Music

Save the Princess!

By Rob Harvilla 

Bach. Beethoven. Brahms. Mozart. Mario. The five pillars of classical music. And while those first four dudes had a good run, it's that last guy who enraptures us now: a Japanese-born (yet ostensibly Italian) plumber in a bright red jumpsuit who warp-zoned his way into 60 million homes worldwide in the mid-'80s, hipping the youth of America to the joys of stomping on goombas and seeking magic mushrooms and mystical fauna that make you grow freakishly in size and/or shoot fireballs.

The theme song (World 1-1, if we're getting technical) to Super Mario Bros. , the marquee title on 1985's absurdly omnipresent Nintendo Entertainment System, is the most vital, influential piece of music composed in the twentieth century. The game's tinny, bleeping, eight-bit symphonies of endlessly looped, relentlessly catchy J-pop, ragtime, cartoonish jazz and surrealistic classical music reached roughly twice as many impressionable youngsters as did, say, Thriller. And as that generation grew up, took piano lessons and eventually heeded the siren song of nostalgia, the soundtracks to those Nintendo classics of yore — Super Mario, Castlevania, Duck Tales, Contra, Metroid — now soothe us with their familiarity and shock us with their excellence.

Cheesy mid-'80s video game music is the new classical music.

Consider nineteen-year-old Martin Leung, born in Hong Kong, raised in Orange County and now a piano prodigy at the Cleveland Institute of Music. That's his day job. Here's his alter ego: VideoGamePianist.com. Martin achieved a staggering degree of Internet fame with a six-minute video of our hero pounding out solo piano renditions of multiple tunes from Super Mario Bros. and its myriad sequels. He starts off blindfolded, actually, dramatically flinging it off and flipping on his glasses before stomping through the eerie, spacious crypto-jazz of Level 1-2 (you know, the dark-blue subterranean one). Martin's site now includes a ten-minute version of the Mario Medley, climaxing when he mimics the series' penchant for jacking up the tempo as time runs out. It's a hilarious, jaw-dislocating virtuoso performance. It also represents Martin's artistic crusade.

For that, we turn to the Video Game Pianist's official three-pronged Mission Statement, of which the third prong is a desire to "popularize classical music by performing video-game music," so as to "build a bridge that will link the pop music world with the classical music world."

Sweet.

"I think that as more and more people get exposed to video-game music, they'll realize that's there's more music classical instruments can play other than video-game music," Martin explains from his winter break in Irvine, California. "And then they'll look at Bach, Beethoven and Mozart."

To facilitate this end, he's aligned himself with Video Games Live, a ludicrously extravagant faux-Broadway multimedia stage show — orchestras! choirs! lasers! live actors in full costume! more lasers! — that debuted in July at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and promises an international tour in 2006, beginning with a March 24 date in San Jose, California. (Martin is hard at work on tunes from the gorgeously symphonic Final Fantasy series as you read this; see VideoGamesLive.com for the six-minute trailer.)

Like punk rock, mid-'80s Nintendo music started as a rogue, crude art form with strict sonic limitations and no respect from Real Musicians. Also like punk rock, it's now dead. The primary architect lives on, though: Japanese composer Koji Kondo, responsible for the bulk of the Mario empire, and the similarly beloved and ubiquitous Zelda series. The joy of his work lies in its forced simplicity — the original Nintendo music sounds, not surprisingly, like a computer mass-produced in 1985. Limp bass, cheesy keyboard melodies and a percussive tableau wherein the snare hits sound like sneezes. Music buffs will understand you if you describe something as "eight-bit," but that's because it's now beloved as a sunny, retro relic suitable for kitschy pilfering: Beck has dabbled extensively, for example.

It's a unique and undeniably appealing style that, paradoxically, ultramodern technology can no longer replicate. "There's a definite classical influence, far beyond rock music and stuff, in terms of chord structures," explains Ben Milner, guitarist for the Advantage, NorCal/Nevada's preeminent all-videogame rock band. "It's pretty out-there. Kind of like a fusion between classical and '80s hair metal — that was what was happening at the time."

Ah, yes, the Advantage. Martin is the gold standard in a shockingly large kingdom of Internet-only Super Mario tributes: There's an unbelievably rad-looking Asian teen rocking out on electric guitar (FunnyJunk.com/movies/4/Mario+Guitar), or Jean Baudin (lurking over at JeanBaudin.com), who rips through a technically stunning rendition on an eleven-string bass, an awe-inspiring black hole of gleeful geekdom. But weirder — and louder — still is the ongoing surge of full-blown guitar-slinging Nintendo rock bands. At the moment it's a two-horse race between Phoenix' Minibosses (who do fine work with Castlevania) and the Advantage, a quartet featuring Spencer Seim from thrash deities Hella.

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