The Chemical Brothers and Dragon Warrior
By tunequest November 27, 2006
A bit of a retroactive Separated at Birth for you today. It’s something I noticed back in April, before I had the ability to easily embed audio files. Indeed, it pre-dates this wordpress site.
This musical similarity concerns the melody of The Chemical Brothers’ My Elastic Eye from their 2002 album Come With Us and the Castle Theme from the NES classic Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest (1986) by composer Koichi Sugiyama.
First, the game music (straight from the ROM):
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Now, the Brothers:
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Sure, the tempo is faster and the arrangement is different, but what say you: happenstance, inspiration or appropriation?
November 28th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
heh that’s pretty close. I’d say it’s inspiration and appropriation, but it’s kind of in the background of the Brothers’ song so it doesn’t bug me.
Heard cornelius’ 2010?
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November 28th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
Yeah, 2010 is a kind of spastic drum-n-bass amalgam of crazy retro game-inspired sounds, like someone playing GameBoy at light speed.
Or maybe someone turned the tempo way up on the Dance Dance Revolution machine.
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December 1st, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Sounds like just intervals to me; it’s hard to make them sound particularly different. If anything, DragonWarriror may have gotten inspiration from a classical piano book of etudes or a study guide, since it sounds like musical exercises more than anything.
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May 28th, 2008 at 9:53 am
The riff is from ‘Steven’ by Alice Cooper……………………
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tunequest Reply:
May 28th, 2008 at 11:36 am
I agree that Steven sounds remarkably similar as well. It could just be what Kevin says above, a basic technique.
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