Motherfish #10- Many Levels of Experimenting

Album of the Week

As the title suggests, I’m experimenting a lot with today’s review. Adding in the Youtube link so you can hear a track off of the album, and reviewing an album outside of my traditional sphere of listening. So let’s get to it. Videogames and music are two of the biggest parts of my life. Often times I find crossovers between them; bands doing covers of songs from videogames, or soundtracks from games being available on CD. The Minibosses, the NESkimoes, the Black Mages, all game-based rock bands, all excellent musicians. And now, add Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, MF Doom, and Mike Jones to that list. What the fuck? Ok, bear with me. This week’s album is something totally different. Let me start by saying that just because it isn’t my favorite genre doesn’t mean I hate rap. I dislike a lot of hip-hop and R&B, but I understand its place in the music world. Rap, however, I appreciate. A talented rapper who has more to talk about than bitches and hoes and shooting bitches and smoking hoes and whatnot is just as legitimate of a musician as any guitar player or singer. There are a lot of talented rappers and rap groups out there. Unfortunately most of them are still on the underground scene, meaning you need to really dig for them. And you’ll usually have to dig through bullshit in its most condensed form. But hey, you gotta break some eggs if you want to make some money. I’m no expert when it comes to rap. Far from it in fact. That being said, I think I can bring a unique perspective to the album. If you haven’t guessed yet, this week’s album is rap, but it has an interesting twist to it. Skeptical? I don’t blame you.

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Ocarina of Rhyme by Team Teamwork

Ocarina of Rhyme has a pretty simple concept: take established rap songs by noted artists such as those mentioned above, and lay the lyrics over remixed versions of the memorable songs from The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. That was the goal, and Team Teamwork more than accomplished it. I usually like to start a review by talking about the band’s history or something like that, BUT I honestly know nothing about Team Teamwork and I couldn’t find any information online. So, instead, I’m going to talk a little bit about Ocarina of Time, one of my favorite videogames of all time, and the music in it. OoT’s soundtrack was composed by Koji Kondo, the man responsible for the Legend of Zelda music since the very beginning. The soundtrack has the Zelda feel that fans have come to expect, but the nature of the game required something beyond the retro feel of the original games. The music in OoT played a fundamental role in the story and the game is considered the first non-dancing game to feature music creation as a part of its game play. Each of the many areas of the game world featured its own background music with its own flavor; the mountain area had a caveman-esque theme featuring bongos, and the lake area had a very smooth, almost glittery sound. I can clearly remember waking up early before school when I was in 4th grade, which basically meant waking up at 5 (can’t do that shit anymore), and playing OoT for an hour every morning. Just this winter I completed what might be my 900th play through. Not really, but you get the point, I’m a huge nerd and I have been most of my life. What makes those memories so fond is the same reason why I continue to make playing this game at very least an annual event; the game is immersive. The Zelda team knows how to build a world where the player actually cares about the characters and what happens to them, and in Ocarina of Time this immersion is created by the rich soundtrack.

Rap as an art form is varied. It has to be. You can only speak words to rhythm so many ways before it gets boring; so new elements have to constantly be introduced to hold the interest of the audience. Team Teamwork had a wide array of sounds and material to draw on when delving into Ocarina of Time, and combine that with the plethora of rappers (both good and bad) out there, and there is the potential for a big fucking explosion as the album crashes and burns. But, they managed to pull it off. Which is good, because Ocarina of Time is one of the few things from my childhood I still consider holy, and if they ruined it I would have had to rain horror down on them full of such hate and fury that it could fuel a thousand dying suns for millennia. But they did a great job, so no worries. There’s not much to say about the rapping. It’s rapping. Though some of the songs they chose to lay over the OoT soundtrack are a little more mainstream than I would like (i.e. they’re about hoes and cars and tits), they’re in an environment where that doesn’t matter as much. When I listen to Ocarina of Rhyme, I’m putting it on to hear the music from a game I love creatively spliced with something contemporary. Team Teamwork remixed the OoT samples, slowing some down, taking bits and pieces from others, and overall did a really excellent job of adapting the classic videogame songs to back the rap vocals. I’m not too keen on the Clipse song, the Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg, or the Common track, but they still fit the theme of the album and are mixed well. The only song I actually don’t like is the Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg track. This song is set to the famous treasure chest sample, which I think is too short to be used for a whole song so it gets a little repetitive, but in a strange way it suits the song. The Jay-Z track might be my favorite. It uses the theme song of the fucking owl who spends thirty fucking years explaining shit to you that even when it’s your first time playing you could figure out on your own unless you’re some kind of idiot who thinks puggles are cute dogs and you have raw bacon for a brain.

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Overall this album is super entertaining. It shows a lot of creativity on the part of Team Teamwork to put something like this together. The concept is fairly original (rap mash ups aren’t a new thing, but as far as I know nobody’s gotten any notoriety for mixing rap and videogame music) and its execution is brilliant. One thing I was afraid of when I first approached this album was that it would sound too gimmicky, like I think Gym Class Heroes can be. Obviously including the Ocarina of Time soundtrack is a gimmick, but each track comes off sounding fresh and intentional. When I listen to the album I have a tendency to forget that the lyrics are from established songs and not purposely created for this album, which is what I think Team Teamwork wanted. I haven’t been able to find the album anywhere (I got it from a friend), so if you’re interested, email me or check out Team Teamwork at http://www.myspace.com/teamteamwork.


And for your enjoyment: