly fast, yellow, and vertical stage; and, because it fit well with the structure of Geronimo's Cadillac, Tube Panic, from the special stage. I'll go into more detail about weaving these tracks in as I post the song.
Speaking of which, now that I've posted all the stuff I took as inspiration, it's probably time to actually post the final song.
Because the song fits so well without having to do too much to it, I've found myself trying to tweak the melody just enough to be a different song rather than to sculpt the various influences into something more novel. Here, the song is pretty recognizable from its main source. I've tried to shape the melody to look more like Star Light Zone, though trying to pick notes that fit the chords of the Masque track, which doesn't move quite as much (especially in the bass) as SLZ does, favoring a pedal tone.
The organ arpeggios in Speed Slider are possibly that track's most distinctive feature, but I couldn't find a good way to fit them into the track in a way that made sense. What I did do was reference the melody line with the bell, which starts each line by repeating the first note of each phase four times, the first three notes as 16th notes beefore the line. Here, though, the same rhythmic pattern is happening at the end of the lines instead. Subtle. Tube Panic is a bit more obvious with the pan pipe chord patterns, followed by mirroring the suspended chords in its b-section with suspended chords by the saxophone voice in my track's b-section. Which ties into Star Light Zone as well, because it's nearly the same pattern as the horn voice had in that at the end of the song.
By the way, to fit within the track limitations of the Sega CD PCM chip, those pad chords are each a sample. I just recorded some midi sequences with virtual midi synth and a basic soundfont, trimmed them, and they're the instrument. Hard-panned alternately left and right to give the song a bit more texture and make the soundstage seem larger (plus, the Japanese past track does something similar).
Something that Geronimo's Cadillac shares with the present and good future tracks is that near the middle of the song there's a bridge before the first verse repeats that moves away from the main chords. In the case of GC it's a sax solo that gets more into the blues scale, while the present track gets into the relative minor key in a way that imediately brings in some energy. Both increase the tension in the track significantly. They serve similar purposes in that they immediately increase the tension in the track which gets released as they finish and return to, in essense, the start of their rspective tracks. The good future is arguably a breakdown that makes the track more calm, but since we're not in a race the need to contrast with an intense prior section wasn't there, and besides, I felt the track sounded too much like the good future already and wanted to move away from that possible direction.
The sax line was copied nearly directly -- using its rhythm pattern helped to move away the horn section right before it away from Star Light Zone and into something slightly more original. However, I consider it the most blatant act of theft I committed in the course of the series, and in the original release of the track I didn't actually keep it. But I felt that it helped tie everything together and, again, gives us a passage that matches the energy of the present track, and so I felt it ultimately belonged.
With all those words, as shocking as it is to consider, we have only one level left.
