8-bit Lullabies

I once had a girl explain to me the idea of ‘heart music’. While I was unable to find an official definition for this term, I though she explained it to me well enough. She described ‘heart music’ as the type of music that makes your heart full of joy; that can make you happy in any mood. She also noted that ‘heart music’ tends to be the music you grew up on. This idea really connected to me, as I tend to like over-romanticizing the little things. But, I wondered to myself, what is my heart music?

I didn’t grow up listening to a lot of music; my mom didn’t play much around me. With my dad, when I saw him, he would play music I definitely did not enjoy. But, it wasn’t hard for me to come up with the answer. There’s one type of music that I listen to in any mood, happy or sad. There’s one type of music I grew up with, the soundtrack to my childhood. My ‘heart music’ is video game music.

“Well,” the educated, well-bred scholar would say, “that’s a very dumb answer.” But, I don’t think I’m the only one who would answer with this. My generation grew up on the Nintendo, all eight bits of it. No matter how you view the medium, I grew up playing video games, for hours at a time, and that means that I listened to a childhood full of their soundtracks. When I hear the Mario Brothers’ theme, it’s not just the background music of an old game; it’s the sound of my past. It links me to a simpler time when I didn’t need to worry about anything other than the next save point.

But I’m not just a nostalgic fool (at least, not always). Video game soundtracks fit my life at anytime, more so than any other style of music. I can play it when my life is going down the tubes and find comfort. I can listen to it when life is high in the sky and continue to skip along. I can listen to it in the car and be content, and there is nothing else I turn on when I’m reading or writing (even right now). But, these songs aren’t limited to just what has been released on the games. Others in the world have found they too love this music dearly, and they created my favorite website of them all, Overclocked Remix. These people, in the hundreds, edit and remix old and new game music. It gets released for free and those people, like myself, get to listen to their favorite songs in all new ways. Orchestra becomes rock, electronic becomes a piano solo, and my heart sings with them.

As I’ve grown older, my taste in music has changed; hopefully for the better. I discovered the Red Hot Chili Peppers and felt like I finally understood music. I became a classic rock fan and felt like I really understood music. I became a Christian music fan and finally understood music completely. But, none of these types make me disappear from the world. They’re good, and I love them, but they don’t tug at my heart strings. No, it’s the melodies of my youth that do that, that strum the chords of my soul and remind me why I own headphones. I travel back to the worlds I explored in these games; I remember where I was in life. I hear the songs of a Final Fantasy game and remember the heat of the summer as I sat in my gigantic black beanbag chair. I listen to a Zelda tune and I remember the smell of fresh laundry, trying to fold it as fast as I can to get back to the game. I play the theme from Metroid and I can still see the snow falling outside, with myself wrapped in a blanket as New England shut down.

Call this childish, claim it immature. Tell me I don’t have a real sense of music and that I waste brain cells listening to music that deserves no attention, it doesn’t matter. This music isn’t just music; it’s a road to my past and a path to my memories. I wouldn’t trade that for all the Led Zepplin in the world.