Music 2000 Software
Marcelene Vasconez
The main screen has 24 channels (opposed to previous game's 16), where premade sounds called "riffs" can be layered together. New in the sequel, multiple channels can be combined into one riff. Samples from previous game were kept and more samples were added.[5] The multiplayer mode is turn-based where up to four-players has to manage beats, rhythms, or melodies to form one complete song.[6]
GameSpot reviewed the PS1 version: "If you're a serious musician and tool around on your PC, you're probably going to be frustrated or bored, as the RAM is obviously limited and the library is nothing you haven't seen or used before."[6] IGN said: "The video library is massive, and the utilitarian feel and ease of composition is nearly flawless. For the most part the sound effects and beats are great to use and easy to paste into the music score, or to alter."[1] GamePro called the PS1 version "amazing" and the PC version "a must-have for music fans everywhere"[8][4]
Jester Interactive released Music 2000 in America with backing and brand recognition as MTV Music Generator and just like it did in the UK, the game enabled a new generation of poor kids to get involved with production in a way they never had before. Lex Luger and Big KRIT speak on how this video game got them on the ladder to becoming the international stars they are today.
Remember 1999? That ebullient mix of pre-millennial tension and excitement? Remember the bug that threatened to take us back to the stone age and Kelly Brook on The Big Breakfast? The establishment of the euro and Ricky Martin in the charts, and all that. It was good wasn't it? Halcyon days, really, before everything turned to absolute shit and we all started wearing cargo pants and getting really into As If. 1999's most important moment wasn't the ousting of Guinea-Bissau's president Joo Bernardo Vieira by military coup, or Ole Gunnar Solskjr shinning in the winner at the Nou Camp: the release of Playstation game Music 2000 was.
The Jester Interactive developed, Codemasters released studio simulator was revolutionary, giving millions of us an insight into how fucking boring it must be to actually spend all day making music. As a 'game' it was torturous; fiddly, unresponsive, demanding and difficult. As a tool it was invaluable.
Hours of my own personal hinterland between the innocence of childhood and the assumed-experience of early adolescence were spent putzing about with Music's in-built sampler, trying to turn one second snatches of Jack White's guitar into something that didn't sound just like a once-second snatch of Jack White's guitar sampled at super low bit rate plonked on a very rudimentary drum track.
s visual approach to musical content generation - it's all blocks, bars and colour coding - is immediately familiar to anyone who's spunked a cumulative few weeks of their life away on late-night Fruity Loops sessions with only a joint for company. It turns the complex act of creation into something that's immediately understandable and, theoretically at least, easy to pick up. The only thing is, you need to actually have ideas in the first place. Which I never really did.
Sure I tried to slam the pre-made riffs together, creating tonal approximations of music rather than music itself, and yes, I fucked about with the piano roll making pointillist melodies out of rudimentary samples of trumpet notes, and, yes, your honour, I am guilty of actually plugging in my housemate's PS2 only last year to try and make a Burial-esque tune out of one of the vocal snatches that litter the disc, but, sadly, in all my years of fucking about in this digital shed, I never came close to finishing anything.
Happily, there are people out there who had a bit more nous than me, a bit more patience and, well, a bit more talent than I posses. These musical maestros overcame the limitations of the system to produce tunes you didn't know a humble 16 bit video game console were capable of.
For a starter, check out this sensational attempt at transmuting Robert Miles' dreamhouse classic "Children" into Playstation parlance. It's majestic end-of-the-pier stuff, a driving, dark take on a sentimental favourite. Just try not to think of the things that could have been achieved in the time it took the madman behind it to make a dream come true.
Shit, this next one is the real deal. This is Tresor-worthy techno wrought out of a machine that came out twenty years ago. Fuck your 808, chuck the 303 in the bin and I'll see you in VIP at Berghain on Sunday morning.
Music 2000 wasn't just good for chintzy club tracks that sound like house with a really flat tire. Though Dizzee Rascal eventually quashed the rumour that most of Boy in Da Corner was a product of pottering about with a copy of this in his Playstation, there are a few guys out there who've decided to think outside the constraints of the 4/4 thud. To my, admittedly uncultured ears, this sounds just as good as any jungle track I've ever heard thirty seconds of before skipping that bit of a Ben UFO mix. I think this is what they call "a roller." I think.
I don't know about you, but I'm heading to the nearest dump now to see if I can get my hands on a battered old Playstation before picking up six cans of Stella and steeling myself for a night of musical mayhem. Hot Creations, get ready.
Somehow the Gorillaz needed a cartoon band to smuggle this seamless merger of Damon Albarn's melancholy Britpop and De La Soul's head-bobbing hip-hop into the mainstream. It seems unnecessary now, but bless those animated apes.
The melodrama was vintage Sixties girl-group-style, with gorgeous Spectorian wall of sound production by Mark Ronson. The sensibility was a bit more up-to-date. (Sample lyric: "Kept your dick wet/ With that same old safe bet.") And the stormily soulful vocal performance? Pure Winehouse.
A single brief verse (repeated three times) about a snowy epiphany, some exquisite close harmonies, wordless falsetto doubled by understated surf guitar. What more could you ask from scruffy young men?
Paisley was one of the era's great country artists, a Nashville-factory star who also happened to pull duty as a stunning singer, songwriter and guitarist. He sings this song from alcohol's point of view: "Since the day I left Milwaukee, Lynchburg, Bordeaux, France/I've been making a fool out of folks just like you/And helping white people dance." Another round!
The Boss's 9/11 anthem was actually written in 2000 about the decline of Asbury Park, New Jersey. Built around the chords of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready," it became the climactic prayer of his album The Rising.
The dream of the Seventies was alive in Denton, Texas, home to the quintet behind this meticulously layered evocation of the foreboding, psychedelic soft rock of their youth and the craftsmen of a century earlier.
Anybody who believed the retirement would last more than a couple years has to be among the planet's most gullible people. If you could still drop rhymes like this, brushing off all possible competition, not to mention escorting Beyonc to the VMAs, would you retire? But that didn't keep anyone from cranking this masterful hip-hop farewell speech.
The Everly Brothers recorded the original version in 1964, but it was the chemistry between Plant's urgent gasps and Krauss's bluegrass coo that made their stripped-down rockabilly remake catch fire.
This Montreal troupe proved they had the scope and passion for an all-out arena-rock anthem, even though nobody suspected they'd ever get in the back door of an actual arena. With the swooping chorus chant ("Every time you close your eyes") and the pumping keyboards, it was the greatest Simple Minds song that Simple Minds never wrote.
If you were a drunk hipster girl in the summer of 2007, you probably had an Amy Winehouse haircut, and you also probably hit the dance floor the second this song came on, with that awesome ridiculous children's choir and filter-disco beats. Dancers never got sick of this French techno duo's massive Michael Jackson tribute.
The decade's best song about romance in a disco was a ferocious rock & roll rave-up by a wildly hyped Britpop band that was, lo and behold, worthy of the hype. Best pick-up line: "Well I bet that you look good on the dance floor/Dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984/From 1984!"
Despite all the new pop starlets out there trying to jump her train, Madonna definitely was not slackening the pace. When she dropped "Music," she was older than Britney and Christina combined, yet she took them to school with vintage electro-boom, Eurodisco flourishes from French producer Mirwais, and her own inimitable sass.
The punk brats of Green Day evolved into stadium gods with this bittersweet power ballad. Billie Joe Armstrong's enormous Broadway-bound chorus is a lonesome lament on record that inspires earnest sing alongs in concert.
Alicia Keys was something new in pop, a star whose appeal bridged the generation gap: a singer with hip-hop swagger, an old-school soul sound and older school (as in Chopin) piano chops. Her lovelorn debut smash flaunted all three assets.
That acoustic guitar surge, courtesy of songwriter Ne-Yo, gives Miss B the courage to throw a no-good boyfriend out of the house. Yet another reason to love Beyonc: at 13 letters, this was the longest one-word song title ever to hit Number One, breaking the 12-letter record set by "Superstition."
In which the saviors of New York rock perfect their attack: two interlocking guitars; one whip-cracking rhythm section; and a gloriously louche frontman sneering at the rubes: "Raised in Carolina/I'm not like that." Beneath the torrid groove, you can practically hear the squeak of black leather on denim.
The song Natalie Portman told Zach Braff would change his life (see Garden State) is a sweet ballad of what might've been, but wasn't. "I'm looking in on the good life I might be doomed never to find" nails a generational mindset like a baby T-shirt slogan.
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