No better way to close the week than with some 8-bit renditions of hits by suddenly deceased, long troubled pop legend Michael Jackson, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 50. There’s a handful of such covers floating around, and no doubt more will surface in the coming weeks and months. 8bit versions turn anything into a video game, which is to say, in the case of a dead public figure like Michael Jackson, they turn the subject into a video-game character.
This seems particularly fitting for someone who, like Jackson, spent his life in a self-imposed exile from reality and adulthood. 8-bit covers also fit Jackson because the retro technology was state-of-the-art back when Jackson he himself making some of his biggest records; thus, the arcade sounds have a fitting temporal association with him. (Truly diligent computer-music fans can dig out copies of the old Sega game Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker.)
Songs like ShnabubulaEX‘s blippy little take on “Man in the Mirror” (MP3, at 8bdaily.blogspot.com) render the legend in pixelated amber. That same blog page links to an 8-bit “Billie Jean” version, by 486, that layers Jackson’s a cappella over a brittle little video-game rendition of the instrumental track (MP3, at 8bitcollective.com). The contrast between Jackson’s hyper-articulated singing and the antiseptic funk of the backing music is striking, and despite the potential for irony, pretty darn effective.
The group Soft Cell is best remembered for its languorous, metronomic pop, a precursor not only to minimal techno, but more broadly to the giddily presumptuous nonchalance that infuses much of the Internet’s amateur musicianship. There was always something in the musical rudimentaries of Soft Cell songs that suggested a flouting of traditional pop categories of quality — like, say, instrumental facility. Holzkopf opens its Credit Card Ache, a short album of hard noise, with a cover (
Some of the best remixes are incidental, accidental, chance. Think of the way a favorite song sounds on an unfamiliar stereo system. Or when a specific moment of a CD (an ever so brief segment) chooses to go, anarchically, into manic loop mode on a restaurant’s creaky stereo system. Or how inadequate radio reception can transform an innocuous pop hit into something clandestine. All of the seven pieces that comprise Bird Requiem, by Summons of Shining Ruins (aka Shinobu Nemoto), are heavily distorted melodies, heard through numerous filters and decaying techniques that render the original as some rough-hewn, world-weary document. Case in point the garbled, shaky thing that is “Utan” (