By imitating the Atari sound in its first two bars, then layering on bass harmony and finally adding percussion once its loop begins in earnest, “The Moon” captures in microcosm the Cambrian explosion in expressive potential between the second and third console generations.
The track, “[Desert] Storm [Bald] Eagle,” sounds almost comically American to me, as if the Japanese composer, Makoto Tomozawa, were parodying the music at an early ’90s American airshow. It sounds like Guns ’n’ Roses sounded in 1993, after grunge and hip-hop had absorbed heavy metal’s countercultural cachet.
A number of Nintendo’s main franchises have roots in horror films. We get Mario via Donkey Kong, which is of course via King Kong. And we get Metroid via Alien: the boss Ridley is a nod to Ridley Scott; Mother Brain is analogous to Mother, the Nostromo’s onboard computer; the parallels between Samus and Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley are not negligible.
It’s a song of not knowing what to do with what you’ve just encountered. No matter how obviously meaningful the thing in front of you appears, there is no way you can learn its meaning. Not yet. It’s a tease, a feeling Zelda fans at least tolerate and likely love.
Ostensibly, the song is heterosexual: a female singer lusts for the opposite sex, conjuring a world of endlessly disposable dudes. But “So Many Men” in any version is so very gay, the single gayest song I’ve heard on a videogame soundtrack, which might mean I’m not playing the right games. Nevertheless, even in DDR’s 90-second sample of Me & My’s cover of Brown’s original record—whose gayness was veiled, however thinly—the song’s call to my community comes through loud and queer.
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