Michael Jackson

Okay so very soon I’m gonna really go to work on this, but there’s a loooottttt of misinfo about MJ and S3. It’s almost entirely all misinfo, with people filling in gaps in history without realizing the factual and logical errors. I think people get excited when they see these two big celebrity icons together, and it’s just such a cool idea that it makes people too eager.

Short of a big outline right now, here’s the real nutshell. MJ contributed beatboxed melodies via voicemails to SoA. He wasn’t in the studio making music. He did it over the phone, something he frequently did with all kinds of music production. There’s a ton of people who recorded them in other industries, and I honestly think some SoA employee must have an old cassette tape of these recordings. SoA stated they were unusuable, meaning the composition wasn’t suited for Sonic, SoA’s style, or both. At some point a SoA programmer comverted a few tracks to FM (I think their name is actually published somewhere...), played it to Michael, he wasn’t a fan of it, and that’s the end of it. He left some of his sound team to work on the project (Buxer, one-two more I think?), and THEY were inspired to throw some MJ sounds into the game as a tribute: namely the woohoos and the crashing glass, but there are other MJ-esque motifs in some songs. If anything, the Western-composed new jack swing-y stuff wouldn’t have been nearly as new jack swing-y without MJ.

On these voicemails were likely two sounds: the rolling drum beat from Knuckles’ theme (directly associated with Buxer, indirectly with MJ) which is the strongest candidate for MJ’s remaining work on S3. The other is something that inspired the credits theme. But only a very base inspiration: these were only beatboxes. If you want to point to anything as being OBJECTIVELY MJ compositions, it’s these two and only these two. Everything else was inspired by his commercial music, presence, and maaaayyybbeeee a few beat patterns from those voiemails.

What makes this worse is one of the SoA people who got interviewed about it later misremembered hard, and that got spread everywhere. I don’t think he meant to, or was doing it to gain some attention, but it was so poorly communicated that it was used to blindly shoot down a lot of related logic because “that guy said so”. Man I can’t remember what I had for breakfast last week. Don’t tell me no one’s going to confuse “directly composed” and “indirectly composed” like 20 years later. Game devs misremember in interviews ALL the time. No one wrote this shit down, it’s all oral histories, and that shit gets telephoned after being passed along so far.

Anyway expect all of this to be encyclopedically nutshelled and migrated to the main page soon. Seriously I’m telling you that cassette tape exists. CartridgeCulture (talk) 05:31, 1 April 2021 (EDT)